MAURICE LEWIS v. CITY OF CHICAGO, et al.
No. 17-1510
United States Court of Appeals For the Seventh Circuit
ARGUED FEBRUARY 6, 2018 — DECIDED JANUARY 23, 2019
Appeal from the United States District Court for the Northern District of Illinois, Eastern Division. No. 16-CV-7592 — Amy J. St. Eve, Judge.
Before RIPPLE, SYKES, and BARRETT, Circuit Judges.
The district court dismissed the suit, ruling that both claims were time-barred. Lewis appealed. Twelve days later the Supreme Court decided Manuel v. City of Joliet (“Manuel I”), 137 S. Ct. 911, 920 (2017), clarifying that detention without probable cause violates the Fourth Amendment “when it precedes, but also when it follows, the start of legal process in a criminal case.” Id. at 918. The Court declined to decide when such claims accrue, instead remanding the case to this court to resolve that issue. Id. at 922. In September the Manuel panel held that a Fourth Amendment claim for wrongful pretrial detention accrues on the date the detention ends. Manuel v. City of Joliet (“Manuel II”), 903 F.3d 667, 670 (7th Cir. 2018).
The combined effect of Manuel I and II saves part of Lewis‘s case. Consistent with Manuel I, Lewis pleaded a viable Fourth Amendment claim for unlawful pretrial detention.
The due-process claim is another matter. Manuel I makes clear that the Fourth Amendment, not the Due Process Clause, governs a claim for wrongful pretrial detention. To the extent Hurt v. Wise, 880 F.3d 831, 843–44 (7th Cir. 2018), holds otherwise, it is incompatible with Manuel I and II and is overruled.1 We therefore reverse the dismissal of the
Fourth Amendment claim and affirm the dismissal of the due-process claim, though on different grounds.
I. Background
On September 12, 2013, Chicago police officers searched an apartment on West Walton Street where they encountered Lewis and two others. During the search, the officers discovered a handgun. Lewis alleges that the officers had no basis to believe the gun was his. He claims that he didn‘t live at the apartment and never told the officers otherwise. He further alleges that the officers never found anything in the apartment indicating that he lived there.
The officers arrested Lewis for illegally possessing the firearm. Lewis claims that the officers prepared police reports falsely stating that he “had admitted to residing in the Walton Street Apartment” and that the officers “had found and seized evidence establishing that [Lewis] resided in the Walton Street Apartment.”
The day after Lewis‘s arrest, a state-court judge held a probable-cause hearing and found cause to believe that Lewis illegally possessed the weapon,
On July 26, 2016, Lewis sued the City and six officers under
The defendants moved to dismiss the complaint under
II. Discussion
We review a
A. Fourth Amendment Claim
Lewis maintains that he pleaded a viable Fourth Amendment claim for unlawful pretrial detention based on falsified evidence. He also argues that the claim is timely. Under Manuel I and II, he is correct on both points.
The Fourth Amendment protects “[t]he right of the people to be secure in their persons ... against unreasonable ... seizures.”
Lewis alleges that he was detained—that is to say, “seized“—in the Cook County Jail for two years based on falsified police reports and that this injury is actionable under
The Supreme Court superseded this circuit precedent in Manuel I. Elijah Manuel was arrested for possession of unlawful drugs. After a probable-cause hearing based on evidence allegedly fabricated by the police, a local judge found probable cause and sent Manuel to the county jail to await trial. There he sat for 48 days until the prosecutor dismissed the charge. Manuel I, 137 S. Ct. at 915–16. He sought damages under
The Court jettisoned the malicious-prosecution analogy and the due-process source of the right, instead grounding the claim in long-established Fourth Amendment doctrine:
The Fourth Amendment prohibits government officials from detaining a person in the absence of probable cause. That can happen when the police hold someone without any reason before the formal onset of a criminal proceeding. But it can also occur when legal process itself goes wrong—when, for example, a judge‘s probable-cause determination is predicated solely on a police officer‘s false statements. Then, too, a person is confined without constitutionally adequate justification. Legal process has gone forward, but it has done nothing to satisfy the Fourth Amendment‘s probablecause requirement. And for that reason, it cannot extinguish the detainee‘s Fourth Amendment claim—or somehow, as the Seventh Circuit has held, convert that claim into one founded on the Due Process Clause.
