Appeals court decides enough's enough: Orders homeless guy who's been suing everybody over everything for more than 20 years to pay $1,000

The U.S. Court of Appeals has ordered a man who lists his address as the St. Francis House to pay $1,000 for what it determined was a frivolous lawsuit involving a criminal case that had nothing to do with him.

The court ordered Friedrich Lu to pay the state $500, for the time the Attorney General's office had to waste defending several officials at Suffolk Superior Court, and to pay a Boston law firm another $500 for the time two of its lawyers had to waste defending themselves.

Since at least 1995, Lu has been filing lawsuits against organizations that include the Boston Public Library, MIT, Harvard, the Harvard School of Dental Medicine, Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, Boston College, Suffolk County, the US Attorney's office in Boston, Boston Municipal Court, Capitol Waste Services, the city of Boston, the town of Brookline, the Boston Public Library and the Supreme Judicial Court. In recent years, he has alleged a vast conspiracy among lawyers and judges against him; in one case, this forced Boston federal judges to recuse themselves and bring in a judge from Maine to oversee his case.

No matter how many times judges tell him to knock it off, he has refused.

In his most recent case, filed in Boston federal court, he started by claiming he was disturbed by what he considered a lenient sentence some guy got in a rape case in Suffolk Superior Court in 2019 - a case that did not involve him in the least. When the Suffolk Superior Court clerk's office refused to let him file a motion demanding a tougher sentence, he filed a federal lawsuit against Superior Court Clerk Maura Hennigan, her assistant, the judge's clerk, two lawyers who worked on the man's appeal, the commissioner of the state Department of Corrections, the state secretary of public safety and the convicted man.

A judge in Boston federal court dismissed the case. Lu appealed.

On May 16, the appeals court, well familiar with his cases, since it's rejected four of his previous appeals, said his time is up.

Beyond the fact that Lu has no "standing" in the case - he was not a victim or witness or anything remotely related to it - the court noted that Lu had, as he has done repeatedly over the past two decades, ignored an order issued by federal Judge Mark Wolf in dismissing his 2002 case against Harvard Dental School that requires him, should he file any subsequent suits in federal court, attach a copy of the order, to let any future judges know what sort of legal shenanigans Lu keeps pulling.

Lu, contending Wolf was not and never will be the boss of him, has refused to attach copies of the order to anything he's since filed in federal court - just like he's continued to file cases in state court, where he's been similarly told to knock it off (although he's a less frequent state filer; court records show his last case there was in 2015).

In its ruling, a three-judge appeals-court panel writes:

After careful consideration, we find that sanctions are in order. We conclude that "a further round of filings to refine the amount precisely will lead only to more expense." Roger Edwards, LLC v. Fiddes & Son Ltd., 437 F.3d 140, 145 (1st Cir. 2006). Accordingly, the appellant is ordered to pay sanctions as follows: no later than May 30, 2023, the appellant shall pay to the Massachusetts Attorney General's Office the flat sum of $500 in attorney's fees, and no later than May 30, 2023, the appellant shall pay to the law firm of Rankin & Sultan the flat sum of $500 in attorney's fees. ...

The appellant is admonished that should he fail to pay the sanctions as directed, this court may impose additional sanctions on him, including filing restrictions.