Hvorcik v. Sheahan, 92 C 7329.

• Decision Date: 24 March 1994
• Docket Number: No. 92 C 7329.,92 C 7329.
• Citation: 847 F. Supp. 1414
• Parties: Jeffrey HVORCIK, et al., Plaintiffs, v. Michael SHEAHAN, Sheriff of Cook County, et al., Defendants.
• Court: U.S. District Court — Northern District of Illinois

847 F. Supp. 1414

Jeffrey HVORCIK, et al., Plaintiffs, v. Michael SHEAHAN, Sheriff of Cook County, et al., Defendants.

No. 92 C 7329.

United States District Court, N.D. Illinois, E.D.

March 24, 1994.

COPYRIGHT MATERIAL OMITTED

Thomas G. Morrissey, Chicago, IL, for plaintiffs.

Robert D. Quinlivan, Chicago, IL, for defendants.

MEMORANDUM OPINION AND ORDER

SHADUR, Senior District Judge.

Three of the four named plaintiffs — Jeffrey Hvorcik ("Hvorcik"), James Poloncasz ("Poloncasz") and Vincent Hedge ("Hedge")¹ — were arrested on the basis of invalid arrest warrants — warrants that at one time had been legitimate but, unknown to the arresting officers, had since been recalled (quashed) by the courts. Although warrants themselves are issued by the courts in the first instance, the warrant records in Cook County are maintained by the Sheriff's office. Plaintiffs now bring this three-count class action² against Cook County Sheriff Michael Sheahan ("Sheahan" or the "Sheriff") in his official capacity, charging him with (1) illegal custodial detention ("seizure" within the meaning of the Fourth Amendment³) in violation of their civil rights under 42 U.S.C. § 1983 ("Section 1983"), (2) false arrest under state law and (3) civil contempt of court, also a state law claim.

Plaintiffs now move for summary judgment as to liability (not as to damages) on all counts pursuant to Rule 56, while Sheahan in his turn moves for summary judgment on the ground of his claimed Eleventh Amendment immunity.⁴ For the reasons set forth in this memorandum opinion and order, plaintiffs' motions are denied as to all of the named plaintiffs but are granted as to the class, while Sheahan's motion is denied.

Facts

Warrants issued by the Circuit Court of Cook County are tracked in three independent ways: by the Clerk of the Circuit Court, by the Illinois State Police and by the Sheriff's Department, the latter through the Sheriff's Fugitive Warrants Division ("FWD"). FWD is headquartered in the "Central Warrants Office" at 26th and California in Chicago, but it also operates offices staffed by the Sheriff's warrant clerks in all suburban districts. One of FWD's primary responsibilities is to maintain the Sheriff's Police Warrant Computer System ("SPWA"), a records repository for about 125,000 active warrants.

Judicial orders are of course the means both for giving life to warrants and for later depriving them of such life. To process the quash and recall orders ("recall orders") after they are signed by judges, each Circuit Court Judge is assigned a deputy court clerk who works for Clerk Aurelia Pucinski ("Pucinski"). Although each courtroom is also assigned a deputy sheriff, the mission of those deputies is strictly security — they have no responsibility for the recall orders. Instead the Sheriff's Office is kept apprised of the status of outstanding warrants by the Sheriff's FWD warrant clerks assigned to the various municipal districts — it is their job to enter into the SPWA the data transmitted from the Clerk's Office.⁵

That transfer of information takes place when a Clerk's Office employee places one of the four color-coded copies of the recall order in a basket for pickup by the Sheriff's people, typically within two to five days after the order is issued.⁶ In addition, the Clerk's Office also provides the Sheriff's Office with a monthly list of recall orders entered for all non-traffic cases, and the Sheriff's Office then compares that listing to its own list of warrants reported as active on the SPWA.

That "cross-checking" procedure has been conducted regularly since 1988. Throughout the relevant time period the task was performed by Investigator Ralph Willer ("Willer"), and P.Ex. 31 contains a compendium of his monthly reports beginning in July 1991 (D.Exs. 4 and 5 are his reports from 1990 and 1989, respectively). By cross-checking against the Clerk's list, Willer typically catches and removes from the SPWA between 49 to 100 warrants per month that, though listed as active, should have been recalled but were not for one reason or another.

Three warrants that were not successfully purged from the system led to the arrests of Hvorcik, Poloncasz and Hedge, all in the Fourth Municipal District. Each of them was arrested when a recalled warrant (stemming from since-resolved misdemeanor charges) was incorrectly classified as active at the time that a law enforcement officer ran a computer check. This opinion later deals with the specifics of those events.