Id. at 918–19 (citations omitted).
Manuel I thus clarified that the constitutional injury arising from a wrongful
Put another way, the initiation of formal legal process “did not expunge Manuel‘s Fourth Amendment claim because the process he received failed to establish what that Amendment makes essential for pretrial detention—probable cause to believe he committed a crime.” Id. at 919–20. As we explained in our decision on remand in Manuel II, a Fourth Amendment claim for wrongful pretrial detention is concerned with “the detention rather than the existence of criminal charges.” Manuel II, 903 F.3d at 670.
Lewis‘s allegations are materially indistinguishable from Manuel‘s. He has therefore pleaded a plausible Fourth Amendment claim. The officers respond with an assertion of qualified immunity. “Qualified immunity attaches when an official‘s conduct does not violate clearly established statutory or constitutional rights of which a reasonable person would have known.” Kisela v. Hughes, 138 S. Ct. 1148, 1151 (2018) (per curiam) (quoting White v. Pauly, 137 S. Ct. 548, 551 (2017) (per curiam)). Qualified immunity requires a two-part inquiry: we must determine (1) whether facts alleged or shown by a plaintiff make out a violation of a constitutional right, and (2) if so, whether that right was clearly established at the time of the defendant‘s alleged misconduct. Pearson v. Callahan, 555 U.S. 223, 232 (2009).
It has been clear since at least Franks v. Delaware, 438 U.S. 154 (1978), that falsifying the factual basis for a judicial probable-cause determination violates the Fourth Amendment. A judicial determination of probable cause is normally entitled to a presumption of validity, but
this presumption is premised on an “assumption ... that there will be a truthful showing” of probable cause. [Franks, 438 U.S.] at 164–65, 98 S. Ct. 2674 (emphasis in original). Accordingly, the presumption may give way on a showing that the officer who sought the warrant “knowingly or intentionally or with a reckless disregard for the truth, made false statements to the judicial officer, and that the false statements were necessary to the judicial officer‘s determination that probable cause existed for the arrest.” Beauchamp v. City of Noblesville, Ind., 320 F.3d 733, 742–43 (7th Cir. 2003) (citing Franks, 438 U.S. at 155–56, 98 S. Ct. 2674).
Whitlock v. Brown, 596 F.3d 406, 410 (7th Cir. 2010) (omission in original) (alterations omitted).
Lewis alleges that the officers falsely asserted, both in their police reports and in testimony at the probable-cause hearing, that he admitted residing at the apartment where the gun was found and that they found evidence showing that he lived there. Accepting these allegations as true, as we must at this stage, no reasonable officer could have thought this conduct was constitutionally permissible. It makes no difference that our circuit caselaw situated the constitutional violation in the Due Process Clause rather than the Fourth Amendment.
Manuel II addressed the accrual question the Supreme Court remanded in Manuel I, holding that a Fourth Amendment claim for wrongful pretrial detention accrues when the detention ceases. Manuel II, 903 F.3d at 669. Two considerations supported this conclusion. First, because the constitutional violation is “ongoing” rather than “discrete,” the claim accrues when the ongoing violation ends. Id. Second, “a claim cannot accrue until the would-be plaintiff is entitled to sue, yet the existence of detention forbids a suit for damages contesting that detention‘s validity.” Id. at 670 (citing Preiser v. Rodriguez, 411 U.S. 475 (1973), and Heck v. Humphrey, 512 U.S. 477 (1994)).
