Lyles v. Sparks
| Decision Date | 19 March 1996 |
| Docket Number | No. 93-1442,93-1442 |
| Citation | 79 F.3d 372 |
| Parties | Pamela LYLES; John Edmond, Plaintiffs-Appellees, v. Dewey SPARKS, Inspector, Individually and as Postal Inspector; M. Sherwin Green, Individually and as Postal Inspector; Thomas Krautheim, Individually and as Postal Inspector; Wendy Arnell, Individually and as U.S. Assistant Attorney for the District of Maryland, Defendants-Appellants, and United States Postal Service General Counsel; Roger Wolf, Individually and as Assistant Attorney General of the State of Maryland; Arnold Popkin; Richard Spitz, Jr.; United States of America, Defendants. |
| Court | U.S. Court of Appeals — Fourth Circuit |
Appeal from the United States District Court for the District of Maryland, at Baltimore; M.J. Garbis, District Judge, Nos. CA-90-1181, CA-92-2912.
ARGUED: David Ira Salem, Assistant United States Attorney, Greenbelt, Maryland, for Appellant. Pamela Lynne Lyles, Washington, D.C., for Appellees. ON BRIEF: Lynne A. Battaglia, United States Attorney, Greenbelt, Maryland, for Appellant.
Before WILKINS, NIEMEYER, and WILLIAMS, Circuit Judges.
Reversed and remanded by published opinion. Judge NIEMEYER wrote the opinion, in which Judge WILKINS and Judge WILLIAMS joined.
Following an investigation into a contact lens mail order business, the United States Postal Service obtained a criminal indictment charging John Edmond and his attorney, Pamela Lyles, with mail fraud. Edmond and Lyles were arrested, detained, and released on bond. After Edmond and Lyles filed a motion to dismiss their indictment for prosecutorial vindictiveness, the government dismissed the indictment. And this civil action followed.
In their civil complaint, Edmond and Lyles alleged that various postal inspectors and the Assistant United States Attorney assigned to the case violated their constitutional rights in securing their indictment and arresting them. Asserting official immunity from suit, those defendants filed a motion to dismiss or, alternatively, for summary judgment, but the district court denied their motion. Because we hold (1) that absolute prosecutorial immunity shields the Assistant United States Attorney from the constitutional tort claims against her; (2) that absolute witness immunity shields one of the postal inspectors from the Fourth Amendment claim that he committed perjury before the grand jury; and (3) that qualified immunity shields the postal inspectors from the remaining constitutional tort claims against them, we reverse.
John Edmond owned and operated Landover Contact Lens Center ("Landover Lens"), a contact lens mail order company located in Maryland. Pamela Lyles was Edmond's counsel and, although not an owner, was intimately involved in running Landover Lens. Prompted by numerous customer complaints, Postal Inspector M. Sherwin Green began an investigation of Landover Lens in early 1986. Green's investigation led to civil administrative action against Landover Lens and a 15-count criminal indictment charging Edmond and Lyles with mail fraud.
The criminal indictment charged that Edmond and Lyles had carried out a scheme to defraud contact lens suppliers by ordering lenses from them, paying them the minimum amount required to keep the account open, refusing to pay the remainder of the account or paying with checks not covered by sufficient funds, and, when further credit was refused, moving to another supplier. The indictment also alleged that in some instances Edmond and Lyles had used different business names to obtain lenses from suppliers who had already cut them off.
Green and his supervisor Thomas Krautheim, accompanied by other postal inspectors and local police officers, arrested Edmond and Lyles at their Maryland apartment during the pre-dawn hours of February 18, 1987. The officers took Edmond and Lyles to the Postal Inspection Division Headquarters in Washington, D.C., where they were questioned, booked, and fingerprinted. The officers then transported Edmond and Lyles to the federal courthouse in Baltimore, Maryland, where they were held for nine hours before receiving a bail hearing and being released on bond pending trial.
Edmond and Lyles filed a motion to dismiss their indictment for prosecutorial vindictiveness. After a hearing on the motion had been scheduled, the United States Attorney for the District of Maryland dismissed the indictment.
