NONPRECEDENTIAL DISPOSITION
To be cited only in accordance with
Fed. R. App. P. 32.1
United States Court of Appeals
For the Seventh Circuit
Chicago, Illinois 60604
Argued April 2, 2010
Decided June 3, 2010
Before
JOEL M. FLAUM, Circuit Judge
DIANE P. WOOD, Circuit Judge
DAVID F. HAMILTON, Circuit Judge
No. 09‐2816
RONALD D. SMITH, Appeal from the United States District
Plaintiff‐Appellant, Court for the Northern District
of Illinois, Eastern Division
v.
No. 1:07‐cv‐07048
JEFFERSON COUNTY BOARD OF
EDUCATION, et al., Matthew F. Kennelly,
Defendants‐Appellees. Judge.
O R D E R
Claiming to be the victim of a conspiracy stretching across two states and two decades,
plaintiff Ronald DeWayne Smith filed in the Northern District of Illinois a petition for a writ
of habeas corpus and this related civil lawsuit seeking damages and injunctive relief from two
dozen defendants. Among those defendants were the appellees here, a county board of
education in West Virginia and five individual West Virginia residents. The district court
dismissed the claims against these West Virginia defendants for lack of personal jurisdiction,
then granted their Rule 54(b) motion for entry of a partial final judgment in their favor. Smith
No. 09‐2816 Page 2
has appealed both rulings. We affirm.
Smith’s troubles began in the early 1990s when he attempted to return from a hiatus in his
job as a teacher with the Jefferson County, West Virginia, schools. Smith had left Jefferson
County in 1983 to serve in the military; in his absence, a man named David Didden took his
place. According to Smith’s allegations, his attempt to return to his old job set off an elaborate
conspiracy against him. This alleged conspiracy involved Didden himself; Didden’s parents,
Gregory and Margaret; Braun Hamstead, lawyer for the Diddens and for the education board;
and Michael Thompson, the Jefferson County prosecutor. According to Smith, these five
people conspired to file false administrative and criminal complaints alleging that Smith had
sexually abused David Didden in the mid‐1970s. Smith alleges that these false complaints had
two purposes: first, to keep Smith out of his old job, and second, to fabricate a history of
repressed sexual abuse for David so that he could claim psychological problems as an excuse
for not deploying to Iraq in 1992.
Smith pled nolo contendere in 1995 to a criminal charge of sodomy. (He alleges here that
Prosecutor Thompson coerced him to plead guilty, but the conviction has not been set aside.)
Smith was sentenced to one to ten years of suspended incarceration and three years of
probation. His probation was revoked in 1996 (again, Smith says, thanks to the conspirators).
Smith was then incarcerated in West Virginia for about four years until his release on
October 12, 2001. Just before leaving prison, he filed a state petition for habeas corpus and later
obtained a deal in which the state agreed to revise his criminal record to read “crimes against
nature” rather than “sodomy” and to limit to ten years the period in which Smith had to remain
on West Virginia’s sex offender registry.
The scene then shifted to Illinois, where Smith moved in 2003 to enroll as a student at
Chicago’s Moody Bible Institute. He remained there in relative peace until November 1, 2005,
when a Berkeley County, West Virginia, assistant prosecutor named Josh Henline allegedly
made a phone call to the Illinois Attorney General’s office.1 According to an unrebutted police
report filed by another defendant, Berkeley County had sent a letter to the address that Smith
had given to the West Virginia sex offender registry, and the letter had been returned as
undeliverable. This return set off an investigation in Berkeley County, culminating in the
issuance of a bench warrant for Smith’s arrest in Berkeley County and Henline’s call to Illinois.
Investigators with the Illinois Attorney General’s office followed up on Henline’s inquiry
and arrested Smith at his school on November 2, 2005. At that point, West Virginia officials
apparently dropped their investigation and ended their attempt to have Smith sent back to
1
Berkeley County is located just to the west of Jefferson County in the panhandle of West Virginia,
about sixty miles northwest of Washington, D.C. Neither Henline nor any Berkeley County entity is a party
to this action.
No. 09‐2816 Page 3
West Virginia. But despite this odd turn of events, Smith was not out of the woods: he was
later arrested and charged with failing to register as a sex offender in Illinois, a charge on which
he awaits trial in an Illinois state court. Smith has sued various Illinois defendants for alleged
constitutional violations in his arrest and prosecution. We do not address those issues here; the
only issues before us in this appeal concern personal jurisdiction in Illinois over the West
Virginia defendants.
In a federal question case such as this one, where there is no provision for nationwide
service of process, a federal court has personal jurisdiction to the extent permitted by the law
of the state in which it sits. Janmark, Inc. v. Reidy, 132 F.3d 1200, 1201 (7th Cir. 1997). Illinois
law, in turn, allows personal jurisdiction over a defendant to the same extent permitted by the
United States Constitution. See 735 Ill. Comp. Stat. 5/2‐209(c). That means Smith must at least
show that each defendant has “purposefully established ‘minimum contacts’ in the forum
State” such that it is “not unreasonable to require him to submit to the burdens of litigation in
that forum.” Burger King Corp. v. Rudzewicz, 471 U.S. 462, 474‐76 (1985); accord, Hanson v.
