CHARLESTON, SC - In a bizarre administrative feedback loop, the Charleston County 9th Circuit Court of Common Pleas has physically demonstrated the exact due process violation a pending U.S. Supreme Court petition targets—by using the petition itself.

The state circuit court was served a courtesy digital copy of the plaintiffs’ federal Petition for Writ of Certiorari, naming the court itself as the Respondent. Oddly, despite having no legal requirement or procedural jurisdiction to docket a federal appellate filing onto its own trial-level docket, the clerk's office rushed to entry-docket the document onto the local public index early.

To achieve this unprompted upload, the clerk’s office printed the native digital PDF down to physical paper, then manually fed that paper into an intake scanner set to a primitive black-and-white fax setting (1-bit bitonal scanning). The result is an administrative irony now locked onto the public registry: the court's scanner flattened the document, actively degrading the petition's color evidentiary photographs into unreadable black-and-white smudges on the facing pages. The court literally inflicted the exact technological degradation the SCOTUS petition appeals, using the petition as the medium.

The live, degraded filing is publicly viewable at the Charleston County Public Index Document P1A65 under trial case number 2025CP1005095.

Dismantling the "Administrative Efficiency" Defense

This operational loop completely dismantles the state's traditional defense that restricting electronic filing access for self-represented litigants preserves court efficiency. There is no administrative process more inherently inefficient than receiving a native digital PDF, printing it to physical paper, running it through a manual scanner, and uploading a corrupted, text-unsearchable image file back onto a digital docket. The state infrastructure spent manual labor to deliberately systematically downgrade a file's accuracy.

The ADA Accommodation Illusion

This early docketing loop similarly exposes the bad-faith framework of the court's January 30, 2026, refusal to grant basic Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) accommodations. The plaintiffs had merely requested remote hearing access upon request - a feature the court already successfully utilized during scheduling conferences—and electronic filing access.

The court's alternative request - allowing the disabled plaintiff to simply email PDF briefs directly to the clerk for manual uploading—was explicitly denied under the guise that it would place an undue operational burden on clerk staff. By proving that the clerk's office possesses the immediate bandwidth to print, hand-scan, and upload a courtesy copy of a massive Supreme Court filing before they were legally required to do so, the court proved that the requested ADA email accommodation could have been seamlessly executed since January.

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• The Original Quality pdf "Courtesy Copy" of the US Supreme Court Petition for Writ of Certiorari: See it in its non-degraded form. The full color image in question is on page 7.
• The scanned (at 1980's fax grade quality for all but 2 pages) "Courtesy Copy" of the US Supreme Court Petition for Writ of Certiorari: The degradation of both the original image now before the US Supreme Court (docket number pending) and the already degraded image on pages 6-7.
• Analysis of the ruling based on the original degraded image at the heart of the SCOTUS Petition:Judge Will Wheeler, in the ruling above, "The ruling based on "the appearance being incidental" based on the image in question by Judge Wheeler analyzed : …allegations such as the Plaintiffs being depicted incidentally in a listing photograph, without being identified, do not rise to the level of a cognizable claim."