The Boston man who sues and sues and sues and then sues again

A man who has filed so many lawsuits in both state and federal court he's no longer supposed to file a suit without a judge's permission is not letting increasingly angry and frustrated judges stop him from suing Boston Police and the Suffolk County District Attorney's office.

In the latest of his hundreds of lawsuits dating back to the early 1990s - always filed pro se - Chukwuma E. Azubuko accuses four unnamed Boston cops and three unnamed Suffolk County prosecutors of violating his civil rights over a 2004 arrest. Because of the civil-rights allegations, the city's lawyer had the case transferred from state to federal court - where Azubuko already faces at least $7,000 in penalties for disregarding orders not to file lawsuits without first getting a judge's OK.

Azubuko has filed close to 400 federal and state lawsuits against everybody from Roxbury Community College to Rupert Murdoch, typically seeking millions of dollars in damages. When he loses a case, as he inevitably does, typically in rulings that cite him for the incomprehensibility of his arguments, he often sues the judge - in a court in another state.

In 2012 he sued Rupert Murdoch for an item that appeared in the Boston Herald in 1991 - in a Virginia federal court. He lost. The next year, he sued the Louisiana Board of Bar Overseers - in a Minnesota federal court. He lost.

In 2011 and 2012, he filed suits in federal court in southern California and southern Florida against a Massachusetts district-court judge, two prosecutors in the Massachusetts Attorney General's office, a lawyer for the city of Boston and a private attorney, possibly over the dismissal of his attempt to quash his landlord's move to evict him for not paying his rent in 2011, possibly for the Boston Public School system's decision not to renew him as a substitute teacher in 2005, possibly due to the state revoking his driver's license in 2010. Azubuko, who earned a master's in education from UMass Boston in 1995, cited all of these in his complaints.

Among his arguments:

[I]t really defied logic that [the public lawyers] elected to living life in Jezebel-like or out-Herod Herod manners. They were educated, but learnings did not occur (in alI modesty and should not be deemed as a verbal ejaculation) Central to interactions, they manifested desiderata of intellectual humility, intellectual courage and faith-to-reasons. More, the Defendants' education implicitly or utterly lacked ethics hence their Talibanistic propensities towards the Plaintiff s third party practice. Job's comforter, indeed! To them , administration of justice should be without human face. They knew not the meaning of Cedant arma togae. The Plaintiff would like to know who breast-fed them if they were breast-fed? Indeed, "You know Hercules by his foot."

Judges in both cases tossed the suits. A judge in federal court in southern Florida dismissed his appeal of the dismissal, saying the suit is "frivolous, fails to state a cause of action, and was filed in the wrong venue."

The judge continued:

A survey of the docket reveals that Plaintiff has filed over 350 suits nationwide. Among the 18 lawsuits filed in the Southern District of Florida, many were dismissed on the same grounds as in this case, i.e. the action was frivolous and filed in the wrong venue.

Plaintiff abuses the court system and should not be afforded yet another opportunity to pursue this meritless action, based on allegations that are not supported by the record, that he did not receive notice of entry of the court's order.

In 2015, he filed a suit in federal court in Boston against a federal judge in Atlanta who had dismissed his suit against a university in England, in which he sought $75 million and a law degree. In his suit against the judge, he claimed racial discrimination and the alleged violations of his constitutional rights because of the requirement he ask a judge's permission first to sue somebody. Boston federal Judge F. Dennis Saylor wrote:

Given Azubuko's very substantial abusive litigation history, this Court finds no constitutional or other improprieties in the restrictive filing conditions imposed by judges of this Court. Accordingly, Azubuko's motion for relief from judgment will be denied with prejudice.

However, Saylor did order the $400 in filing fees Azubuko paid to file the suit reimbursed.

Massachusetts judges are equally tired of him. In 1999, in fact, the Supreme Judicial Court - the state's highest - filed its own order requiring him to get a judge's permission to file any more suits.

The SJC now routinely cites its 2007 decision telling him not to appeal a trial-court decision directly to the SJC in other rulings related to the appeals process in Massachusetts.

Also see:
It's nice to have a hobby - another Boston man fond of the legal system.