Frederickson v. Landeros

• Decision Date: 26 November 2019
• Docket Number: No. 18-1605,18-1605
• Citation: 943 F.3d 1054
• Parties: Rex A. FREDERICKSON, Plaintiff-Appellee, v. Tizoc LANDEROS, Detective, Defendant-Appellant.
• Court: U.S. Court of Appeals — Seventh Circuit

943 F.3d 1054

Rex A. FREDERICKSON, Plaintiff-Appellee,

v.Tizoc LANDEROS, Detective, Defendant-Appellant.

No. 18-1605

United States Court of Appeals, Seventh Circuit.

Argued November 6, 2018

Decided November 26, 2019

Rehearing and Rehearing En Banc Denied March 4, 2020

Mary R. Alexander, Attorney, Kathleen R. Elsner, Attorney, Johanna M. Spellman, Attorney, Michael J. Faris, Attorney, LATHAM & WATKINS LLP, Chicago, IL, for Plaintiff-Appellee.

Thomas G. DiCianni, Attorney, ANCEL, GLINK, DIAMOND, BUSH, DICIANNI & KRAFTHEFER, P.C., Chicago, IL, for Defendant-Appellant.

Before Wood, Chief Judge, and Easterbrook and Kanne, Circuit Judges.

Wood, Chief Judge.

The Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment requires that state actors have, at a minimum, a rational basis for treating similarly situated people differently. Rex Frederickson alleges that Officer Tizoc Landeros prevented him from updating his Illinois sexual offender registration and otherwise used his official position to harass Frederickson purely out of personal dislike. Without an updated registration, Frederickson was unable to move from Joliet, Illinois, to nearby Bolingbrook.

The district court found that Frederickson had put forth enough evidence to allow a jury to find that Landeros had singled Frederickson out for unfavorable treatment, and that in so doing Landeros was motivated solely by personal animus and thus lacked a rational basis for his actions. Frederickson v. Landeros, No. 11 C 3484, 2018 WL 1184730 (N.D. Ill. March 7, 2018). The district court also held, relying on our decision in Hanes v. Zurick, 578 F.3d 491, 496 (7th Cir. 2009), that "Frederickson’s equal protection right to ‘police protection uncorrupted by personal animus’ [was] clearly established." 2018 WL 1184730 at *8 (quoting from Hanes ). Relying on these two conclusions, the district court denied Landeros’s motion for summary judgment based on qualified immunity as it applied to Frederickson’s equal protection theory. It also found that Landeros was entitled to qualified immunity on Frederickson’s theories based on a substantive due process right to intrastate travel and an alleged procedural due process right to register under the Illinois sex offender legislation. Frederickson did not cross-appeal from the latter two findings, and so we need not address them. Landeros filed a timely appeal from the partial denial of qualified immunity. We conclude that the district court’s order must be affirmed.

I

Because this case comes to us on an interlocutory appeal from a denial of qualified immunity, we must accept the plaintiff’s version of the facts. Gant v. Hartman , 924 F.3d 445, 448 (7th Cir. 2019), relying on Johnson v. Jones , 515 U.S. 304, 115 S.Ct. 2151, 132 L.Ed.2d 238 (1995). The account that follows reflects that favorable assumption, not any findings of our own.

In 2011, Frederickson lived in Joliet, Illinois. He was homeless, and he had a prior conviction for a sex crime. That combination meant that he had (and has) to comply with strict registration requirements under the Illinois Sexual Offender Registration Act ("SORA"). Chief among those requirements is SORA’s mandate that he report and register every week with the law enforcement agency for the jurisdiction in which he resides. 730 ILCS 150/6 ; 730 ILCS 150/3(a). As part of that process, he must provide certain information, including his work address and where he had stayed over the past seven days. If he wishes to move to a different jurisdiction, additional rules apply. The City of Joliet interprets SORA to require that a person in Frederickson’s position take two distinct steps: (1) register with the new jurisdiction, and (2) "register out" of the old jurisdiction. Both, it says, must be done within three days. See 730 ILCS 150/6.

Frederickson’s understanding of the system is that the law requires only the first of those actions, but we do not need to resolve this question of state law. No one disputes that if Illinois wanted to enact a requirement to "register out," it could do so. For present purposes, we can assume without deciding that SORA requires notice of exit on an ongoing basis for a homeless person (rather than only when the person first loses a fixed residence, see 730 ILCS 150/6 ). The issue before us concerns only Frederickson’s claim that Detective Landeros violated his federal rights, not whether Landeros was misinterpreting a state law. We therefore turn directly to qualified immunity.

