The Prison Inmate Who’s Spent 40 Years Filing Hundreds of Lawsuits

Even the U.S. Supreme Court has tried to slow him down

Tim Gebhart
9 min readMar 29, 2022
The official syllabus of the first of two U.S. Supreme Court orders restricting filings by John Demos

LLast year, I wrote about a man who filed more than 1,900 federal lawsuits between February 2006 and March 2016. While John Robert Demos, Jr., a Washington State Penitentiary inmate, has filed fewer lawsuits, all have come while in prison. Moreover, the U.S. Supreme Court is among the courts entering separate orders to restrict his filings.

In 1978, Demos was convicted of attempted rape and first-degree burglary in a Washington state court. He was sentenced to an indeterminate sentence of 240 months to life in prison and is still incarcerated. In 1979 and 1980, the Washington Court of Appeals and Supreme Court, respectively, unanimously affirmed his conviction. He filed his own appellate briefs in addition to those filed by his attorney. Both courts said the issues his brief raised had no merit.

Demos Starts Filing Lawsuits Throughout the Country

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Tim Gebhart
Tim Gebhart

Written by Tim Gebhart

Retired Lawyer. Book Addict. History Buff. Lifelong South Dakotan. Blog: prairieprogressive.com