Opinion
No. 16-2181
09-12-2016
MARVIN DAVENPORT and JUDITH DAVENPORT, Plaintiffs-Appellants, v. ROUNDPOINT MORTGAGE SERVICING CORP., et al., Defendants-Appellees.
NONPRECEDENTIAL DISPOSITION
To be cited only in accordance with Fed. R. App. P. 32.1 Before DIANE P. WOOD, Chief Judge RICHARD A. POSNER, Circuit Judge FRANK H. EASTERBROOK, Circuit Judge Appeal from the United States District Court for the Northern District of Illinois, Eastern Division. No. 15 C 10947 Virginia M. Kendall, Judge.
ORDER
Marvin and Judith Davenport defaulted on their mortgage, and their lender brought a foreclosure action against them in state court. The Davenports contested the action, alleging that foreclosure was improper because their lender and loan servicer had engaged in various unfair business practices. The court issued a judgment of foreclosure and eventually approved the judicial sale of the property. The very next day, the Davenports filed this lawsuit in federal court—purportedly on the basis of diversity jurisdiction, see 28 U.S.C. § 1332—in which they reiterated that the mortgage "was based on fraud therefore the foreclosure as well as the mortgage was null and voided." In addition to damages, the Davenports sought "clear title to their property." The district court dismissed the suit with prejudice, reasoning that the Rooker-Feldman doctrine, see D.C. Court of Appeals v. Feldman, 460 U.S. 462 (1983); Rooker v. Fid. Trust Co., 263 U.S. 413 (1923), precluded the exercise of federal subject-matter jurisdiction because the Davenports are not permitted to use the district court "as an appellate tribunal to review the state court foreclosure."
The Davenports continue to insist, as they did to the district court, that the federal case is "irrelevant to the foreclosure case." But the federal lawsuit sought to "clear title" to the foreclosed property and thus represented an improper collateral challenge to the state-court judgment. See Exxon Mobil Corp. v. Saudi Basic Indus. Corp., 544 U.S. 280, 284 (2005); Crawford v. Countrywide Home Loans, Inc., 647 F.3d 642, 645 (7th Cir. 2011); Taylor v. Fed. Nat'l Mortg. Ass'n, 374 F.3d 529, 532-33 (7th Cir. 2004). To the extent the Davenports hint that they seek damages for extrajudicial injuries that wouldn't be barred by the Rooker-Feldman doctrine, see Iqbal v. Patel, 780 F.3d 728, 730 (7th Cir. 2015), they do not develop any meaningful argument that we can review. See FED. R. APP. P. 28(a)(8)(A); Rahn v. Bd. of Trustees of N. Ill. Univ., 803 F.3d 285, 295 (7th Cir. 2015). They do not explain the significance, for example, of their scattershot references to statutes such as the Freedom of Information Act and the USA Patriot Act.
AFFIRMED.