Lead Opinion
Following a hit-and-run collision, the driver of the struck vehicle took off in pursuit of the fleeing one. Walter Chandler, who had left the scene, eventually turned into what appeared to be a dead-end alley; Lisa Rhodes pulled up behind him, blocking his exit. Rhodes had the advantage of numbers. She was accompanied by Sara Bridewell, Randy Manuel, and Anthony Watkins. All but Watkins got out of the car and confronted Chandler. Rhodes reached into Chandler’s car and took the key. Before long, Bridewell yelled that Chandler had a gun and the three moved off. A shot rang out. The horn of Chandler’s car began to sound; his head was pressing the button. Minutes later two men were seen in the alley; they may have been Manuel, and Watkins, but perhaps not. A witness, who saw one of these two carrying a gun, heard two more shots.
These men left and police arrived. Bridewell and Rhodes approached the police and told them that Chandler had shot at them. (They did not know his name yet, but we usе names to simplify the story.) Two detectives, Kevin Eberle and Brian Forberg, found Chandler dead, with a gun near his hand. They concluded that he had been shot three times. They also learned from the witness that two men had accompanied Rhodes and Bridewell, something they had not volunteered. They took Bridewell and Rhodes into custody,
After extended interrogation, both Rhodes and Watkins told the police that Bridewell had shot Chandler. (Manuel invoked his rights under Miranda and was not questioned further.) Bridewell was charged with murder. She was already under indictment for possession of cocaine with intent to distribute. Rhodes, Manuel, and Watkins were released.
After three years in custody, Bridewell pleaded guilty to a reduced drug charge (possession only) and was sentenced to time served; prosecutors dismissed the murder charge by filing a nolle prosequi. More than a year earlier, Bridewell, Rhodes, and Manuel had filed this suit against Eberle, Forberg, and the City of Chicago under 42 U.S.C. § 1983, contending that their arrests were unlawful. None of the plaintiffs contended that the interrogations had been coercive or otherwise improper, though Bridewell raises this subject indirectly under state law (we return to the issue at pages 677-78). Bridewell added three claims unique to her: that the police took longer than the fourth amendment allows to present her to a judge, that the murder charge constituted malicious prosecution, and that the defendants tortiously caused her to suffer emotional distress. The district judge granted summary judgment to all three defendants on all four claims.
The district court found that Eberle and Forberg had probable cause to believe that Bridewell, Rhodes, and Manuel either shot Chandler or aided the killer. Police found a dead body and learned from the witness plus Bridewell and Rhodes that Chandler had been pursued, trapped, and confronted by people who were angry with him. Multiple shots were heard. The witness saw Bridewell and her companions run away. One inference was that one or more of them had shot Chandler. It was not the only possible inference. Perhaps the two men who came to the alley later had fired the fatal shots and were strangers to the quartet. Perhaps Chandler shot himself, intentionally or by accident when trying to harm or scare his pursuers. The police thought this unlikely; they saw three holes in Chandler’s head, implying that at least two of the shots had been fired by someone else.
A medical examination revealed only two holes, made by a single bullet. But probable cause is not determined by retrospect. It depends on what the police know, or reasonably believe, at the time. And probable cause is a standard, not a rule. See Illinois v. Gates,
There was no dispute in the district court about what Eberle and Forberg knew or reasonably believed at the time. Plaintiffs contend that a jury should make an independent assessment of probable cause, no matter how things appeared to the officers at the scene. They observe that the witness who heard shots and saw plaintiffs run away did not tell the officers that plaintiffs had fired guns; perhaps a jury would treat this as reducing the likelihood that any of the plaintiffs shоt Chandler (or assisted the shooter). Similarly, plaintiffs contend, a jury might attach significance to the fact that Chandler was
First, it proceeds as if the police had to use the rules for summary judgment and draw inferences in favor of the suspects. They don’t. See, e.g., Gramenos v. Jewel Companies, Inc.,
Second, the contention that, if the witness did not relate seeing any of the group fire a gun, then they cannot have done so, treats memory as if it were a movie made by a well-positioned camera. Yet things happen withоut being seen. A witness may not have a clear view of an entire alley. The focus of vision is fairly small; events in the periphery regularly are missed. And memory often does not record unexpected or unusual events. See Christopher Chabris & Daniel Simons, The Invisible Gorilla: How Our Intuitions Deceive Us (2010) (describing findings of psychological research). Police are entitled to draw on eyewitness descriptions without being required to assume that witnesses got every detail right, or that every omission from a description must establish that the omitted fact did not occur.
