Wood River attorney Thomas Maag filed a lawsuit in the Madison County Circuit Court challenging the constitutionality of the state’s Firearms Owners Identification (FOID) card statute, and he urged the court not to transfer the case in accordance with a new law signed last month by Gov. J.B. Pritzker which now requires such cases to be litigated in either Chicago or Springfield.
Pritzker signed the law establishing fixed jurisdiction, House Bill 3062, on June 6 after it passed the Democratic supermajority in Springfield. Prior to the new law, any party challenging the constitutionality of a controversial law had the authority to file their cases in any of the state’s 25 judicial circuits.
Maag argues that Pirtzker and the Illinois state legislature enacted the jurisdictional law after “having been successfully sued on multiple occasions in recent years for violating the constitutional rights of citizens of Illinois, and in violation of their oaths of office.”
Under the law, jurisdiction is bound to Sangamon and Cook Counties “no matter how inconvenient or inaccessible the forum is to the victim of the constitutional violation, and no matter where the effect of the constitutional violation took place,” Maag wrote.
Despite Pritzker’s new law, Maag filed his FOID card dispute on June 7 in the Madison County Circuit Court on behalf of plaintiff Gary E. Myers and against Illinois State Police Director Brendan Kelly.
“This action … is brought in a venue proper under the general venue statute, but in express and intentional violation of the void and unconstitutional 735 ILCS 5/2-101.5,” Maag wrote.
Maag argues that the law restricting jurisdiction was “designed expressly to limit Second Amendment and related challenges to forums that the state considers either more friendly to its position, or sufficiently inconvenient to would-be plaintiffs to deter such actions from being filed in the first place.”
He argues that the jurisdiction law abolishes forum non conveniens.
“Other than to protect the state from meritorious constitutional challenges, of which the state in good conscience has no legitimate interest, it fails to explain the legislature’s arbitrary and sudden shift away from its established principles of venue,” Maag wrote. “It would also encourage other state agencies to evade the purposes of the general venue statute by convincing the legislature to insert, as was done in the case at bar, a single sentence in a statute totally unrelated to civil procedure.”
“This would effectively force every party sued by a state agency to ‘be entirely at [an agency’s’ mercy, since such an action could be made oppressive and unbearably costly,’ and place venue ‘in a faraway place where [the party] neither resides nor carries on any kind of activities,’” he added.
Maag argues that the law establishing a fixed venue deprives citizens of due process.
“In fact, one of the great crimes against the colonies of King George III, prior to the Revolution, as noted in the Declaration of Independence was, in essence, fixing venue in far off and inconvenient lands,” he wrote.
Maag claims Illinoisans’ legal rights are worthless under a law that deprives them of the opportunity to use the courts effectively, “which is the intent of the statute, so as to allow the state to violate the Constitution with relative impunity.”
“By making forums far off and inconvenient, and with possibly no connection to the dispute, the challenged statute substantially increases the likelihood of an inability to bring a successful constitutional challenge, especially by the infirm and impoverished, the weakest among us,” he wrote.
Maag also argues that the Illinois Attorney General’s Office would not be burdened by litigating outside of Cook or Sangamon county as it already has satellite offices throughout the state and has routinely litigated in every county.
“To require similar procedures in constitutional claims would not require the office of the attorney general to do anything it does not already do,” he wrote. “Each of the attorney general’s local offices is already intimately familiar with local rules and procedures. Therefore, any argument that requiring a plaintiff to file suits only in counties of Cook and Sangamon would grossly inconvenience the attorney general has no basis in fact.”
According to the constitutional challenge filed on behalf of Myers, Maag wrote that the plaintiffs seeks to possess “literally any legal and effective firearm” for “personal private self defense in his home.” In order to do so, Illinois law requires Myers to have a valid FOID card.
Maag claims Myers was denied a FOID card on May 12 in violation of his Second and 14th Amendment rights. Myers was denied “on the basis that Illinois law prohibits issuing a FOID card to a person prohibited by any Illinois state statute or federal law from acquiring or possessing firearms and that there is some allegedly relevant disqualification from South Carolina in 2017.”
Maag alleges the “South Carolina matter refers to a non-violent drug conviction.”
Maag argues that the Second Amendment protects the right to possess and acquire a firearm. He adds that because the right to a FOID card is constitutionally “co-extensive” with the right to keep and bear arms, the FOID card statute is unconstitutional.
“The defendant cannot show that the Republic has a longstanding history and tradition of depriving people like plaintiff of their firearms, or any other applicable statute, cannot constitutionally strip him of his Second Amendment rights,” Maag wrote.
Maag also urges the court not to transfer Myers’ complaint to either Cook or Sangamon County.
“That plaintiff is not well off, is relatively poor, and suffers from a severe and substantial physical [medical] condition that limits his ability to travel long distances, such that being forced to litigate in Cook County would be a near physical impossibility, and forcing plaintiff to litigate in Sangamon County would impose a substantial difficulty for plaintiff to vindicate his rights,” Maag wrote.