7th Circuit affirms dismissal due to attempted fraud on court

A federal judge in Indianapolis rightly dismissed with prejudice a man’s age and sex discrimination complaints against his former employer because he attempted to perpetrate a fraud on the court, the 7th Circuit Court of Appeals ruled Tuesday.

Judge Jane Magnus-Stinson of the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Indiana levied the severe sanction on plaintiff Neal D. Secrease Jr., and likewise dismissed his retaliation claim. Her order was affirmed in an eight-page opinion.

“We find no error in the district court’s factual finding of attempted fraud,” Circuit Judge David Hamilton wrote for the panel in Neal D. Secrease Jr. v. The Western & Southern Life Insurance Co., et al., 15-1328. “The district judge reasonably concluded that Secrease intended to mislead the court into granting his request to compel arbitration.”

Secrease signed an employment contract with the insurance company in 2006 and after his termination, he sued the company in June 2014. Hamilton wrote that Secrease used the first and last pages of his employment contract, but inserted terms of another employee’s contract from 2008 that included the arbitration clause.

Secrease claimed the documents were combined accidentally and that he’d signed another contract that included the arbitration clause. But he couldn’t produce the contract, and Magnus-Stinson found his explanations implausible and dishonest.

“The district court’s findings that Secrease had falsified evidence in bad faith and lied about it were amply supported by the evidence and certainly were not clearly erroneous,” Hamilton wrote. “While dismissal with prejudice, like a default judgment against a defendant, is a severe sanction, it was a reasonable sanction here.”