Denckla, 357 U.S. 235, 253 (1958) (requiring “some act by which the defendant purposefully
avails itself of the privilege of conducting activities within the forum State”).
Our abbreviated recitation of Smith’s allegations makes apparent that the only wrongdoing
he ascribes to the six West Virginia defendants took place entirely in West Virginia. Smith
argues nonetheless that Illinois can exercise jurisdiction because the conduct he alleges in West
Virginia had an “effect” in Illinois. This argument mistakes the nature of personal jurisdiction,
which is concerned with the actions of individual defendants and not with the effects of
conduct generally. For Illinois to exercise personal jurisdiction over any one of these non‐
resident defendants, Smith must allege that the particular person reached out to Illinois in a
way that makes him reasonably liable to be sued there. Burger King, 471 U.S. at 475‐76. This
Smith has not done. The only West Virginian who Smith alleges had any contact at all with
Illinois is the Berkeley County deputy prosecutor, Josh Henline, and he is not a defendant here.2
Jurisdiction is nevertheless available, Smith argues, by Illinois’s recognition of the
“conspiracy theory of personal jurisdiction.” The idea behind this theory is that personal
jurisdiction is proper over an out‐of‐state defendant in a forum where one of his co‐conspirators
has acted as the defendant’s agent in furtherance of the conspiracy. See, e.g., Davis v. A&J
Electronics, 792 F.2d 74, 75‐76 (7th Cir. 1986), citing Textor v. Board of Regents of Northern Illinois
University, 711 F.2d 1387, 1392‐93 (7th Cir. 1983). The first problem with this argument is that
the theory may not be valid in Illinois. See Ploense v. Electrolux Home Products, Inc., 882 N.E.2d
653, 666 (Ill. App. Ct. 2007) (stating that an Illinois Supreme Court case “effectively scuttl[ed]”
2
We take the facts as alleged in Smith’s second amended complaint, not in his brief before this court,
where he contends without support from the record that “the telephone call was made by [the] State of West
Virginia and Thompson.” Appellant’s Br. 21.
No. 09‐2816 Page 4
the theory); Knaus v. Guidry, 906 N.E.2d 644, 659‐61 (Ill. App. Ct. 2009) (noting the “articulated
hesitancy of our supreme court . . . to adopt the conspiracy theory of jurisdiction in Illinois”).
Even if it were viable, the theory would not permit a plaintiff to draw a defendant into court
in Illinois simply by alleging a conspiracy that includes some Illinois defendants and some out‐
of‐state defendants, while making no effort to connect the two. That stretch would take well
beyond the bounds of Illinois law and the bounds of federal due process a theory that is already
marginal at best. See Ploense, 882 N.E.2d at 667‐68 (questioning whether conspiracy theory of
personal jurisdiction meets federal minimum contacts requirement); Knaus, 906 N.E.2d at 662‐
63 (same).
The only connection that Smith’s allegations make between West Virginia and Illinois is the
phone call made by Henline. And the only connection his allegations make between Henline
and the West Virginia defendants is that all of them live among the rolling hills of eastern West
Virginia. That attenuated link is not enough to establish that these defendants purposefully
availed themselves of the benefit of Illinois’s laws or should have expected to be called into
Illinois’s courts.
Once the district court had properly dismissed the West Virginia defendants for lack of
personal jurisdiction, it was entirely proper to grant their Rule 54(b) motion for partial final
judgment as well. Requisite to any Rule 54(b) judgment is a final resolution of a separate claim
or of all claims against a particular party or parties. See, e.g., United States v. Ettrick Wood
Products, Inc., 916 F.2d 1211, 1217 (7th Cir. 1990). The district court’s dismissal of the claims
against the West Virginia defendants pursuant to Rule 12(b)(2) constitutes such a final
resolution.
Once that preliminary requirement is satisfied, a district court may grant final judgment to
fewer than all parties only if it “expressly determines that there is no just reason for delay.”
Fed. R. Civ. P. 54(b). The district court made its express determination with respect to these
defendants both in court on June 15, 2009 and in a written order the next day. The court
explained that it was granting the motion because “the West Virginia defendants are
completely separable from the remainder of the case” once they were dismissed for lack of
personal jurisdiction. Smith does not say why we should find this ruling to be an abuse of
discretion, see Marseilles Hydro Power, LLC v. Marseilles Land & Water Co., 518 F.3d 459, 464 (7th
Cir. 2008) (applying abuse of discretion standard to Rule 54(b) determination), nor does he offer
any other reason to delay releasing these defendants from the snare of this litigation. In fact,
the district court’s ruling was in perfect harmony with its finding that Illinois lacks personal
jurisdiction over these defendants, a finding premised on the injustice of dragging them to
Illinois to defend a West Virginia lawsuit in the first place. This situation – one group of
defendants who are entitled to dismissal on grounds entirely separate from the issues relating
to the remaining defendants – is the paradigm of an easy case for entry of a partial final
judgment under Rule 54(b).
No. 09‐2816 Page 5
The district court’s partial final judgment in favor of defendants David Didden, Gregory
Didden, Margaret Didden, Braun Hamstead, Michael Thompson, and the Jefferson County
Board of Education is AFFIRMED.
