Yongping Zhou v. Belanger

ORDER

After Yongping Zhou got into a scuffle with a county deputy outside a courtroom, he was arrested and charged with several offenses. Eventually the charges were dropped, but Zhou then sued the deputy under 42 U.S.C. § 1983, asserting that he had been arrested without probable cause and that the deputy had used excessive force. On the day of the trial in his federal case, Zhou left a brief telephone message with the court; in it, he said that because he was ill, he would not attend. Treating this terse allegation of illness as unsubstantiated and noting Zhou’s failure on several other…