Lewis v. City of Chi.

• Citation: 914 F.3d 472
• Decision Date: 23 January 2019
• Docket Number: No. 17-1510,17-1510
• Parties: Maurice LEWIS, Plaintiff-Appellant, v. CITY OF CHICAGO, et al., Defendants-Appellees.
• Court: U.S. Court of Appeals — Seventh Circuit

914 F.3d 472

Maurice LEWIS, Plaintiff-Appellant,

v.CITY OF CHICAGO, et al., Defendants-Appellees.

No. 17-1510

United States Court of Appeals, Seventh Circuit.

Argued February 6, 2018

Decided January 23, 2019

Joel A. Flaxman, Attorney, Kenneth N. Flaxman, Attorney, Law Office of Kenneth N. Flaxman P.C., Chicago, IL, for Plaintiff-Appellant.

Julian Nunes Henriques, Jr., Attorney, City of Chicago Law Department, Chicago, IL, for Defendants-Appellees.

Before Ripple, Sykes, and Barrett, Circuit Judges.

Sykes, Circuit Judge.

Maurice Lewis spent more than two years in pretrial detention in the Cook County Jail based on police reports falsely implicating him for unlawfully possessing a firearm. After the charges against him were dropped, Lewis sued the City of Chicago and six police officers under 42 U.S.C. § 1983 seeking damages for violation of his rights under the Fourth Amendment and the Due Process Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment.

The district court dismissed the suit, ruling that both claims were time-barred. Lewis appealed. Twelve days later the Supreme Court decided Manuel v. City of Joliet ("Manuel I "), ––– U.S. ––––, 137 S.Ct. 911, 920, 197 L.Ed.2d 312 (2017), clarifying that detention without probable cause violates the Fourth Amendment "when it precedes, but also when it follows, the start of legal process in a criminal case." Id. at 918. The Court declined to decide when such claims accrue, instead remanding the case to this court to resolve that issue. Id. at 922. In September the Manuel panel held that a Fourth Amendment claim for wrongful pretrial detention accrues on the date the detention ends. Manuel v. City of Joliet ("Manuel II "), 903 F.3d 667, 670 (7th Cir. 2018).

The combined effect of Manuel I and II saves part of Lewis’s case. Consistent with Manuel I , Lewis pleaded a viable Fourth Amendment claim for unlawful pretrial detention.

And Manuel II confirms that the claim is timely because Lewis filed it within two years of his release from detention.

The due-process claim is another matter. Manuel I makes clear that the Fourth Amendment, not the Due Process Clause, governs a claim for wrongful pretrial detention. To the extent Hurt v. Wise , 880 F.3d 831, 843–44 (7th Cir. 2018), holds otherwise, it is incompatible with Manuel I and II and is overruled.¹ We therefore reverse the dismissal of the Fourth Amendment claim and affirm the dismissal of the due-process claim, though on different grounds.

I. Background

On September 12, 2013, Chicago police officers searched an apartment on West Walton Street where they encountered Lewis and two others. During the search, the officers discovered a handgun. Lewis alleges that the officers had no basis to believe the gun was his. He claims that he didn’t live at the apartment and never told the officers otherwise. He further alleges that the officers never found anything in the apartment indicating that he lived there.

The officers arrested Lewis for illegally possessing the firearm. Lewis claims that the officers prepared police reports falsely stating that he "had admitted to residing in the Walton Street Apartment" and that the officers "had found and seized evidence establishing that [Lewis] resided in the Walton Street Apartment."

The day after Lewis’s arrest, a state-court judge held a probable-cause hearing and found cause to believe that Lewis illegally possessed the weapon, 720 ILL. COMP. STAT. 5/24-1.1(a), and violated Illinois’s armed habitual criminal statute, id. § 5/24-1.7(a). The judge ordered Lewis held for trial. Two weeks later a prosecutor amended the charges, and a different judge held a probable-cause hearing on the new charges. Officer Abraham Mora testified that the search of the apartment uncovered a handgun and two documents addressed to Lewis at the Walton Street address. The judge found probable cause to detain Lewis for trial. He sat in the Cook County Jail for two years until the charges were dropped on September 29, 2015.

On July 26, 2016, Lewis sued the City and six officers under § 1983 alleging that he was held in jail pending trial based on falsified evidence, violating his rights under the Fourth Amendment and the Fourteenth Amendment’s Due Process Clause. He also raised a claim under Illinois law for malicious prosecution.

The defendants moved to dismiss the complaint under Rule 12(b)(6) of the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure. The judge granted the motion, dismissing the constitutional claims with prejudice after finding them time-barred under the two-year statute of limitations applicable to § 1983 claims in Illinois. The judge then relinquished supplemental jurisdiction over the state-law claim, dismissing it without prejudice.

