Wallace v. City of Chicago

• Decision Date: 08 March 2006
• Docket Number: No. 04-3949.,04-3949.
• Citation: 440 F.3d 421
• Parties: Andre WALLACE, Plaintiff-Appellant, v. CITY OF CHICAGO, Kristen Kato and Eugene Roy, Defendants-Appellees.
• Court: U.S. Court of Appeals — Seventh Circuit

440 F.3d 421

Andre WALLACE, Plaintiff-Appellant, v. CITY OF CHICAGO, Kristen Kato and Eugene Roy, Defendants-Appellees.

No. 04-3949.

United States Court of Appeals, Seventh Circuit.

Argued May 31, 2005.

Decided March 8, 2006.

Kenneth N. Flaxman (argued), Chicago, IL, for Plaintiff-Appellant.

Jane E. Notz (argued), Office of the Corporation Counsel, Appeals Division, Chicago, IL, for Defendants-Appellees.

Before EASTERBROOK, ROVNER, and WOOD, Circuit Judges.

WOOD, Circuit Judge.

From the age of fifteen until twenty-three, Andre Wallace was serving time in prison for his alleged participation in a murder. After several appeals, the Illinois Appellate Court found that the police had arrested him without probable cause and that his confession was not sufficiently attenuated from his unlawful arrest. At that point, the prosecution decided to leave well enough alone, and Wallace was released. Only then did Wallace commence the present action: he filed a suit under 42 U.S.C. § 1983 in federal court asserting that Detectives Kato and Roy and the City of Chicago had violated his Fourth Amendment rights and that they had also committed the state torts of malicious prosecution and false imprisonment. The district court granted summary judgment in favor of all three defendants. We affirm. In doing so, we have found it necessary to clarify the law of our circuit concerning when a false arrest claim accrues. We reaffirm the holding of Booker v. Ward, 94 F.3d 1052, 1056-57 (7th Cir.1996), that false arrest claims accrue at the time of arrest; to the extent that it is inconsistent with Booker v. Ward and the present opinion, we overrule Gauger v. Hendle, 349 F.3d 354 (7th Cir.2003).^*

I

On January 17, 1994, John Handy was shot and killed at 825 N. Lawndale Avenue near the intersection of Chicago Avenue and Lawndale. Handy had been working as a house sitter for a construction company and had apparently had a previous confrontation with drug dealers in the area. Detectives Kristen Kato and Eugene Roy were assigned to investigate Handy's murder. After discussing the murder with witnesses and informants in the neighborhood, the police brought Wallace and Laron Jackson in for questioning on the night of January 19, 1994. At the time, the police were not aware that Wallace was only 15 years old because Wallace had told them he was 17 years old.

During the course of the night, Detectives Kato and Roy took turns interrogating Wallace. Wallace, they claim, was free to leave the station house at any time. Wallace's account is somewhat different: he reported that Kato and Roy played "good cop/bad cop" with him to induce him to confess falsely. Kato was the bad guy; whenever Kato took a break, Roy spoke with Wallace and told him that if he confessed, Roy could get Kato to stop hurting him. This continued through the night. At about 4:15 a.m., the detectives confronted Wallace with Jackson's and another witness's statements that they saw Wallace running down the gangway from 825 N. Lawndale after hearing shots. Wallace then admitted that he was only 15. Around 6:00 a.m., Wallace agreed to confess. A youth officer and an assistant state's attorney met with Wallace and read him his Miranda rights and took his written statement. In his complaint, Wallace claims that Kato told him not to tell the state's attorney that Kato had promised Wallace that he could go home after he gave his statement.

Before his trial, Wallace filed several motions to suppress his statements on the grounds that his arrest had been made without probable cause and that the statements were coerced and violated his Miranda rights. His motions were all denied. On April 19, 1996, after a bench trial, Wallace was found guilty of first degree murder.

Wallace appealed. In an opinion issued on September 21, 1998, the Illinois Appellate Court found that the police arrested him without probable cause and remanded for a hearing to determine whether his statements were sufficiently attenuated from his unlawful arrest to permit their use. On remand, the circuit court found that Wallace's confession was sufficiently attenuated from his arrest and affirmed his conviction. Wallace appealed again, and the Illinois Appellate Court reversed the circuit court's decision and remanded for a new trial. On April 10, 2002, the prosecution filed a nolle prosequi motion and dropped the case.

