The Niqabi Paralegal

I'm on quarter break right now so I don't have access to resources for doing legal research. Hopefully, substantive posting will resume in a week or two, inshallah. However, I did come across this bit of foolishness to tide us over.

You may have heard of cases such as United States ex rel. Mayo v. Satan and his Staff, 54 F.R.D. 282 (W.D. Pa. 1971) in which the plaintiff sought to sue Satan for causing trouble for him.

Christians are not the only ones to bring silly lawsuits of this type. Take Collins v. Henman, 676 F. Supp. 175 (S.D. Ill. 1987). Raymond Collins was a member of the Nation of Islam. He was convicted of murder, armed robbery, and attempted murder. He brought a habeas corpus action in which he alleged, among other things, that he was the Prophet Muhammad, that he was not the same person who was convicted by the jury, that his case was fixed because the jury were all Christians, that he should have been tried under Islamic law not the laws of the "Masonic regime", and that he should have received the benefit of Saudi Arabia's sovereign immunity.

The court commented:

Central to petitioner's claims is his statement that he is the prophet Muhammad, the authority of Islam in the East and West and presumably the same prophet Muhammad who died in the year 632. It might appear that this action is frivolous and subject to sua sponte dismissal for that reason alone; but it is not the place of a federal court to decide which is the true faith or who is a true prophet. We will, therefore, accept plaintiff's claims in good faith in making our threshold determination

Collins, supra at 176 (citations omitted).

The court then dismissed the claim on the grounds that Collins had not yet exhausted all other remedies.