II. Discussion

We review a Rule 12(b)(6) dismissal de novo. Jakupovic v. Curran , 850 F.3d 898, 901 (7th Cir. 2017). To survive a motion to dismiss, a complaint must contain "factual content that allows the court to draw the reasonable inference that the defendant is liable for the misconduct alleged."

Ashcroft v. Iqbal , 556 U.S. 662, 678, 129 S.Ct. 1937, 173 L.Ed.2d 868 (2009).

A. Fourth Amendment Claim

Lewis maintains that he pleaded a viable Fourth Amendment claim for unlawful pretrial detention based on falsified evidence. He also argues that the claim is timely. Under Manuel I and II , he is correct on both points.

The Fourth Amendment protects "[t]he right of the people to be secure in their persons ... against unreasonable ... seizures." U.S. CONST. amend. IV. A person is "seized" whenever an official "restrains his freedom of movement" such that he is "not free to leave." Brendlin v. California , 551 U.S. 249, 254–55, 127 S.Ct. 2400, 168 L.Ed.2d 132 (2007). "[T]he general rule [is] that Fourth Amendment seizures are ‘reasonable’ only if based on probable cause to believe that the individual has committed a crime." Bailey v. United States , 568 U.S. 186, 192, 133 S.Ct. 1031, 185 L.Ed.2d 19 (2013) (internal quotation marks omitted).

Lewis alleges that he was detained—that is to say, "seized"—in the Cook County Jail for two years based on falsified police reports and that this injury is actionable under § 1983 as a violation of his Fourth Amendment right to be free from unreasonable seizure. Our circuit caselaw once foreclosed this theory. See, e.g. , Newsome v. McCabe , 256 F.3d 747, 750 (7th Cir. 2001). Prior to Manuel I , our cases held that "once detention by reason of arrest turns into detention by way of arraignment—once police action gives way to legal process—the Fourth Amendment falls out of the picture and the detainee’s claim that the detention is improper becomes a claim of malicious prosecution violative of due process." Llovet v. City of Chicago , 761 F.3d 759, 763 (7th Cir. 2014).

The Supreme Court superseded this circuit precedent in Manuel I . Elijah Manuel was arrested for possession of unlawful drugs. After a probable-cause hearing based on evidence allegedly fabricated by the police, a local judge found probable cause and sent Manuel to the county jail to await trial. There he sat for 48 days until the prosecutor dismissed the charge. Manuel I , 137 S.Ct. at 915–16. He sought damages under § 1983 alleging that his pretrial detention violated the Fourth Amendment. The district court dismissed the claim based on binding circuit precedent and we affirmed. Id. at 916. The Supreme Court reversed, holding that Manuel stated a Fourth Amendment claim when he sought relief "not merely for his (pre-legal-process) arrest, but also for his (post-legal process) pretrial detention." Id. at 919.

The Court jettisoned the malicious-prosecution analogy and the due-process source of the right, instead grounding the claim in long-established Fourth Amendment doctrine:

The Fourth Amendment prohibits government officials from detaining a person in the absence of probable cause. That can happen when the police hold someone without any reason before the formal onset of a criminal proceeding. But it can also occur when legal process itself goes wrong—when, for example, a judge’s probable-cause determination is predicated solely on a police officer’s false statements. Then, too, a person is confined without constitutionally adequate justification. Legal process has gone forward, but it has done nothing to satisfy the Fourth Amendment’s probable-cause requirement. And for that reason, it cannot extinguish the detainee’s Fourth Amendment claim—or somehow, as the Seventh Circuit has held, convert that claim into one founded on the Due Process Clause.

Id. at 918–19 (citations omitted).

Manuel I thus clarified that the constitutional injury arising from a wrongful pretrial detention rests on the fundamental Fourth Amendment principle that a pretrial detention is a "seizure"—both before formal legal process and after —and is justified only on probable cause. Id. at 918. Manuel alleged that his detention was not supported by probable cause because the judge’s order holding him for trial was based only on "police fabrications." Id. at 919. If that proved to be true, his detention was unreasonable in violation of the Fourth Amendment. Id.

Put another way, the initiation of formal legal process "did not expunge Manuel’s Fourth Amendment claim because the process he received failed to establish what that Amendment makes essential for pretrial detention—probable cause to believe he committed a crime." Id. at 919–20. As we explained in our decision on remand in Manuel II , a Fourth Amendment claim for wrongful pretrial detention is concerned with "the detention rather than the existence of criminal charges." 903 F.3d at 670.

Lewis’s allegations are materially indistinguishable from Manuel’s. He has therefore pleaded a plausible Fourth Amendment claim. The officers respond with an assertion of qualified immunity. "Qualified immunity attaches when an official’s conduct does not violate clearly established statutory or constitutional rights of which a reasonable person would have known." Kisela v. Hughes , ––– U.S. ––––, 138...