In the

United States Court of Appeals

For the Seventh Circuit ____________________

No. 16-3118

MERYL SQUIRES-CANNON,

Plaintiff-Appellant,

v.

DENNIS WHITE, et al.,

Defendants-Appellees.

____________________

Appeal from the United States District Court for the

Northern District of Illinois, Eastern Division.

No. 15 CV 6876 — Virginia M. Kendall, Judge.

____________________

ARGUED JUNE 1, 2017 — DECIDED JULY 19, 2017

____________________

Before POSNER, EASTERBROOK, and HAMILTON, Circuit 

Judges.

POSNER, Circuit Judge. The plaintiff and her husband used 

to own and live on a 400-acre estate and horse farm in Barrington Hills, Illinois (a wealthy suburb of Chicago in Cook 

County, Illinois). They leased the horse farm, which they 

called “Horizon Farms,” to a company they owned called 

Royalty Farms, LLC, which managed the farm’s operations, 

including the care of the horses, which at one point reached 
2 No. 16-3118

50 in number. But there was a mortgage on the couple’s 

property, and it was foreclosed in 2013. The Forest Preserve 

District of Cook County—a county commission that owns 

more than 69,000 forested acres in the county—bought the 

property at the foreclosure sale. Royalty Farms, LLC, was 

not a party to the foreclosure proceeding, but nevertheless

the Circuit Court of Cook County issued an order (called a 

Dispossession Order), the validity of which has not been 

challenged, directing the plaintiff and her husband to vacate

the property.

The Forest Preserve District is not interested in feeding or 

breeding or otherwise operating a horse farm on the property that it obtained in the foreclosure; and, unsurprisingly 

therefore, it requested that the plaintiff and her husband 

move the horses off the property. But taking the allegations 

in the plaintiff’s complaint to be true, for a time the Forest 

Preserve District tolerated the continued presence of several 

horses (after the foreclosure sale, the number of horses on 

the property dropped from 50 to 7). The plaintiff continued 

visiting the property daily to feed or otherwise tend to the 

remaining horses, although the Dispossession Order had set 

a deadline of November 18, 2013, for the couple to vacate the 

property; nine months later the plaintiff was continuing her 

daily visits.

She entered the property once again on the morning of 

August 13, 2014. This time, however, she was arrested and

prosecuted in state court by the Cook County sheriff for 

criminal trespass—but she was acquitted in a bench trial because the judge could not conclusively determine that she’d

ever been told not to enter the property. In fact she had been 

told, in an email by the Forest Preserve District’s lawyer that 
No. 16-3118 3

she had received and read the night before her arrest, that 

any entry by her into the property would be a trespass and 

that “continued trespassing [would] be addressed by the police.”

A year later she brought this federal suit, naming as defendants the Forest Preserve District, its general counsel, its 

outside lawyer and his law firm (he was not an employee of 

the District but rather a member of a law firm—Holland & 

Knight), fifteen unnamed members of either the staff or 

board of the Forest Preserve District, and the three Forest 

Preserve District police officers who had arrested her. The 

suit accused the defendants of false arrest and malicious 

prosecution. The accusation had and has no merit, and the 

district court was therefore right to dismiss the suit. And 

though she’d been acquitted in the state prosecution, there 

was probable cause to arrest her for criminal trespass, which 

under Illinois law is trespass plus knowledge that the owner 

of the property trespassed upon has not authorized the trespass, 720 ILCS 5/21-3(a)(1)–(3)—conditions clearly fulfilled 

in this case. As a criminal trespasser she was of course liable 

to be arrested, and couldn’t plead ignorance of the trespass 

since, as noted, she had received a warning—and defied it.

The plaintiff argues that we know that the Forest Preserve District notified her that she was not permitted to enter 

the property only because of documents attached to the defendants’ motion to dismiss her complaint: those documents 

were a copy of the email warning sent the day before the arrest and a copy of the plaintiff’s affidavit, submitted in state 

court, acknowledging that she was aware of that email. It’s 

true that, if matters outside the pleadings are presented to a 

court on a Rule 12(b)(6) motion, the court normally must 
4 No. 16-3118

treat the motion as one for summary judgment and give all 

parties a reasonable opportunity for discovery. Fed. R. Civ. 

P. 12(d). But the plaintiff does not dispute the veracity of 

these documents; indeed, in the district court she withdrew 

a contention, made in one of her briefs, that she had not received notice that she was prohibited from entering the 

property. So she was not deprived of “the opportunity to 

conduct discovery and to present contrary evidence on a 

point of genuinely disputed fact.” Williamson v. Curran, 714 

F.3d 432, 442 (7th Cir. 2013).

She claims to have been arrested without probable cause 

because she entered the Forest Preserve land as an employee 

of Royalty Farms, LLC, rather than in propria persona. But 

neither her status as an employee of Royalty Farms, nor 

Royalty Farms’ rights if any (probably none) in what was 

now Forest Preserve land, is relevant to whether there was 

probable cause for her arrest, since the order approving the 

foreclosure sale stated that the Forest Preserve District “is 

entitled to and shall have possession of the mortgaged real 

estate ... no sooner than 30 days from the entry of this Order 

[entered May 5, 2014], without further Order of Court”—and 

the Forest Preserve District, in notifying her that she was 

unwelcome on its property, clearly forbade her to return for 

any reason, in any capacity: “The Cannons cannot enter the 

property any more, and have no reason to do so.” The Forest 

Preserve and its police did not have to rule out the remote 

possibility that Royalty Farms had a property right, unmentioned in the order approving the foreclosure sale, that 

would entitle its agents to enter the property over the Forest 

Preserve’s objection. Cf. Hurem v. Tavares, 793 F.3d 742, 745–

46 (7th Cir. 2015).
No. 16-3118 5

What is true is that an alternative to the arrest would 

have been for the police, upon accosting her on what was 

now Forest Preserve land, to have told her she was trespassing and that they would escort her from the property and 

that if she refused they would arrest her. She might have refused and therefore have been arrested, for remember that 

she’d defied the arrest warning that she had received the 

night before, but her complaint suggests that she might have 

been willing to leave the property. In any event the fact that 

the police had an alternative did not make the arrest unlawful, for they had an unquestionable right to arrest her because they had probable cause to believe her a criminal trespasser. And remember that although she was prosecuted for 

the criminal trespass, she was acquitted. She violated the 

law, but was not punished for the violation, and so has little 

to complain about.

The judgment of the district court dismissing her suit is

AFFIRMED.