Larry D. Sapp v. Kimberly Foxx, Individually and in Her Official Capacity as State's Attorney of Cook County, Illinois

“CAPITAL ‘CIVIL DEATH’ CASE” Reference to history here is peculiarly appropriate. Kennedy v. Mendoza-Martinez, 372 U.S. 144 n.23, 83 S. Ct. 554 (1963). Forfeiture of citizenship and the related devices of banishment and exile have throughout history been used as punishment. Id. In ancient Rome, “[t]here were many ways in which a man might lose his freedom, and with his freedom he necessarily lost his citizenship also. Id. Thus, he might be sold into slavery as an insolvent debtor or condemned to the mines for his crimes as servus poenae.” Id. Banishment was a weapon in the English legal arsenal for centuries, but it was always “adjudged a harsh punishment even by men who were accustomed to brutality in the administration of criminal justice.” Id. “By the ancient common law . . . [t]here were three principle incidents consequent upon an attainder for treason or felony, forfeiture, corruption of blood, and an extinction of civil rights, more or less complete, which was denominated civil death.”. Kanter v. Barr, 919 F.3d 437, 459 (7th Cir. 2019) (dissenting Barrett, J.)). Civil death was a state in which a person “though living, was considered dead”—a status “very similar to natural death in that all civil rights were extinguished.” Id. Within this context, the question presented is whether Illinois’s punishment disability statutes—without time limits—violate the Eighth Amendment’s Cruel and Unusual Clause constituting a “civil death.” This resolves the procedural question can res judicata apply to a “civil death.” Mr. Sapp’s precedent setting question will ease the suffering nation and provide procedural and substantive guidance to a “civil death” under the Eighth Amendment. As the Seventh Circuit agreed, Mr. Sapp is a righteous man by any standard of measurement. 1a.