[Download] "Soldal v. County of Cook" by United States Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit # Book PDF Kindle ePub Free
eBook details
- Title: Soldal v. County of Cook
- Author : United States Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit
- Release Date : January 24, 1991
- Genre: Law,Books,Professional & Technical,
- Pages : * pages
- Size : 68 KB
Description
POSNER, Circuit Judge This matter is before us on the appeal of the plaintiffs, Edward Soldal and his family, from the dismissal of their civil rights suit (42 U.S.C. § 1983) on the defendants' motion for summary judgment. The defendants are Cook County, Illinois; several officers of the Cook County sheriff's office; Terrace Properties, which owns a trailer park in Elk Grove, Illinois; and Margaret Hale, the manager of the park, together with several other private individuals. The Soldals had rented a lot in the park as a site for their trailer home, in which they lived with their four children. In August 1987, Terrace Properties filed a suit in an Illinois state court to evict the Soldals. A hearing was scheduled for September 22, but more than two weeks before then Hale called the Cook County sheriff's office to say that she was planning to evict a family that day (September 4) and that, because she feared that the family might resist being evicted, she wanted deputy sheriffs to be present. That afternoon two employees of Terrace Properties came to the Soldals' trailer accompanied by a deputy sheriff. The employees began by wrenching the sewer and water boxes off the side of the trailer home, causing damage to it. When Soldal ask the workers what they were doing, they told him to ask the deputy sheriff, which he did, and the reply was that ""he [the deputy sheriff] was there to see that [Soldal] didn't interfere with [Terrace's] workers."" The workers tore off the skirting and canopy of the trailer and hooked a tractor to it. Although they also disconnected the phone, Soldal called his lawyer from a pay phone and she in turn called the sheriff's office -- which at first denied that there was any deputy sheriff on the scene. Getting no satisfaction, the lawyer advised Soldal, in a second conversation from the pay phone, to file a complaint against Terrace Properties for criminal damage to his property.