Weekly Case Digests July 5, 2021 July 9, 2021.

Byline: Rick Benedict

7th Circuit Digests

7th Circuit Court of Appeals

Case Name: United States of America v. Michael Jarigese

Case No.: 20-1485

Officials: ROVNER, HAMILTON, and ST. EVE, Circuit Judges.

Focus: Sentencing Guidelines Supervised Release

A jury convicted Michael Jarigese of nine counts of wire fraud, in violation of 18 U.S.C. 1343 and 1346, and one count of bribery, in violation of 18 U.S.C. 666(a)(2). The district court sentenced him to forty-one months' imprisonment and three years of supervised release. He challenges both his conviction and his sentence. We affirm.

Affirmed

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7th Circuit Court of Appeals

Case Name: Percy Taylor v. Joseph Ways, et al.,

Case No.: 20-1410; 20-1411

Officials: FLAUM, KANNE, and HAMILTON, Circuit Judges.

Focus: Interlocutory Appeal Qualified Immunity

Plaintiff Percy Taylor was fired from his job as a police officer with the Cook County Sheriff's Office. Taylor contends it was because of his race. He has sued the Sheriff's Office under Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and defendants Joseph Ways, Zelda Whittler, and Gregory Ernst under 42 U.S.C. 1983 for violating the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. Defendants maintain that Taylor was terminated for having fired pellets with an air rifle at his neighbor in March 2011, a charge that Taylor denies.

Defendant Ernst was the lead investigator assigned to Taylor's case. Taylor offers evidence that Ernst engineered his firing based on racial animosity. Taylor also asserts that defendants Ways and Whittler, who are or were senior officials in the Sheriff's Office, are liable because they both reviewed Ernst's final report of his investigation and endorsed his recommendation that Taylor be fired.

The district court denied the individual defendants' motions for summary judgment based on the defense of qualified immunity, and they have brought these interlocutory appeals of those denials. As we explain below, the district court correctly denied qualified immunity to Ernst. The district court erred, however, in denying qualified immunity to Ways and Whittler. We therefore affirm in No. 20-1411 and reverse in No. 20-1410, and remand the case to the district court, where Taylor's Title VII claim remains pending.

Affirmed

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7th Circuit Court of Appeals

Case Name: James O. Ademiju v. United States of America

Case No.: 19-2588

Officials: KANNE, BRENNAN, and SCUDDER, Circuit Judges.

Focus: Equitable Tolling

James Ademiju, a Nigerian citizen, seeks to vacate his conviction for healthcare fraud. He concedes that he filed his motion outside the one-year limitations period but argues that the statute of limitations should be equitably tolled due to various extenuating circumstances. We conclude that Ademiju has not met the high standard for equitable tolling, and we therefore affirm the district court.

Affirmed

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7th Circuit Court of Appeals

Case Name: Cody Christopherson v. American Strategic Insurance Corporation

Case No.: 20-2831

Officials: RIPPLE, HAMILTON, and ST. EVE, Circuit Judges.

Focus: Insurance Claim Policy Limits

Plaintiff Cody Christopherson has appealed from a grant of summary judgment in favor of his home insurance company, defendant American Strategic Insurance Corporation, known as ASI. We affirm. In the summer of 2018, two trees fell on plaintiff's home, three months apart, resulting in its total destruction. The undisputed facts show that the insurer paid all sums owed to plaintiff, including the policy limits for total destruction of his home and all other claims that he submitted with documentation for costs actually incurred.

Affirmed

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7th Circuit Court of Appeals

Case Name: KR Enterprises, Inc., v. Zerteck Inc., et al.,

Case No.: 20-2069; 20-2155

Officials: EASTERBROOK, KANNE, and HAMILTON, Circuit Judges.

Focus: Prejudgment Interest

In 2016, a manufacturer of recreational vehicles delivered 21 new RVs to a group of affiliated dealers. Those dealers did not pay before the manufacturer went out of business. The dealers kept the RVs but have refused to pay the manufacturer's secured creditor, which brought this suit to collect the accounts receivable. After the secured creditor assigned its rights to the owner of the manufacturer, the district court held a bench trial and found that the secured creditor's assignee was entitled to payment of the purchase prices, minus some setoffs for warranty and rebate claims that the manufacturer had owed to the dealers on earlier RV sales. See KR Enterprises, Inc. v. Zerteck, Inc., 461 F. Supp. 3d 825 (N.D. Ind. 2020).

The defendant dealers have appealed, arguing they owe nothing for the RVs they received, at least not to this plaintiff. The secured creditor's assignee has cross-appealed, arguing that the setoffs should not have been allowed and that it is entitled to prejudgment interest. We affirm in all respects.

Affirmed

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7th Circuit Court of Appeals

Case Name: Luis Villavicencio-Serna v. Leonta Jackson

Case No.: 19-2385

Officials: WOOD, HAMILTON, and ST. EVE, Circuit Judges.

Focus: Sufficiency of Evidence

On March 22, 2009, a jury found Luis Villavicencio-Serna guilty of first-degree murder of Armando Huerta Jr. Scant physical evidence linked him to the charge. The conviction instead was largely based on testimony from three of his friends, all of whom later recanted.

Villavicencio-Serna exhausted his state-court appeals and then sought a writ of habeas corpus pursuant to 28 U.S.C. 2254(d). Throughout these proceedings, he consistently has challenged the sufficiency of the evidence to support his conviction. He emphasizes the lack of physical evidence connecting him to the murder, and he suggests that several factors inconsistencies between the testimonies of his three friends, their subsequent recantations, and the interrogation tactics used by the policereveal that the police pressured his friends to implicate him. Finally, he offers an alternative theory that links another group to the murder. In the face of these arguments, the Illinois Appellate Court upheld his conviction. The district court, applying the double-layered deference re- quired by section 2254(d), concluded that the state court's decision was not unreasonable, and so it refused to issue the writ. See Villavicencio-Serna v. Melvin, No. 17 C 5442, 2019 WL 2548688 (N.D. Ill. June 19, 2019).

Although we sympathize with the district court's observation that "the lack of any physical evidence in this case is troubling," we too conclude that Villavicencio-Serna has not shown enough to entitle him to issuance of the writ. We therefore affirm.

Affirmed

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7th Circuit Court of Appeals

Case Name: Justin Castelino v. Rose-Hulman Institute of Technology

Case No.: 19-1905

Officials: ROVNER, BRENNAN, and SCUDDER, Circuit Judges.

Focus: Summary Judgment Sanctions

Justin Castelino was suspended from Rose-Hulman Institute of Technology for a semester for academic misconduct. When he applied to return the following spring, Rose-Hulman denied his requests for readmission and also informed him that he would not be permitted to reapply in the future. Castelino then sued Rose-Hulman, alleging that his suspension violated the Americans with Disabilities Act, 42 U.S.C. 12101 et seq. ("ADA"), and also asserting claims against Rose-Hulman for breach of contract, defamation, false advertising, invasion of privacy, and malice. The district court entered summary judgment for Rose-Hulman on all counts and also granted Rose-Hulman's motion for sanctions based on Castelino's failure to comply with a scheduling order. Castelino appeals, but we affirm.

Affirmed

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7th Circuit Court of Appeals

Case Name: United States of America v. Edward Woodfork

Case No...