Supreme Court Keeps Sanctions in Place for Kari Lake’s Lawyers

The U.S. Supreme Court has declined to throw out sanctions against lawyers who represented former Arizona gubernatorial hopeful Kari Lake.

Justices on Oct. 13 turned away a petition from Andrew Parker, one of the lawyers, for review of the $122,000 in sanctions. None of the justices outlined why they rejected the case.

At least four of the nine justices must vote to accept such a petition, or they reject it. In a typical year, 100 to 150 petitions are accepted, and thousands of others are rejected.

A federal district judge in 2022 imposed sanctions on Parker and another lawyer after dismissing the case brought by Lake that alleged problems with electronic voting machines and sought to force Arizona to hand-count ballots in the 2022 election.

The judge said in his decision that an amended complaint in the case falsely implied that Arizona does not use paper ballots and that Lake would have to vote by paper ballot absent a ruling in her favor.

An appeals court in 2025 upheld the ruling.

A majority of the appeals court panel said that the lawyers “made false, misleading, and unsupported factual assertions” in court filings and that the district court judge’s determination that the lawyers acted in bad faith “was not clearly erroneous.”

In a dissent, one of the judges on the panel said of the lawyers that “nothing they did was deceptive, intentionally false, or beyond the bounds of zealous advocacy.”

Lawyers representing Parker had told the nation’s top court that keeping the sanctions in place “will deter attorneys from bringing creative, aggressive, or novel claims of the sort that are often necessary to shape and reshape our legal landscape.”

Maricopa County officials had said the sanctions should remain in place to deter baseless lawsuits.

Parker and a representative for the Maricopa County Attorney’s Office, which filed the motion for sanctions, did not respond to requests for comment by the time of publication.