For the first four years during which Frederickson lived in Joliet, Detective Moises Avila registered Frederickson and everything went smoothly. In 2007 Detective Landeros took over Joliet’s SORA registrations—a post he held throughout the period at issue here. Frederickson interacted with Landeros every week when he updated his SORA registration.

Frederickson’s compliance with the SORA registration requirements, while dutiful, was begrudging. To Landeros’s annoyance, Frederickson often questioned the constitutionality of the registration requirement. He also requested seemingly small—indeed, trivial in Landeros’s opinion—changes to his registration. For example, Frederickson regularly asked Landeros to specify that Frederickson was not an employee of Greg’s Body Shop, but instead that he was an independent contractor for that shop’s owner, Greg Buccarelli. Matters became so contentious that Frederickson began bringing witnesses to some of his weekly registrations. One witness purportedly observed Landeros saying that "of all the people I register, why are you the only one I have trouble with[?]" Frederickson testified that Landeros often repeated variations on this refrain.

Over the years, Landeros arrested Frederickson several times. In 2008, he arrested Frederickson for failure to register under SORA. Although Frederickson ultimately was acquitted on that charge, he spent a year in jail before it was resolved. In November 2010 Landeros arrested Frederickson for driving on a suspended license. Frederickson pleaded guilty to this charge, although he asserts that he did so only because his plea allowed him to get out of jail. Critically, despite the emphasis that the dissent puts on these arrests, Frederickson does not challenge his guilty plea or conviction in this lawsuit. We agree that under Nieves v. Bartlett , ––– U.S. ––––, 139 S. Ct. 1715, 204 L.Ed.2d 1 (2019), they cannot be challenged if supported by probable cause, and we assume that they were so supported.

Frederickson points instead to independent evidence that, he believes, is relevant to his equal protection claim. On January 26, 2011, Frederickson informed Landeros that he had decided to leave Joliet. Landeros did not take well to the news: he threatened to arrest Frederickson (on unclear grounds and with no hint of probable cause) if Frederickson relocated. Despite this threat, Frederickson moved to Bolingbrook, Illinois, on February 8, 2011, to take a job with J&J Autobody. On February 9—a day after the move and a week after his last registration—Frederickson registered with the Bolingbrook Police Department. Bolingbrook accepted the registration. Landeros believed that the move also triggered a requirement under SORA for Frederickson to "register out" of Joliet. But Frederickson alleges that Illinois jurisdictions regularly waive notice of exit—a fact that is relevant to what happened next.

After Bolingbrook registered Frederickson, it had to update his record in Illinois’s Law Enforcement Agency Data System ("LEADS") database. To do that Bolingbrook needed Frederickson’s LEADS file. But only one law enforcement agency can "own" a LEADS file at a time, and only the agency that owns the file can update it. That meant that Joliet had to transfer Frederickson’s file to Bolingbrook before the latter town could make the necessary change. When the Bolingbrook records clerk, Nicole Wlodarski, called Joliet, the person to whom she spoke refused to transfer Frederickson’s LEADS file. That person stated that "they knew [Frederickson] was still living in Joliet," and that his residence was "under investigation." This was the only time that Wlodarski could remember a jurisdiction’s refusing to transfer a LEADS file. Sean Talbot, a Bolingbrook detective, and Diane Kloepfer, a Bolingbrook administrator responsible for LEADS files for "most of" 19 years, also testified that they could not remember a jurisdiction ever refusing a file transfer. This incident had nothing to do with an arrest and thus did not trigger the Nieves rule.

Landeros then spoke to Detective Talbot about Frederickson. Landeros told Talbot that Frederickson was trying to "pull the wool over [Bolingbrook’s] eyes" and that Frederickson was not actually residing in Bolingbrook. After this conversation, several emails were circulated within the Bolingbrook Police Department instructing the recipients not to accept Frederickson’s SORA registration because "he lives in Joliet [sic ] he is not homeless."

After his initial registration in Bolingbrook on February 9, Frederickson worked in Bolingbrook for most of the next week while attempting to move his belongings from Joliet to Bolingbrook. On February 16, Frederickson again had to register. Once again, thanks to Landeros’s intervention, he had problems doing so. That morning Frederickson was in Joliet picking up his tools, but he did not know whether he would be able to get a ride to Bolingbrook later that day. Because the 16th was his required registration day, just to be safe Frederickson registered in Joliet that morning. But Frederickson managed to get a ride to Bolingbrook that afternoon, and so, based on his intent to remain and work in Bolingbrook for the coming week, he went to the Bolingbrook police station to register. The Bolingbrook police officer with whom Frederickson spoke refused to register him and ordered him to go back to Joliet. Despite this refusal, Frederickson resided in Bolingbrook for the next week, living in a truck parked...