Jenese Larmouth

Why It Matters

The judicial officer who turned a comment-section dispute into a civil HRO, refused an evidentiary hearing, issued orders without signatures, and then watched as those same defective documents were retro-signed, re-dated, and exported into other courts as if they were reliable artifacts. She is also a named defendant in the federal civil-rights case that grew out of that mess, yet continued to act in it as if the conflict were optional.

When a referee presides over a case, becomes a defendant in the resulting federal lawsuit, and still allows her name and authority to be used on orders correcting or extending her own conduct, the problem is not one bad ruling. It is a failure of basic judicial ethics and an attack on the idea that records mean anything at all.

Every broken system has a human interface. In Ramsey County's harassment docket, that interface is Referee Jenese Larmouth.

Staying On The Case After Becoming A Defendant

By the time the federal complaint in Strickland v. Ramsey County et al. was filed, Referee Larmouth had already been put on notice that her conduct in the HRO proceedings was at issue: denial of ADA accommodations, refusal to hold an evidentiary hearing, and reliance on altered and unsigned orders. The complaint named her personally as a civil-rights defendant.

A judge or referee aware of being named in related litigation is supposed to step back. Instead, Larmouth stayed exactly where she was. During the May 23 hearing, she explicitly stated it was not an "evidence hearing" and used that self-created procedural trap to bar any evidence from being considered at all. She denied the Motion to Vacate, declaring the Author was "evading" and therefore didn't deserve a new hearing.

When subsequently named as a defendant in the trial, she initially flat-out refused to recuse herself. She eventually bent to reality and issued a recusal order, but the exit was as sloppy as the performance. Larmouth left behind a string of unsigned orders that Judge Rueger later backdated to patch the hole—except they missed a spot. The actual recusal order was issued completely exposed on July 30, 2025.

In any other context, deciding your own case is called a conflict of interest. On her bench, it was just another hearing.

Unsigned Orders And A Manufactured Record

One of the core problems in the harassment case was simple and catastrophic: orders were issued without signatures, then treated as if they were final, enforceable, and valid. Larmouth was the judicial officer whose name and authority were attached to those ghost documents.

She denied an evidentiary hearing despite statutory entitlement, ensured no witness ever had to answer questions under oath, and allowed the case to proceed on paper alone. Then, when orders appeared in the file without signatures or with signature pages added later, nothing was corrected. No amended order was issued to acknowledge the defect. No notice was sent to say, in plain language, that the court had released a noncompliant document.

Those same orders later resurfaced with retroactive signatures and re-dated metadata, and were eventually carried into federal court by county counsel as if they were clean. The result is a record that behaves like a glitching video file: the same order with different timestamps, the same docket entry with different contents, all funneling back to one referee who never once acknowledged the problem.

When the referee will not admit the file is corrupt, the corruption becomes the file.

Three Signatures, One Defect

Three referee-signed orders in Onion’s document set carry “Referee Larmouth” above a blank “Judge of District Court” countersignature line. Two of the three are HROs. One is a recusal order. Minn. Stat. § 609.748 subds. 4(b) and 5(b) tell you which is which:

• 62-HR-CV-25-300 (Onion’s spouse Skanda), March 7, 2025 — Ex Parte Temporary HRO. § 609.748 subd. 4(b): “When signed by a referee, the temporary order becomes effective upon the referee’s signature.” The blank countersignature line is not a defect. It is the statute operating as designed.
• 62-HR-CV-26-415 (Perryn Marks, unrelated party), May 14, 2026 — HRO After Hearing. § 609.748 subd. 5(b): “When a referee presides at the hearing on the petition, the restraining order becomes effective upon the referee’s signature.” Same result. Not a defect on the four corners.
• 62-HR-CV-24-963 (Onion’s case), July 31, 2025 — Recusal Order. Not an HRO. Not covered by § 609.748. Governed by Minn. Stat. § 484.70, subd. 7(e): “All orders and findings recommended by a referee become an effective order when countersigned by a judge.” The blank line here is a Griffis defect — and only this one.

This is not a walk-back. It is a sharpening. The Court of Appeals characterized the missing countersignature on the July 31, 2025 recusal order as “probably through an oversight.” The empirical record does not fit that framing. In Griffis v. Luban, 601 N.W.2d 712 (Minn. Ct. App. 1999) — a Second-District case that has never been overruled — the same court called uncountersigned referee orders “unauthorized” and vacated the judgment resting on them. Griffis specifically rejected a Second-District “standing order” that had authorized entering referee orders without a judge’s signature. If that standing-order practice has quietly resumed, it is a live doctrinal question, not an oversight.