Now we take up the three claims advanced by Bridewell alone, starting with her contention that the police waited too long to present her to a court. County of Riverside v. McLaughlin,
We need not decide whether Bridewell has adequately demonstrated that her claim differs from the one resolved in Dunn, because she cannot show injury. The state judge concluded that probable cause existed to find that she had shot Chandler and ordered her to be held—and also revoked her bail on the drug-distribution charge. The Supreme Court observed in Riverside that the reason for requiring suspects in custody to be taken before a magistrate promptly is to ensure that detention based on “incorrect or unfounded suspicion” is short-lived,
What’s more, Bridewеll cannot receive damages for time spent in custody on a valid sentence. See Ramos v. Chicago,
Bridewell next contends that she is a victim of malicious prosecution. Like the district judge, we put to one side the question whether Eberle, Forberg, or the City of Chicago can be amerced on account of charges filed by the State’s Attorney of Cook County, an official of a different public body. See Ramos,
Bridewell contends that аlthough dismissal as part of a bargain usually fails to imply innocence, it did so in her situation because the prosecutor was certain to abandon the murder charge eventually no matter what happened to the drug charge. She tells us that the evidence was weak— that Rhodes and Watkins implicated her only because of improper interrogation, that her hands tested negative for gunshot residue (though the test was not performed until after she had washed her hands), that her DNA and fingerprints were not found on the gun, and that Chandler’s death from one shot fired at close range is best understood as suicide rather than murder. Yet the medical examiner classified the death as homicide initially and after a reexamination, and Bridewell was in position to have shot Chandler from less than a foot away and dropped the gun into the car. Rhodes and Watkins had no reason to make false charges against Bridewell; Rhodes is Bridewell’s sister, and there is no suggestion of bad blood between them.
We therefore cannot say that the murder charge was doomed from the outset—and, more to the point, we could not find any Illinois case holding that it is proper to look past the form of a plea bargain to inquire what would have happened had a compromise not been reached. Federal courts asked to rule on claims arising under state law must take it as it exists. State courts have the prerogative of innovаting on common-law subjects, but federal courts do not. Bridewell could have filed this suit in state court but chose a federal forum and did not ask the district judge to relinquish supplemental jurisdiction, 28 U.S.C. § 1367(c)(3), after resolving her two claims under federal law.
Bridewell asserts that a memo in the prosecutor’s files shows that dismissal of the murder charge was inevitable because the evidence was weak. The Assistant State’s Attorney who wrote the memo concluded that the failure of police to obtain DNA from the gun, and to test Bridewell’s hands for residue before she washed them,
As for Bridewell’s claim that Eberle and Forberg intentionally inflicted emotional distress by arresting her and recommending her prosecution for murder: the district judge dismissed this as barred by the one-year period of limitations Illinois uses for claims of this sort. 745 ILCS 10/8-101. Bridewell was arrested on September 3, 2006, and did not sue until August 29, 2008. We held in Evans v. Chicago,
Bridewell does not contend that any state court has understood the accrual time differently—Illinois applies the standard rule that a claim accrues when the victim first suffers injury and knows its cause—but insists that her claim accruеd anew every day the detectives did not tell the prosecutors to dismiss the indictment because the statements by Rhodes and Watkins were unreliable and DNA evidence was unavailable. If Bridewell is right, however, then Evans must be wrong. The tort of intentional infliction of emotional distress either is a continuing wrong (as she contends) or is not (as Evans held). The idea that failing to reverse the ongoing effects of a tort restarts the period of limitations has no support in Illinois law—or in federal law either. See, e.g., Wallace v. Kato,
Although the detectives did not submit the gun for full forensic testing until too late to collect DNA, and became reluctant to cooperate with the prosecutors once they were defendants in this suit (which, recall, Bridewell filed more than a year before the murder charge was dismissed), it is hard to see how these events could constitute anew malicious prosecution, when the prosecution was already under way. And some of the events to which Bridewell points, such as the lack of proper and prompt forensic testing, occurred more than a year before she filed suit.