Section 1983 Claim

Because under Illinois law Sheriff Sheahan in his official capacity is the ultimate decisionmaker in his area of Illinois' governmental structure⁷, the analysis of plaintiffs' Section 1983 claim begins with the familiar decision in Monell v. Department of Social Services of City of New York, 436 U.S. 658, 690-91, 98 S.Ct. 2018, 2035-36, 56 L.Ed.2d 611 (1978). Monell, id. charted the necessary elements of such a claim as (1) a deprivation of a constitutionally protected interest (2) caused by an official policy, custom or usage of the governmental entity (accord in the context of a wrongful-warrant-based arrest, Powe v. City of Chicago, 664 F.2d 639, 643 (7th Cir.1981)).

1. Deprivation of a Constitutional Interest

Even with reasonable factual inferences drawn in Sheahan's favor, the initial hurdle of showing a constitutional deprivation (in this instance impinging on Fourth and Fourteenth Amendment rights) poses no difficulty for plaintiffs. Murray v. City of Chicago, 634 F.2d 365, 366 (7th Cir.1980) has put the matter succinctly:

It seems clear that appellant sustained a violation of constitutional rights by being arrested and detained pursuant to an invalid warrant.

Indeed, Sheahan essentially concedes that plaintiffs have suffered a deprivation of the requisite constitutional gravity,⁸ for his submissions focus exclusively on the second Monell prong (D.Mem. 2, 9-23). This opinion therefore turns to that issue.

2. Official Policy, Custom or Usage

Monell is perhaps best known for its negation of respondeat superior liability under Section 1983 (436 U.S. at 691) — for the proposition later articulated (for example) in Pembaur v. City of Cincinnati, 475 U.S. 469, 480, 106 S.Ct. 1292, 1298, 89 L.Ed.2d 452 (1986):

Monell reasoned that recovery from a municipality is limited to acts that are, properly speaking, acts "of the municipality" — that is, acts which the municipality has officially sanctioned or ordered.

Obviously even a single decision or action by the legislative body that governs a municipality — or given the status of a sheriff under Illinois law, a single decision or action by Sheriff Sheahan himself — will meet that test for Section 1983 purposes (id.). But when a plaintiff points to the conduct of anyone farther down in the pecking order, courts have required a showing that the conduct may fairly be laid at the doorstep of the ultimately authorized decisionmaker or decisionmakers (id. 475 U.S. at 480-81, 106 S.Ct. at 1298-99) — hence the regular case law references to "official policy, custom or usage."

It goes without saying that Sheriff Sheahan has not promulgated an actual directive to any officers to arrest and detain suspects on warrants that have already been recalled (see Mitchell v. Aluisi, 872 F.2d 577, 579 (4th Cir.1989) ("There is no evidence of a policy anywhere in Prince George's County to serve invalid warrants")). Hence plaintiffs must look to the Monell-taught doctrine well summarized in McNabola v. CTA, 10 F.3d 501, 511 (7th Cir.1993) (citations from other Courts of Appeals omitted):

In the absence of a formal policy, plaintiff must rely on Monell's custom or practice prong to establish a basis for municipal liability. Monell authorizes the imposition of liability against a municipal entity "for constitutional deprivations visited pursuant to governmental `custom' even though such custom has not received formal approval through the body's official decisionmaking channels." 436 U.S. at 690-91, 98 S.Ct. at 2036; see also Pembaur, 475 U.S. at 482 n. 10, 106 S.Ct. at 1300 n. 10. We explained in Cornfield v. Consolidated High Sch. Dist. No. 230, 991 F.2d 1316, 1326 (7th Cir.1993) that "a practice of unconstitutional conduct, although lacking formal approval, may provide a basis for municipal liability" if the plaintiff can establish that the policymaking authority acquiesced in a pattern of unconstitutional conduct. 991 F.2d at 1326; see also Felton v. Board of Commissioners, 5 F.3d 198, 203 (7th Cir. 1993). A municipal "custom" may be established by proof of the knowledge of policymaking officials and their acquiescence in the established practice. The longstanding or widespread nature of a particular practice would support the inference that policymaking officials "must have known about it but failed to stop it."⁹

In this instance all of the claimed "customs" or "practices" are cast in terms of the Sheriff's derelictions rather than his affirmative behavior. Every factor identified by plaintiffs as causing the violations of their constitutional rights is based on an omission, a failure to take precautionary steps that would have averted the unjustified arrests: failure to conduct satisfactory cross-checks, failure to train and supervise, failure to heed the warnings of various officers concerning the deficiencies in the system, failure to provide suburban police forces with validation printouts, failure to include misdemeanors and traffic offenses among the validation procedures to clear out dead warrants.

That omission-to-act approach to Section 1983 has been applied at the highest possible judicial level (see, e.g., City of Canton v. Harris, 489 U.S. 378, 390, 109 S.Ct. 1197, 1205, 103 L.Ed.2d 412 (1989) (failure adequately to train police officers may constitute "city policy" even if "it may seem contrary to common sense to assert that a municipality will actually have a policy of not taking reasonable steps to train...