Under Manuel II, Lewis‘s Fourth Amendment claim is timely. Lewis remained in jail until the charges against him were dropped on September 29, 2015. He filed this
B. Due-Process Claim
Lewis argues that this same misconduct by law enforcement—falsifying the police reports that led to his pretrial detention—also violated his right to due process, giving rise to an additional constitutional claim under
To reiterate, Manuel I explained that “[i]f the complaint is that a form of legal process resulted in pretrial detention unsupported by probable cause, then the right allegedly infringed lies in the Fourth Amendment.” 137 S. Ct. at 919. As we‘ve noted above, Manuel I clarified that the initiation of formal legal process “cannot extinguish the detainee‘s Fourth Amendment claim—or somehow, as the Seventh Circuit has held, convert that claim into one founded on the Due Process Clause.” Id. at 918–19 (emphasis added). It‘s now clear that a
Lewis relies on Hurt v. Wise as support for his position that pretrial detention based on fabricated evidence violates rights secured by two constitutional provisions—the Fourth Amendment and the Due Process Clause of the Fourteenth—and is actionable under
In Hurt the police arrested three siblings for their suspected roles in the death of their uncle. “But one by one, each was absolved“: one sibling was never criminally charged, the next saw the charges against her dropped after four months in jail, and the third was acquitted at trial after eight months in jail. Hurt, 880 F.3d at 835. The three siblings sued the officers accusing them of fabricating evidence—including confessions—and seeking relief under
As relevant here, Hurt first rejected the officers’ qualified immunity defense on the Fourth Amendment claim, concluding that in light of the evidence in the summary-judgment record, a reasonable trier of fact could find that the plaintiffs “were arrested without even arguable probable cause[] and thus in violation of the Fourth Amendment.” Id. at 843 (citing Manuel I, 137 S. Ct. at 918–19).
Two of the Hurt plaintiffs—the two that were held in jail pending trial—argued that the same police misconduct supported an additional claim for violation of their right to due process, relying on the malicious-prosecution/due-process theory embedded in our circuit caselaw. See, e.g., Julian v. Hanna, 732 F.3d 842 (7th Cir. 2013); Newsome, 256 F.3d 747. Hurt determined that Manuel I had not disturbed the general rule of the Newsome line of cases: while there is “no free-standing constitutional tort of malicious prosecution,” other constitutional rights protect people against “abusive arrests [and] fabrication of evidence.” 880 F.3d at 843. What mattered was that the plaintiffs had “identified the constitutional right at issue“—the Due Process Clause, which “forbids the [S]tate from depriving a person of liberty (including by pre-trial detention) based on manufactured evidence.” Id.
But in Manuel II—decided nine months after Hurt—we explained that all
We overrule precedent only in limited circumstances; a clear intracircuit conflict is one of them. Glaser v. Wound Care Consultants, Inc., 570 F.3d 907, 915–16 (7th Cir. 2009). Manuel II and Hurt cannot be reconciled. Indeed, Hurt is hard to square with Manuel I. The Supreme Court held that the initiation of formal legal process following an arrest does not convert a Fourth Amendment unreasonable-seizure claim “into one founded on the Due Process Clause.” 137 S. Ct. at 919. The injury of wrongful pretrial detention may be remedied under
We close by noting the important point that a claim for wrongful pretrial detention based on fabricated evidence is distinct from a claim for wrongful conviction based on fabricated evidence: “[C]onvictions premised on deliberately fabricated evidence will always violate the defendant‘s right to due process.” Avery v. City of Milwaukee, 847 F.3d 433, 439 (7th Cir. 2017) (emphasis added); see also Mooney v. Holohan, 294 U.S. 103, 112 (1935) (explaining that the use of perjured testimony “to procure the conviction and imprisonment of a defendant is as inconsistent with the rudimentary demands of justice as is the obtaining of a like result by intimidation“); Whitlock v. Brueggemann, 682 F.3d 567, 580 (7th Cir. 2012). Moreover, misconduct of this type that results in a conviction might also violate the accused‘s right to due process under the rubric of Brady v. Maryland, 373 U.S. 83 (1963), and Kyles v. Whitley, 514 U.S. 419 (1995), if government officials suppressed evidence of the fabrication. Avery, 847 F.3d at 443–44. We reiterate that we deal here only with a claim of wrongful pretrial detention, not a claim of wrongful conviction.
* * *
Applying Manuel I and II, we hold that Lewis timely filed a viable Fourth Amendment claim for wrongful pretrial detention. We therefore reverse the dismissal of that claim and remand for further proceedings. Under Manuel I and II, the Due Process Clause does not apply, so the judgment is otherwise affirmed.
AFFIRMED in part and REVERSED AND REMANDED in part.