Lopez v. City of Chicago

• Decision Date: 22 September 2006
• Docket Number: No. 05-1877.,05-1877.
• Citation: 464 F.3d 711
• Parties: Joseph LOPEZ, Plaintiff-Appellant, v. CITY OF CHICAGO, Jennifer Delucia, James Delafont, Daniel Jacobs, and Hector Vergara, Defendants-Appellees.
• Court: U.S. Court of Appeals — Seventh Circuit

464 F.3d 711

Joseph LOPEZ, Plaintiff-Appellant, v. CITY OF CHICAGO, Jennifer Delucia, James Delafont, Daniel Jacobs, and Hector Vergara, Defendants-Appellees.

No. 05-1877.

United States Court of Appeals, Seventh Circuit.

ARGUED February 22, 2006.

DECIDED September 22, 2006.

COPYRIGHT MATERIAL OMITTED

Michael Kanovitz (argued), Arthur Loevy, Loevy & Loevy, Chicago, IL, for Plaintiff-Appellant.

Myriam Zreczny (argued), Suzanne M. Loose, Office of the Corporation Counsel Appeals Division, Chicago, IL, for Defendant-Appellee.

Before FLAUM, Chief Judge, and WILLIAMS and SYKES, Circuit Judges.

SYKES, Circuit Judge.

Joseph Lopez was arrested by Chicago police for a murder he did not commit. The murder victim was a twelve-year-old boy, an innocent bystander hit by gunfire in a drive-by shooting. Lopez was arrested without a warrant, although with probable cause—an eyewitness identified him as the shooter.

Following his arrest, the individual defendants—all detectives with the Chicago Police Department—kept Lopez shackled to the wall of a windowless, nine-by-seven-foot interrogation room for four days and nights while they investigated the case. Lopez had nowhere to sleep but a four-foot-by-ten-inch metal bench or the dirty brick floor. The interrogation room had no toilet or sink; he had to "scream" for the detectives to let him out to use a bathroom. He was given only one bologna sandwich and one serving of juice as food and drink during the entire four days and nights he was kept in the interrogation room. The detectives questioned him from time to time and made him stand in two lineups.

After two-and-a-half days in these conditions, Lopez started to become disoriented and began hearing voices telling him to confess. He ultimately gave a statement containing a false confession that did not match the details of the crime. On the fifth day of his detention, Lopez was moved to the city lockup, charged, and finally taken to court. The following day, the police investigation led detectives to another individual who confessed to the murder. Lopez was released the next day.

Those were the facts the jury was entitled to believe based on evidence Lopez presented during a seven-day trial on his claim under 42 U.S.C. § 1983 for violation of his constitutional rights and his supplemental state law claim for intentional infliction of emotional distress. The detectives testified differently about their treatment of Lopez while he was in their custody, but there was no dispute that they detained him for five days after his warrantless arrest without taking him before a judge for a probable cause hearing. Remarkably, after hearing this evidence, the district court refused to submit the claims to the jury and instead granted the defendants' motion for judgment as a matter of law.

We reverse. Lopez was entitled to judgment as a matter of law on his claim that the detectives violated his Fourth Amendment right to a prompt judicial determination of probable cause. See Gerstein v. Pugh, 420 U.S. 103, 125, 95 S.Ct. 854, 43 L.Ed.2d 54 (1975). County of Riverside v. McLaughlin, 500 U.S. 44, 56-57, 111 S.Ct. 1661, 114 L.Ed.2d 49 (1991), holds that if a Gerstein probable cause hearing is not held within 48 hours of a warrantless arrest, the government must demonstrate the existence of an emergency or other extraordinary circumstance to justify its failure to promptly present the person arrested to a judicial officer for a probable cause determination. Here, the defendants offered no reason for the five-day delay other than the continuation of their investigation, but delays for the purpose of gathering additional evidence are per se unreasonable under McLaughlin. Id.; see also Willis v. City of Chi., 999 F.2d 284, 288-89 (7th Cir.1993).

There was conflicting evidence at trial on Lopez's treatment while in the detectives' custody, raising a jury issue on his constitutional claim relating to the conditions of his warrantless detention and his state law claim for intentional infliction of emotional distress. The district judge should not have taken these claims from the jury and resolved the factual conflict himself; they are remanded for retrial.