Even if we were to suppose that a new claim could in principle be based on events after the initial injury, Bridewell’s claim would fail because she does not contend that the detectives’ ongoing failure to alert the prosecutor to the potential shortcomings in the evidence was motivated by a freshly formed intention to cause emotional distress. A truly new claim arising from inaction requires proof of each element of the tort on each day the supposedly new claim arises. Bridewell wants to treat the (allegedly) bad intent with which the prosecution began as extending to all later inaction. Yet if the initial intent
Affirmed.
Concurrence Opinion
concurring in the judgment.
I agree with my colleagues that Officеrs Kevin Eberle and Brian Forberg had probable cause to arrest each of the plaintiffs—Sara Bridewell, Randy Manuel, and Lisa Rhodes—for the murder of Walter Chandler. Even though the plaintiffs offer a plausible account of the events that unfolded on September 3, 2006, their account does not detract irom the objective reasonableness of the inferences that the officers drew from the information available to them when they arrived on the scene. The fаct that the plaintiffs, especially Rhodes, were subjected to a grueling and humiliating 40-hour interrogation after their arrest is deeply disturbing. Probable cause, however, depends on what the police knew at the time of the arrest, not on anything that happened later. For the same reason, the post-arrest discovery that Chandler had been extremely drunk at the time he died neither adds nor detracts from the objective reasonableness of the actions of the police.
I also agree with the majority that Bridewell’s state-law claims for malicious prosecution and intentional infliction of emotional distress were properly dismissed. Nevertheless, I find both of these to be closer calls than one might think based on the majority’s opinion. The majority sees the disposition of the malicious-prosecution claim as straightforward: the prosecution dismissed the murder charges with a nolle prosequi motion, as part of a bargain in which Bridewell pleaded guilty to unrelated drug and gun possession charges. In Swick v. Liautaud,
Bridewell’s claim for intentional infliction of emotional distress also presents a much closer call for me than it does for the majority. The district court thought that this claim was time-barred, because it understood her to be contending that all of the offensive actions took place no later than the day when she was charged. That date was more than one year before she filed suit, and so if her claim was limited in
I have no quarrel with the district court’s analysis, as far as it goes. But there is more to Bridewell’s allegations: she asserts' that the police committed several allegedly tortious actions after she was charged, and that these actions independently amounted to intentional infliction of emotional distress. Specifically, she states that the detectives failed to disclose to the prosecutors that Rhodes’s and Watkins’s statements implicating her were coerced and false. These were the statements elicited as a product of Rhodes’s 40-hour interrogation, during which the detectives threatened her by telling her that she would never see her children again, screamed at her, denied her bathroom breaks, subjectеd her to a biased polygraph examination, lied to her about the results, and were otherwise abusive. Only after that ordeal did Rhodes give a statement against Bridewell, her sister; she later repeated that statement to the grand jury. But these events were known to the prosecutors either before her indictment or shortly thereafter. Any claim based on them is thus also time-barred. Bridewell also argues that the DNA samples gleaned from the gun that was recovered were not sent for testing until 2009. Finally, she complains that Officer Forberg refused to discuss her case with the prosecutors because this civil case was pending. Even if the officers were responsible for the late DNA testing and were uncooperative with the prosecutors, however, those two actions are not enough to amount to the outrageous conduct that Illinois requires for this tort. See, e.g., Duffy v. Orlan Brook Condo. Owners’ Ass’n,
My final reservation relates to the majority’s discussion of Cnty. of Riverside v. McLaughlin,
But Riverside is concerned not only with the obviously innocent, but also with those who might be entitled to bail. It is worth recalling, in this connection, that in the federal courts, the Bail Reform Act requires the pretrial release of a person, upon proper security, unless the judicial officer determines that the person will not show up as required or that he will endanger others in the community. See 18 U.S.C. § 3142(b); see also People ex rel. Hemingway v. Elrod,
Bridewell hаs not explained, however, what emotional damages apart from the natural distress flowing from her detention she may have suffered as a result of the fifteen extra hours that elapsed before her Gerstein hearing. With respect to the detention itself, as a practical matter she is the beneficiary of the Dunn litigation, which dealt with the City’s careless application of Riverside. See Dunn v. City of Chi,
With these reservations, I concur in the decision to affirm the judgment of the district court.