Blue v. Lopez

Decision Date28 August 2018
Docket NumberNo. 17-11742,17-11742
Citation901 F.3d 1352
Parties John Daniel BLUE, Plaintiff-Appellant, v. Maria Deguadalupe LOPEZ, a DFACS caseworker, in her individual capacity, Defendant-Appellee.
CourtU.S. Court of Appeals — Eleventh Circuit

John Paul Batson, Law Office of John P. Batson, Augusta, GA, Jeffrey R. Filipovits, Filipovits Law Firm, Atlanta, GA, Craig Thomas Jones, Craig T. Jones, PC, Washington, GA, for Plaintiff-Appellant.

Michelle Jeanette Hirsch, Christopher Michael Carr, Attorney General's Office, Atlanta, GA, for Defendant-Appellee.

Before ROSENBAUM and JILL PRYOR, Circuit Judges, and BARTLE,* District Judge.

ROSENBAUM, Circuit Judge:

We can’t tell what time it is by measuring yards. We can’t know how much something weighs by measuring lightyears. We can’t see how long a field is by measuring degrees of heat. And we can’t quantify rainfall by measuring it on the Richter magnitude scale. That’s because in all of these cases, the measuring device simply is not designed to gauge the thing we are trying to measure.

Here, we must decide whether a legal measuring device—the standard for denying a motion for directed verdict in a Georgia criminal trial—can accurately gauge whether another legal standard—the propriety of granting summary judgment to a defendant in a 42 U.S.C. § 1983 malicious-prosecution case—has been satisfied. Georgia’s Monroe Rule dictates that denial of a motion for directed verdict in a criminal trial conclusively demonstrates the existence of probable cause, thereby precluding a state civil malicious-prosecution claim based on the prosecution in which the criminal court denied the directed verdict. The district court here applied the Monroe Rule to grant summary judgment to Defendant-Appellee Maria Lopez, a case manager and investigator with the Georgia Department of Family and Child Services ("DFACS"), and against Plaintiff-Appellant John Blue on his § 1983 malicious-prosecution claim.

For the reasons we explain below, we conclude that was error. The denial of a directed verdict in a criminal trial does not measure what matters in evaluating on summary judgment in the § 1983 case whether probable cause for a prosecution existed: the credibility, reliability, and quality of evidence supporting the prosecution in the first place. We therefore now vacate the entry of summary judgment and remand for further proceedings consistent with this opinion.

I.
A.

This case arises from an incident involving Blue and Lopez. At the time of the incident, Blue lived with his girlfriend Zstanya Patrick and their two sons, who were 14 and 10 years old.

DFACS received a complaint alleging domestic violence at the Patrick residence. So on the morning of June 12, 2014, Lopez went to Patrick’s apartment to investigate. When Lopez arrived, she was driving a car that DFACS had provided for use in her job. Because of a medical condition, Lopez was using an intravenous ("IV") catheter, which was located on her arm.

After Lopez parked, she went to the front door, and Patrick answered. Lopez asked her to step outside to speak with her. Patrick complied.

During their conversation, Patrick admitted that domestic violence had occurred in the home. Patrick said that she and Blue did not get along, and she described a recent incident where Blue had hit one of the children, causing the child to complain of ringing in his ear. When Lopez asked Patrick what she intended to do about the situation, Patrick explained that she was going to separate from Blue and move with her sons to Ohio. But Patrick had not made any specific plans about a timeframe for moving.

While the two women spoke, Blue arrived at the apartment. As Blue approached, Patrick asked Lopez to change the subject.

Blue did not address the two women when he entered the home. According to Blue, he did not know of Lopez’s official capacity when he saw Patrick and Lopez speaking together. Instead, Blue stated that he believed that Lopez, whom he later described as appearing disheveled, was a "drug addict" friend of Patrick’s. He claimed to base his belief on what he described as Lopez’s flushed face and on his alleged observation of the IV dangling from her arm.1

Once Blue entered the apartment, he found his sons and told them to get dressed while he went out. Blue then left the apartment.

In the meantime, Lopez became concerned about Patrick’s lack of a specific plan to remove the two children from the alleged domestic violence occurring in the home. So she returned to her car to call her supervisor and discuss the problem. Lopez’s supervisor instructed Lopez to contact the Juvenile Court so she could take further action.