On April 2, 2003, Wallace filed the present suit, asserting that his Fourth Amendment rights had been violated and raising state law claims for false imprisonment and malicious prosecution. Kato and Roy filed an answer and a motion for summary judgment, and the City filed a motion to dismiss. On October 21, 2003, Wallace filed his response, just a week before we decided Gauger v. Hendle, which held that under the circumstances presented there the statute of limitations did not begin to run until the defendant's conviction was invalidated. 349 F.3d at 361-62.

On March 30, 2004, the district court granted summary judgment for Roy and Kato on all claims except Wallace's federal fair trial claim, which it denied without prejudice. The court also denied without prejudice the City's motion to dismiss under Fed.R.Civ.P. 12(b)(6). Wallace filed an amended complaint on April 28, 2004, reasserting his Fourth Amendment claims. The defendants answered and filed a second motion for summary judgment, which included an affirmative defense of collateral estoppel. Wallace's response asserted that the defendants had waived their collateral estoppel defense by failing to raise it in their answer to his amended complaint. The defendants moved to amend their answer.

On October 29, 2004, the court granted the defendants' motion to amend their answer to assert their collateral estoppel defense and in the same order granted the defendants' motion for summary judgment. It concluded that Wallace had conceded that his false arrest claim was time-barred. Alternatively, the court held that even if Wallace was allowed to replead his claim under the more recent decision in Gauger, he would still be time-barred because Wallace could have brought the claim after the Illinois Appellate Court found on September 21, 1998, that Wallace was arrested without probable cause. This was so even though the appellate court remanded the case to the trial court to determine whether Wallace's confession was sufficiently attenuated from his illegal arrest. The district court concluded that at this point it was possible that even if Wallace was illegally arrested his conviction could still stand, and thus he could not take advantage of the Gauger rule.

II

A. False Arrest Claim

Wallace brought his false arrest claim for violation of his Fourth Amendment rights under 42 U.S.C. § 1983. Before turning to the merits of the claim, we address briefly the government's argument that it is waived (or more properly, forfeited) because Wallace failed to raise it in a timely manner in the district court. Our review of the record shows that Wallace initially conceded that his false arrest claim was time-barred in the responsive papers he filed on October 21, 2003, under pre-Gauger law. After Gauger appeared a week later and before the district court ruled on the defendants' second motion for summary judgment, Wallace changed his position and asserted the merits of the false arrest claim. We therefore conclude that he neither waived nor forfeited this argument below.

Although federal law governs the question of the accrual of constitutional torts, state statutes of limitations and tolling doctrines apply once accrual has been determined. See Hardin v. Straub, 490 U.S. 536, 538-39, 109 S.Ct. 1998, 104 L.Ed.2d 582 (1989); see also Gonzalez v. Entress, 133 F.3d 551, 554 (7th Cir.1998). Wallace's false arrest claim is subject to the two-year statute of limitations supplied by Illinois law under 735 ILCS § 5/13-202. In his case, that period was tolled until November 7, 1999, two years after Wallace turned eighteen years old, by virtue of 735 ILCS § 5/13-211. If Wallace's claim accrued as of April 10, 2002, when his conviction was finally nullified and the state dropped his case, then the suit filed on April 2, 2003, easily met the two-year deadline. If, on the other hand, his claim accrued at the time of his arrest on January 20, 1994, his claim is time-barred, even taking into account the tolling that occurred during the period of his minority. Everything depends, therefore, on the accrual rule we must use.

In principle, there are at least three approaches we could take to the accrual of Fourth Amendment claims: (1) the Fourth Amendment claim arises at the time of the wrong (i.e., the false arrest, the unlawful search); (2) the Fourth Amendment claim accrues only after the underlying conviction definitively has been set aside; or (3) as Gauger suggested, accrual depends on how central the evidence was to the conviction: if it was non-essential, use rule 1; if it was critical, use rule 2. Before settling on our preferred option, it is useful to review the underlying law in this area.

When a person's Fourth Amendment rights have been violated by a false arrest, the injury occurs at the time of the arrest. Thus, an individual is entitled to recover only for injuries suffered from the time of arrest until his arraignment. Wiley v. City of Chicago, 361 F.3d 994, 998 (7th Cir.2004) ("[W]e have held that the scope of a Fourth Amendment claim is limited up until the point of arraignment."); see also Gauger, 349 F.3d at 363 ("[T]he interest in not being prosecuted groundlessly is not an interest that the Fourth Amendment protects."). On the other hand, as Wallace's own case illustrates, it is often the case that the prosecution cannot proceed without the fruits of an unlawful arrest (as Wallace's confession was) or an unlawful search. In those cases, the idea that the claim accrues at the time of the injury runs into some tension with the Supreme Court's...