UNITED STATES DISTRICT COURT

NORTHERN DISTRICT OF INDIANA

DAMARIS JUNE RHODES; 

 Plaintiff; 

 v. Civil Action No. 1:13-CV-72 JVB 

DOUGLAS H. SHULMAN, ET AL.; 

 Defendants. 

OPINION AND ORDER 

 Plaintiff, Damaris Rhodes, pro se, has sued John Roberts, the Chief Justice of the 

Supreme Court; Douglas Shulman, the Commissioner of the Internal Revenue Service; Morrell 

John Berry, the Director of the United States Office of Personnel Management; and the United 

States of America for a multitude of claims ranging from government conspiracies to 

unconstitutional tax laws. Plaintiff seeks $75,000,000 in relief. 

 Plaintiff has a history of filing nearly identical lawsuits, the most recent of which was 

filed in 2010 in this district. See Rhodes v. Shulman, No. 1:10-CV-269, 2010 WL 4974547 (N.D. 

Ind. Nov. 30, 2010)1. The court dismissed the complaint filed in Rhodes I for lack of standing. 

And the complaint in Rhodes I was nearly identical to the complaint filed in this action. The only 

differences between the two are the addition of Chief Justice John Roberts as a defendant and 

two new claims against the parties. 

                                                            

1

 For simplicity, this case will be referred to as Rhodes I. 
2

 Defendants have moved to dismiss this case for lack of standing under Federal Rules of 

Civil Procedure Rule 12(b)(1). Defendants argue that the decision in Rhodes I precludes Plaintiff 

from establishing standing. Defendants also argue that Plaintiff lacks standing because there is 

no actual case or controversy. The Court agrees that the issue of standing cannot be relitigated as 

to any claim identical to that which was asserted in Rhodes I. The Court also finds that the 

Plaintiff lacks standing as to any new claim brought as there is no actual case or controversy. For 

those reasons, the Court GRANTS Defendants’ Motion to Dismiss. 

A. Background 

 Plaintiff filed a complaint under 42 U.S.C. § 1983. The complaint is twenty-seven pages 

in length and contains a variety of claims against the government. Nearly all of the allegations, 

though, are identical to those in Rhodes I, but from what the Court can tell, Plaintiff asserts three 

new claims. The first of which, a claim against John Roberts, is the “[c]ontinual reoccurring 

damages by wrongful acts, omission by unconstitutional legislation by the Congress giving aid to 

the foreign entity IRS with U.S. and other foreign activity daily.”(Compl. 6).2

 The other two new 

allegations asserted against all the parties are: 

(1) “They enforce the support of government religion by fines, license, permits, and 

threat of loss or jail and Waco murder Oklahoma City bombing and by their 

legislation of conscience of Americans to obey and support government religion by 

statute, causes grief and often the loss of life by the call for blood by Ball for over 

100 years.” (Compl. 7). 

                                                            

2

 This exact claim was asserted against the other parties in Rhodes I. Plaintiff has simply added Chief Justice John 

Roberts to the current complaint. 
3

(2) The “[d]eath rate is kept silenced in U.S. False information encourages damage by 

lack of knowledge.” (Compl. 8). 

The rest of the complaint is identical to Rhodes I on a sentence by sentence level. It is unclear to 

the Court if the Plaintiff is actually trying to assert new claims against the parties with these 

statements or has just nominally rewritten brief portions of the Rhodes I complaint. However, 

with a liberal reading of the complaint, the Court will treat these as new claims for the purpose of 

the motion to dismiss. 

B. Standing 

Rhodes I was dismissed for a lack of standing. Plaintiff seems to believe that since the 

case was dismissed without prejudice, she is free to file a nearly identical complaint. However, 

“dismissals for want of subject matter jurisdiction are always denominated without prejudice, 

because they signify that the court did not have the power to decide the case on the merits. But 

they are preclusive with respect to the jurisdictional ruling, as otherwise the plaintiff would be 

free to refile the identical case in the same court.” Hill v. Potter, 352 F.3d 1142, 1147 (7th Cir. 

2003) (citing Okoro v. Bohman, 164 F.3d 1059, 1063 (7th Cir. 1999)). Because of the principles 

set forth in Hill, the Plaintiff is precluded from litigating the jurisdictional issue as to any claims 

that are present in both complaints. 

To avoid the preclusive effect in asserting identical claims, a plaintiff would need facts 

establishing jurisdiction that were not available when the original complaint was filed: “Only 

facts arising after the complaint was dismissed—or at least after the final opportunity to present 
4

the facts to the court—can operate to defeat the bar of issue preclusion.” 222 F.3d 309 (7th 

Circuit, 2000). This Court, even with a liberal reading of the complaint, does not find any 

additional facts that could be used to establish jurisdiction as to the identical claims. 

There are, however, new assertions that are not precluded by the decision in Rhodes I, but 

they fair no better than the old claims. 

The United States Constitution requires that a party present a valid “case or controversy.” 

U.S. Const. Art. III § 2. To plead a valid case or controversy, plaintiff needs to allege a “concrete 

and particularized” injury that is “actual or imminent” and not purely “hypothetical” or 

“conjectural.” Lujan v. Defenders of Wildlife, 504 U.S. 555, 560. (1992). 

 It is hard to see how any of the new claims assert an injury in fact that is beyond 

conjecture. To quote the Rhodes I decision, “[t]he harms Rhodes complains of are both 

hypothetical and conjectural and are not the sorts of actual or imminent injuries that result in 

standing. Rhodes wholly fails to address a traceable connection between the harms alleged and 

the acts of the Defendants. And, the harms Rhodes alleges cannot be redressed by this court.” 

No. 1:10-CV-269, 2010 WL 4974547, at *4. 

C. Conclusion 

 Plaintiff is precluded from relitigating the issue of standing as to any claim that was 

asserted in the previous Rhodes I decision. Moreover, she lacks standing as to the new claims, 

because they do not allege an injury in fact. For those reasons, the Court GRANTS Defendants’ 

Motion to Dismiss (DE 6). 
5

 

 SO ORDERED on June 6, 2013. 

 s/ Joseph S. Van Bokkelen 

 Joseph S. Van Bokkelen 

 United States District Judge