Lopez did just that. Once she reached the Juvenile Court by phone, a judge there granted Authorizations for Protective Custody ("Authorizations") for the children. The Juvenile Court then emailed Lopez the Authorizations, which permitted her, on behalf of DFACS, to take Blue’s sons into custody.

At about this time, Blue, who had left the apartment a few minutes earlier, returned for his children. According to Blue, when he arrived at the apartment, he did not see Lopez because, he later reasoned, she was in her car speaking with her supervisor and the Juvenile Court. Blue went into the apartment, waited for the children to get dressed, and then left the apartment with the children.

As Lopez continued to sit in her car, Blue emerged from the apartment with his sons. The three entered Blue’s van, which was parked head-in in the parking space directly across from and in front of Lopez’s car, which was backed in and therefore facing the back of Blue’s van. An eight-to-ten-foot-wide lane of travel separated the two vehicles.

Blue and his children entered the van and prepared to back out of the parking space. Lopez did not want the children to leave because DFACS had custody of them under the Authorizations issued by the Juvenile Court.

In Blue’s version of the facts, as he prepared to back out of his parking spot, Lopez approached the van, beat on the driver’s side window and told him he could not leave with the children. Blue simply said, "No," and began backing out of the parking space.

What happened next is hotly disputed by the parties. According to Blue, as he was backing out, Lopez ran to her car and deliberately drove it into the back of Blue’s van. But Lopez claimed that it was Blue who struck her vehicle: Lopez asserted that she pulled her car up behind the van to prevent Blue from leaving with the children, but she did not strike his van. Rather, after she got close and had already stopped moving, Blue then backed into her.

Blue claimed that after the two cars collided, Blue got out of his van and asked Lopez to move her vehicle, but she did not respond. At the time, Blue said, he thought Lopez looked "high" and "crazy as heck," and his only interest was getting his children away from Lopez.

So when Lopez refused to move her car, Blue returned to his van and began driving it backward and forward multiple times until he was able to leave the parking space. Blue later claimed that he succeeded in leaving without hitting Lopez’s car, though even later, he conceded that he used his van to "push" off Lopez’s car.

Lopez had a different take on the incident. She said that Blue rammed her vehicle with his van until he had successfully pushed her car out of the way and was able to maneuver the van out of the parking space. After Blue left the apartment complex with his children, Lopez called 911 to report the incident, prompting police to arrive on the scene and speak with Lopez.

Lopez later went to the Duluth Police Department to give a statement to police. In her statement, Lopez reported that Blue rammed her car as he was leaving the parking lot. As Lopez described the incident, Blue "continued backing into her vehicle until he had created a space where he could flee with his vehicle and both juveniles."

An officer then asked the Georgia Bureau of Investigation to issue a statewide alert for the children. And the officers who spoke to Lopez asked if she wanted to press charges against Blue. Lopez called her supervisor at DFACS, who told Lopez to press charges.

At some point, Blue saw the police alert on television and, after asking his parents to pick up the children, turned himself in. Once at the Duluth Police Department, Blue spoke with the lead investigator. Blue told the investigator that, after he and the children entered the van and as he was backing up, Lopez drove her car into the back of his van. Following the initial impact, Blue said he hit the gas, pushed her car off, and left. He told the detective that if he hit Lopez’s car with his van, it was because he was trying to get out of the parking space.

The police ultimately arrested Blue, and an indictment was returned against him on a single charge of aggravated assault in violation of O.C.G.A. § 16-5-21(a)(2). The Superior Court of Gwinnett County held a jury trial on the charge. At the close of the government’s evidence, Blue’s attorney moved for a directed verdict. The court denied the motion for directed verdict. Then the case proceeded to the jury, and it returned a verdict of not guilty.

B.

Following his acquittal, Blue filed a lawsuit against Lopez asserting, among other things, a Fourth Amendment malicious-prosecution claim under 42 U.S.C. § 1983.2

In the course of the proceedings, Lopez moved for summary judgment on the malicious-prosecution claim. In her motion, Lopez argued that Blue could not establish the necessary elements of his claim because he could not show that the prosecution was carried on "maliciously and without probable cause." Lopez offered two independent reasons for why this was so. First, she contended that probable cause for the prosecution was "conclusively established" when the state trial court judge denied Blue’s motion for directed verdict in the criminal trial. Lopez relied on a Georgia Supreme Court case in support of her argument— Monroe v. Sigler , 256 Ga. 759, 353 S.E.2d 23 (1987...

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