I. Background

Given the procedural posture of this case, we recount the facts based on the evidence presented at trial in the light most favorable to Lopez, the party against whom the district court entered judgment as a matter of law. See Zimmerman v. Chi. Bd. of Trade, 360 F.3d 612, 623 (7th Cir.2004) (when considering a motion for judgment as a matter of law, a court must view the evidence in the light most favorable to the nonmoving party and must draw all reasonable inferences in that party's favor). The facts pertinent to Lopez's duration-of-confinement claim under Gerstein and McLaughlin are undisputed.

On July 19, 2000, a twelve-year-old boy was shot and killed in a drive-by shooting in Lopez's Chicago neighborhood. Based on one eyewitness's identification, Chicago police officers arrested Lopez without a warrant at approximately 2 p.m. on July 20. Lopez stipulated at trial that the officers had probable cause to arrest him. The arresting officers took him to the Chicago Police Department's Area 5 detective headquarters where they left him in the custody of the defendant detectives: Jennifer Delucia, James Delafont, Daniel Jacobs, and Hector Vergara.

Lopez was placed in a nine-by-seven-foot interrogation room, and one of his arms was handcuffed to a metal ring fastened to the wall about three feet off the floor. When he asked if he could be unshackled from the wall, one of the detectives—Lopez does not remember who—told him "no" because he "was a murderer." The room's brick floor was dirtied with gum, cigarette butts, used matches, wrappers, and dust. Next to the wall and below the ring to which Lopez was shackled was a metal bench that was four feet long and ten inches wide. There was no sink, toilet, or running water in the room. There was a small window in the door, but it was covered over with paper so it was impossible to see through it. The room had no clock and Lopez did not have a watch or other timekeeping device with him, so he could not tell how long he was in the room or whether it was night or day. The detectives kept Lopez shackled to the wall of this room for four days and four nights.

Lopez's expert on police practices testified that a suspect should be held in such an interrogation room only for "short durations" not to exceed "eight hours." He testified that "generally you want to—you don't want to do it longer than what would normally be a business day or would normally be something somebody could tolerate for a period of time." He also said it would "[a]bsolutely not" be appropriate to hold a suspect in an interrogation room for even twenty-four hours, let alone the four days and nights Lopez endured.

The detectives let Lopez out of the interrogation room for only a few brief moments. They removed him twice to appear in police lineups, first on the evening of July 20 and then on the evening of July 21. At some point during his detention, the detectives transferred Lopez to a second interrogation room that was essentially the same as the first. To leave the interrogation room to use the bathroom, Lopez said he had to "scream[ ] from the top of [his] lungs" to get the detectives' attention in order to be let out. It is not clear how many times Lopez asked to use the bathroom. He implied on direct examination that it was multiple times: "Sometimes I'd be yelling for a while. I don't know how long. I couldn't time myself." But on cross-examination he said he thought he only asked once to use the bathroom. At any rate, because the interrogation room lacked a sink or running water, Lopez was unable to attend to his personal hygiene in any way for the four days. He realized he began to smell badly and Detective Jacobs told him he stunk.

Lopez had great difficulty sleeping during the four days and nights he was shackled to the wall of the interrogation room. He tried once to lie down on the brick floor to get some sleep, but he woke up with shooting pains down his shackled arm, which had begun to turn purplish blue, and pain in his shoulder, hip, and knees. Lopez then sat up on the bench and kept his shackled arm level with the ring on the wall in order to restore proper circulation. He gave up trying to sleep lying down and just sat on the bench and leaned back against the wall. It seemed to Lopez that whenever he fell asleep in that seated position, he would bump his head on the wall and wake up. The little sleep he got was not restful.

For his first two-and-a-half days in the interrogation room, no one brought Lopez anything to eat or drink. He testified that he was able to grab a drink of water during his trips to the bathroom. He said, "[T]he only way I could use the bathroom or drink some water [was] if the detectives that were working on my case were there. If not, I had to wait." Lopez testified that he became disoriented and began to hear voices in his head at some point after he was brought back from the second police lineup, about a day and a half into his detention. He told the jury:

I couldn't even put my ideas in place. I couldn't even think straight. And every time I would, like, say something, I would tell myself man, you know, I didn't shoot that little boy and then a voice will click in and say yeah, you did shoot him. . . . It was just some voice that was coming from the back of my head just kept telling me yeah, you did shoot him. So after awhile me fighting against that voice, it just came true. I was like you know what, I started to believe that I did shoot [him]. . . . I was sitting there for a while and after me crying so much and trying to put thoughts all together, which wasn't even going together, I was sitting looking at the wall and I would feel like the wall was like coming in closer. And as I would feel it, it looked like it...