Rivera v. Lake Cnty.
| Decision Date | 26 September 2013 |
| Docket Number | Case No. 12 C 8665. |
| Citation | 974 F.Supp.2d 1179 |
| Parties | Juan RIVERA, Plaintiff, v. LAKE COUNTY, et al., Defendants. |
| Court | U.S. District Court — Northern District of Illinois |
OPINION TEXT STARTS HERE
Jonathan I. Loevy, Arthur R. Loevy, Elizabeth N. Mazur, Michael I. Kanovitz, Russell R. Ainsworth, Scott R. Rauscher, Steven Edwards Art, Loevy & Loevy, Locke E. Bowman, III, Sheila A. Bedi, David M. Shapiro, J. Samuel Tenenbaum, Bluhm Legal Clinic, Chicago, IL, for Plaintiff.
James Gus Sotos, Elizabeth A. Ekl, Jeffrey Neil Given, The Sotos Law Firm, P.C., Itasca, IL, Ellen Kornichuk Emery, Lucy B. Bednarek, Thomas George Dicianni, Ancel, Glink, Diamond, Bush, Dicianni & Krafthefer, P.C., Laura Lee Scarry, Collin David Woodward, Debra Ann Harvey, Howard P. Levine, James L. Deano, Deano & Scarry LLC, Marni M. Malowitz, Laura Marie Rawski, Michael D. Arnold, Illinois Attorney General's Office, Paul Alan Rettberg, Brandon K. Lemley, Jason S. Callicoat, Querrey & Harrow, Ltd., Kevin J. Clancy, Lowis & Gellen, Charles Frank Marino, David M. Marino, Attorney at Law, Alfred Kirkland Murray, II, Robert E. Haley, Swanson, Martin & Bell, LLP Chicago, IL, for Defendants.
Pending before the Court are a Motion for Judicial Notice and nine different Motions to Dismiss. For the reasons stated herein, the Motion for Judicial Notice is granted, and the Motions to Dismiss are granted with respect to Count III and denied with respect to all other Counts and all Defendants.
This case arises out of the tragic wrongful conviction and twenty-year incarceration of Plaintiff Juan Rivera (hereinafter, “Plaintiff” or “Rivera”). The facts that follow are drawn from the allegations in the Complaint.
In August 1992, eleven-year-old Holly Staker was raped and murdered. It was a high-profile crime that drew significant media attention in the Chicago area. The crime remains unsolved.
At the time, nineteen-year-old Plaintiff was living with his family in Staker's neighborhood. Plaintiff had recently committed a nonviolent theft offense, and he was under house arrest as a condition of his release. As such, he wore an electronic transmitter around his ankle. The device tracked his every move, and alarms went off whenever Plaintiff left his family's home.
The transmitter's records from the night of the murder showed that Plaintiff was at home the entire night. In addition, telephone records reflect that Plaintiff had a phone conversation with his mother, who was out of the country, that evening. This reliable electronic evidence showed that, on the night of the murder, Plaintiff was at home and could not have committed the crime.
Authorities were unable to solve the case, and the killer's trail went cold. Two months after the murder, police visited Plaintiff at Hill Correctional Center, where he was detained following his plea in the theft case. They asked him what he knew about the murder. Plaintiff provided information that he thought might help solve the crime and samples of his own blood and hair so that he could be eliminated as a suspect.
Three weeks later, police had Plaintiff transferred to Lake County Jail and began interrogating him about the Staker case. Plaintiff alleges that during the interrogation, police observed Plaintiff's difficulty with written and spoken English—his familyhad moved from Puerto Rico a few years earlier. In addition, Plaintiff reported to them at the time that he had pronounced psychological and emotional issues, including previous suicide attempts. Plaintiff apparently told the police that he had received psychiatric care and medications to manage those problems.
Though aware of Plaintiff's vulnerabilities, police—acting at the urging of prosecutors who were eager to be seen as taking action on the yet unsolved crime—conducted a four-day interrogation that culminated in more than 24 hours of near constant questioning. To exhaust and disorient Plaintiff, they deprived him of sleep, moved him from one location to another, used different interrogators, and subjected him to multiple polygraph tests. To upset Plaintiff, they screamed at him at the top of their lungs and accused him of committing the rape and murder. To confuse him, they told him that he had failed the polygraph tests, even though the test results showed that his denials were entirely truthful. At one point, they allegedly tied Plaintiff's limbs together in a “hog tie,” which rendered Plaintiff immobile and helpless.
Plaintiff alleges further that the police failed to give him any effective Miranda warnings. Despite the lack of warnings, Plaintiff invoked his right to remain silent and his right to counsel repeatedly. Plaintiff maintained his innocence and provided corroborating evidence. He requested that the police stop their abusive questioning.
