Opinion
No. 07 C 6180.
November 2, 2007
MEMORANDUM ORDER
Dorothy Murphy ("Dorothy") and her mother Mildred ("Mildred") have filed a handwritten Complaint charging that the authorities in Mississippi, where Dorothy was born in 1962, made some mistake in listing her name in the birth records there. They have accompanied the Complaint with an In Forma Pauperis Application ("Application") and a Motion for Appointment of Counsel ("Motion"), each of them on forms provided by this District Court's Clerk's Office and filled out in handwriting (more accurately, hand printing) by Dorothy.
As is too often the case, the Motion has not been completed in its most important respect: No information has been provided in its Paragraph 2, which requires that the movant identify what attempts she herself has made to obtain counsel to represent her.
There is of course no jurisdiction here over the three Mississippi defendants that are identified in the Complaint. As for the Chicago-based Legal Assistance Foundation, it clearly has nothing to do with this litigation in terms of any ability to grant the relief sought in the Complaint. Finally, the addition of "Cook County Vital Records" as a putative defendant makes no sense at all — local officials here cannot of course control out-of-state recordkeeping.
Accordingly bringing this action in this District Court must be viewed as frivolous in the legal sense, and both the Complaint and this action are dismissed. That calls for denial of the Application and the Motion as moot, and it is so ordered.