Thereafter, in February 1988, Edmond and Lyles filed a civil action in the United States District Court for the District of Columbia based on their allegedly wrongful prosecution and arrest against the United States Postal Service General Counsel; Postal Inspectors Green, Krautheim, and Dewey Sparks; Assistant United States Attorney Wendy Arnell; Assistant Attorney General for the State of Maryland Roger Wolf; and two complaining witnesses, Richard Spitz, Jr., a businessman who had leased facilities to Landover Lens, and Arnold Popkin, Spitz' attorney. As amended, the complaint alleged various constitutional torts under Bivens v. Six Unknown Named Agents of Federal Bureau of Narcotics, 403 U.S. 388, 91 S.Ct. 1999, 29 L.Ed.2d 619 (1971), as well as violations of 42 U.S.C. §§ 1983 and 1985, 15 U.S.C. § 1681 (Fair Credit Reporting Act), 12 U.S.C. § 3408 (Right to Financial Privacy Act), and Maryland law.
Specifically regarding the federal defendants, Edmond and Lyles claimed, inter alia, (1) that Arnell had threatened to indict Edmond if he filed a bankruptcy petition; (2) that Arnell had secured their indictment by suborning perjured testimony from Spitz; (3) that Arnell and Green had made false statements before the grand jury; (4) that Arnell and Green had conspired to make, and made, false representations about Edmond and Lyles in other judicial proceedings; (5) that Sparks had failed to take any action to stop Green's wrongful conduct; and (6) that Arnell had sent a defamatory letter to the D.C. Bar Counsel informing him of Lyles' indictment in Maryland and, thereafter, had failed to notify the Bar Counsel of the indictment's dismissal. Edmond and Lyles also claimed as abuses during their arrest and processing: (1) that the officers had removed Edmond from his apartment in his bedclothes; (2) that Green had attempted to prevent Edmond from wearing shoes as they left the apartment; (3) that Green and Krautheim had declined to produce an arrest warrant upon Lyles' inquiry; (4) that the arresting officers had verbally abused and humiliated them; and (5) that the officers had transported Edmond and Lyles to the Postal Inspection Division Headquarters in Washington, D.C., for questioning, fingerprinting, and booking and then to Baltimore, where they were held for nine hours before receiving a bail hearing. Finally, Edmond and Lyles claimed that Arnell and Green had falsely named Lyles as an owner of Landover Lens and sought her indictment and arrest to deny Edmond his counsel of choice.
The federal defendants filed a motion to dismiss the complaint, or, in the alternative, for summary judgment on several grounds. In November 1989, the D.C. district court dismissed the entire action "save plaintiff Edmond's claim against defendant Green in his individual capacity for alleged violations of the Fair Credit Reporting Act." Edmond v. United States Postal Serv., 727 F.Supp. 7, 12 (D.D.C.1989). 1
While their appeal of the D.C. district court's dismissal order was pending before the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia, Edmond and Lyles filed a separate action in the district court in Maryland against the United States, Green, Popkin, and Spitz. In their Maryland complaint--which contained claims under the Federal Tort Claims Act, 28 U.S.C. §§ 2671-2680, and state law--Edmond and Lyles alleged that Green, Popkin, and Spitz had conspired to bring criminal prosecutions against them by presenting false information to both the United States Attorney's office and the grand jury impanelled in Maryland.
Then, on November 22, 1991, the D.C. Circuit handed down its decision reversing in part the district court's ruling dismissing Edmond's and Lyles' D.C. action. Edmond v. United States Postal Serv. Gen. Counsel, 949 F.2d 415, 417 (D.C.Cir.1991). The court of appeals concluded that the D.C. district court had "totally ignored" two of Edmond's and Lyles' constitutional tort theories, "Perjurer's Liability"--which "asserts that someone who causes an indictment and consequent arrest by perjuring himself or arranging for the submission of perjured testimony before the grand jury violates the Fourth Amendment"--against Arnell and Green and"Detour-and-Delay"--which "rests on an assertion that the manner in which an arrest was accomplished was unlawful"--against Green and Krautheim. Id. at 419. 2 The D.C. Circuit also ruled that the lower court had given inadequate consideration to Edmond's Sixth Amendment Interference-with-Counsel claim against Arnell, Green, and Krautheim, which was based on the allegation that Lyles' wrongful arrest infringed upon Edmond's right to retain her as his counsel. Id. at 423-24. In remanding those three constitutional tort theories, the court noted that Edmond and Lyles had "conceded at oral argument that no other constitutional claims and no statutory or common law claims [had been] raised for review." Id. at 419. 3
Following remand, the D.C. district court granted the Postal Service's motion to transfer Edmond's and Lyles' case to the District of Maryland, where it was consolidated with their Maryland action. The federal defendants filed a motion for partial dismissal of the complaint or, alternatively, for partial summary judgment, contending that they enjoyed "absolute and/or qualified immunity" from the surviving Bivens-type claims that had been transferred from the District of Columbia. The district court denied the motion, and this interlocutory appeal followed.
Appellants first contend that the district court...
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