But the interrogators persisted, and, after four days, Plaintiff suffered a complete mental breakdown. When police forced him to sign a statement they had written that implicated him in the murder, he submitted.
Plaintiff complains that other officials noticed this misconduct and either acquiesced or participated. Jail personnel observed Plaintiff in a catatonic state and did nothing to stop the interrogation. Prosecutors ignored Plaintiff's verifiable alibi and numerous indications that Plaintiff's statement was coerced. They disregarded the fact that none of the hundreds of pieces of physical evidence from the scene connected Plaintiff to the crime. For example, DNA evidence recovered from the victim's body did not match Plaintiff's DNA. They knew they had no evidence connecting Plaintiff to the rape and murder, yet they proceeded to prosecute him.
To make matters worse, police and prosecutors recruited a supporting cast of witnesses and used improper promises to induce them to implicate Plaintiff. Police manufactured a series of false and fraudulent police reports that ended up in the case file. It goes without saying that this conduct was concealed from Plaintiff.
In 1993, a jury convicted Plaintiff of rape and first-degree murder. The jury could not agree unanimously on the death penalty, so the trial judge sentenced Plaintiff to life in prison without the possibility of parole. Plaintiff might otherwise have been put to death. Instead, he spent nearly two decades behind bars.
In December 2011, the Illinois Appellate Court vacated Plaintiff's conviction. In that Court's view, no rational jury could have convicted Plaintiff of the crime. Plaintiff walked free only after prosecutors declined to appeal that decision.
Plaintiff's Complaint alleges six counts of constitutional violations brought under 42 U.S.C. § 1983 and six counts of state law violations. Because of the widespread misconduct that caused Plaintiff's extensive injuries, Plaintiff sues more than twenty-five named persons and entities, as well as unknown Defendants. While this Court need not recite every Defendant here, it will note those Defendants that are often referred to collectively. Defendants Lucian Tessman, Donald Meadie, Fernando Shipley, Howard Pratt, and Richard Davis (the “Waukegan Defendants”) are former officers of the Waukegan Police Department and the Lake County Major Crimes Task Force. Defendants Michael Waller, Jeffrey Pavletic, Matthew Chancey, Steven McCollum, and Michael Mermel (the “Prosecutor Defendants”) are or were State's Attorneys. Defendants Mark Curran, Charles Fagan, Estate of Clinton Grinnell (as successor in interest to Clinton Grinnell), and Michael Blazincic (the “Sheriff's Defendants”) are current and former officers of the Lake County Sheriff's Department and the Lake County Major Crimes task force.
A Complaint must provide a short and plain statement of the claim showing the plaintiff is entitled to relief. Fed. R. Civ. P. 8(a)(2). A Rule 12(b)(6) motion to dismiss challenges the legal sufficiency of a complaint. Hallinan v. Fraternal Order of Police of Chicago Lodge No. 7, 570 F.3d 811, 820 (7th Cir.2009). To survive a motion to dismiss, a complaint must contain sufficient factual allegations, which when accepted as true, state a claim that is plausible on its face. Ashcroft v. Iqbal, 556 U.S. 662, 678, 129 S.Ct. 1937, 173 L.Ed.2d 868 (2009) (citations omitted). When ruling on a motion to dismiss, the Court construes a complaint in the light most favorable to the plaintiff and accepts all well-pled facts as true. Justice v. Town of Cicero, 577 F.3d 768, 771 (7th Cir.2009).
Before turning to the Motions to Dismiss, the Court will address the Motion for Judicial Notice. Defendants have requested this Court to take judicial notice of the document located on the New York Times' website at http:// www. nytimes. com/ 2011/ 11/ 27/ magazine/ dna- evidence- lake- county. html? pagewanted= all&_ r= 0. Courts can take judicial notice of facts not subject to reasonable dispute that “can be accurately and readily determined from sources who accuracy cannot reasonably be questioned.” Fed. R. Civ. P. 201(b)(2). Plaintiff does not oppose this Motion, and thus the Court takes judicial notice of the document located at that web address.
Defendants move to dismiss Counts I, II, V, and VI—the coerced confession claims under § 1983—on the ground that those Counts are time-barred. Section 1983 does not have an express statute of limitations, so federal courts hearing claims under § 1983 adopt the forum state's statute of limitations for personal injury claims. Ashafa v. City of Chicago, 146 F.3d 459, 461 (7th Cir.1998). In Illinois, the statute of limitations for § 1983 claims is two years. Dominguez v. Hendley, 545 F.3d 585, 588 (7th Cir.2008). However, federal law determines when those claims accrue. Savory v. Lyons, 469 F.3d 667, 672 (7th Cir.2006). Generally, claims accrue—and the clock on the statute of limitations begins to run—“when the...
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