The strong pattern claim is one order, not three. That order is anchored by Griffis, is decided in the same district it was violated in, and is directly in tension with the Court of Appeals’ May 11, 2026 “oversight” label. The framing is honest and the frame is sharper for it.

Two orders the statute saves. One order the statute won’t. Guess which one the record hides.

The Perryn Marks Leak: Default by Routine

The institutional decay isn't isolated to a single target; it's a systemic reflex. A devastating piece of structural evidence arrived directly from a Ramsey County court clerk's hands: a completely unrelated, default Harassment Restraining Order (Case File No. 62-HR-CV-26-415) regarding two total strangers—Perryn Marks and Franchize McWright. The court accidentally mailed the entire raw packet, complete with highly confidential Law Enforcement Information Sheets, straight to the Author.

The document is a pristine look inside Larmouth's factory. On May 14, 2026, Larmouth rubber-stamped a two-year HRO after a hearing where the respondent never appeared. The face of the order shows Larmouth's signature under the "Recommended By" referee line, but the "By the Court" line—the mandatory countersignature of a District Court Judge required to make a referee's edict final—is completely blank.

The machinery processed it anyway, exporting it immediately to law enforcement. The Author personally hunted down the unaware respondent, McWright, who confirmed he had absolutely no idea the order existed. When the petitioner, Perryn Marks, was contacted, he thanked the Author and asked if the court had been notified. They were. The Author explicitly put the administrative glitch on their radar, and the court did what it does best: ignored it and kept the assembly line moving.

Confidential data in the wrong mailboxes, unsigned orders on the street, total silence from the bench.

The One Reversal on the Record

Larmouth’s four-year tenure as a Ramsey County referee produces exactly two publicly-locatable Minnesota Court of Appeals dispositions. One is Clerk v. Dipman (A25-1433 / A25-1527, April 13, 2026), an eviction / frivolous-litigant matter she recommended and the Court of Appeals affirmed. The other is Edrington v. Sheridan (A23-1782, February 3, 2025), and it is a reversal.

The underlying facts: a known sperm donor filed a paternity petition against a same-sex couple. The Sheridans moved to dismiss. Referee Larmouth recommended denial. Judge Thomas Gilligan approved. The Court of Appeals reversed and directed dismissal with prejudice, holding that Minnesota law precluded the sperm donor’s paternity action as a matter of law. The reversal was covered by Minnesota Lawyer (as a 2025 Attorney of the Year story for the winning appellate team) and by the Star Tribune. Not a technicality. Not a procedural reversal. A legal-error reversal on the merits, tossing a case Larmouth had let survive.

One data point is not a pattern. But Edrington sits at the top of the very short list of appellate review Larmouth’s docket generates. When the record is thin, every entry in it matters. This one says the Court of Appeals disagreed with her.

A short appellate record makes one reversal loud.

Appeals, Copies, And The Illusion Of Oversight

The Minnesota Court of Appeals has identified Larmouth as the judicial officer who conducted the underlying HRO proceedings. In a November 2025 order denying a motion to intervene, the Court anchors the challenged orders in her courtroom while declining to address the full federal implications. Even there, the system cannot talk about the case without saying her name.

At the same time, Ramsey County has developed a strange habit: routing orders and notices past Larmouth even when other judicial officers' names are on the caption. She is copied on appellate-related correspondence, looped into denials, and positioned as the quiet recipient of documents describing the damage done in proceedings she controlled.

The message this sends inside the courthouse is simple: no matter who signs the next order, the referee whose actions triggered the federal lawsuit is still in the loop, watching from the system console. The message it sends outside the courthouse is worse: the people responsible for the broken record are now supervising the cleanup.

Prosecutor To Referee: The Same Gravity, New Robes

Before taking the bench as a referee, Larmouth worked as an Assistant County Attorney under Ramsey County Attorney John Choi. In the published opinion State v. Gibson, A14-1955, she appears as counsel for the State, defending the government's position in a criminal appeal. The posture is familiar: resist relief, defend the record, protect the institution.

That same gravity followed her to the referee's chair. Her decisions in the harassment case consistently bent toward institutional convenience and away from access: no evidentiary hearing, unsigned orders left uncorrected, ADA barriers treated as personal failures rather than legal violations, and continued involvement after becoming a named defendant.

Public records also show a petty-misdemeanor traffic conviction (obscured plate, 2017, Case No. 62-VB-17-84912) resolved by administrative fine. It is minor, but it underscores a familiar contrast: when insiders make mistakes, the system offers quiet resolution. When disabled pro se litigants trip on barriers the court itself erected, it calls them noncompliant and uses the resulting confusion as justification to shut the door.

Change the job title from prosecutor to referee and the costume changes, but the role does not.