Shorters v. City of Chicago

• Decision Date: 06 September 1985
• Docket Number: No. 85 C 6078.,85 C 6078.
• Citation: 617 F. Supp. 661
• Parties: Vickie SHORTERS, et al., Plaintiffs, v. CITY OF CHICAGO, et al., Defendants.
• Court: U.S. District Court — Northern District of Illinois

617 F. Supp. 661

Vickie SHORTERS, et al., Plaintiffs, v. CITY OF CHICAGO, et al., Defendants.

No. 85 C 6078.

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

September 6, 1985.

Kenneth N. Flaxman, Chicago, Ill., for plaintiffs.

Robert W. Fioretti, Senior Atty. Supervisor, Ira M. Kleinmuntz, Ass't Corp. Counsel, Chicago, Ill., for defendants.

MEMORANDUM OPINION AND ORDER

SHADUR, District Judge.

On July 2, 1985 Vickie Shorters ("Shorters") and Delores Clark ("Clark") sued the City of Chicago ("City") and Chicago police officer George Weir ("Weir") under 42 U.S.C. § 1983 ("Section 1983"), seeking damages for an alleged violation of plaintiffs' civil rights in August 1982. Defendants then moved under Fed.R.Civ.P. ("Rule") 12(b)(6) to dismiss plaintiffs' Complaint, in part on the grounds it is barred by the applicable statute of limitations.¹ For the reasons stated in this memorandum opinion and order, the Complaint survives that motion.

Facts²

In the early morning hours of August 5, 1982 plaintiffs, who were riding in an automobile owned by Clark, stopped to purchase hamburgers at a White Castle restaurant at 111th and State Streets in Chicago. Shorters entered the restaurant while Clark remained in the car. While waiting for Shorters to return, Clark was approached by a restaurant security guard who told her she was parked in a restricted area and would have to move her car. After some discussion Clark agreed to do so.

As Clark was moving the car Weir arrived on the scene, ordered Clark to stop the car and asked to see her license. When Clark produced her license, Weir reached inside the car, took the license from her and also removed the keys from the ignition switch. Weir then opened the car door, removed Clark from the car and placed her in his squad car, in the meantime subjecting her to verbal abuse. Shortly thereafter Shorters emerged from the restaurant and approached Weir to ask about what had happened. Weir responded "Do you want to go to jail too?," twisted Shorters's arm behind her back and placed her under arrest. Clark was later charged with battery, while both Shorters and Clark were charged with disorderly conduct. After plaintiffs had appeared several times in the Circuit Court of Cook County all charges against them were dropped.

Statute of Limitations

Defendants' motion to dismiss invokes the Supreme Court's definitive ruling in Wilson v. Garcia, ___ U.S. ___, 105 S.Ct. 1938, 85 L.Ed.2d 254 (1985). Wilson, 105 S.Ct. at 1949 characterizes Section 1983 claims collectively as "general personal injury actions, sounding in tort,"³ and id. at 1947 mandates the selection, "in each State, of the one most appropriate statute of limitations for all § 1983 claims." That statute in Illinois, defendants argue, is Ill. Rev.Stat. ch. 110, ¶ 13-202 ("Section 13-202"⁴):

Actions for damages for an injury to the person, or for false imprisonment, or malicious prosecution, or for a statutory penalty, or for abduction, or for seduction, or for criminal conversation ... shall be commenced within two years next after the cause of action accrued....

Because the events giving rise to plaintiffs' claim occurred in August 1982, defendants claim the July 1985 Complaint was filed out of time.

Plaintiffs counter with two arguments:

1. Under the reasoning of Wilson, the Illinois statute of limitations most appropriate for Section 1983 claims is not Section 13-202 but rather Ill.Rev.Stat. ch. 110, ¶ 13-205 ("Section 13-205"), which prescribes a five-year limitations period for "all civil actions not otherwise provided for."

2. Even if Wilson were instead to cause Section 13-202 to supply the applicable limitations period, plaintiffs should be afforded a reasonable time after Wilson to file actions (a) that would have been timely under what had been thought a five-year limitations period (adopted by our Court of Appeals in Beard v. Robinson, 563 F.2d 331 (7th Cir.1977), cert. denied, 438 U.S. 907, 98 S.Ct. 3125, 57 L.Ed.2d 1149 (1978)) but (b) that would become untimely under a post-Wilson two-year period.

This opinion considers those arguments in turn.

1. Applicable Illinois Limitations Period

Wilson teaches a twofold inquiry:

1. a single characterization of all Section 1983 claims—for which purpose a federal standard applies; and

2. selection of a single state limitations statute—for which purpose state law necessarily gives content to the state's own statutes.

Because of the double aspect of that inquiry, and because of the two quite different sources that must be drawn upon, special care must be taken to avoid the trap of assuming the same or similar words necessarily have the same meaning in the two contexts—they may, of course, but they need not.

This opinion turns then to the first question: the precise meaning of the Wilson characterization. Wilson, 105 S.Ct. at 1948 speaks of Section 1983 "as conferring a general remedy for injuries to personal rights." On the following page it refers to "all § 1983 actions as involving claims for personal injuries," to "general personal injury actions, sounding in tort" and to "§ 1983 claims as best characterized as personal injury actions." Certainly Justice Stevens (speaking for the Court, over a single dissent) was not shifting the intended meaning of his language in such a brief compass. Slight variations in locution do not import any change in substance.

Because this Court is already aware of what the second-step (state-law) inquiry later in this opinion will bring, it notes Wilson gave several strong clues as to what the shorthand terms "injuries to personal rights" and "personal injuries" embrace. Wilson, id. at 1948 said:

As we have noted, however, the § 1983 remedy encompasses a broad range of potential tort analogies, from injuries to property to infringements of individual liberty.

It went on (id.) (emphasis in original):

The Constitution's command is that all "persons" shall be accorded the full privileges of citizenship; no person shall be deprived of life, liberty, or property without due process of law or be denied the equal protection of the laws. A violation of that command is an injury to the individual rights of the person.

And it quoted with favor (id.) from Almond v. Kent, 459 F.2d 200, 204 (4th Cir. 1972):

In essence, § 1983 creates a cause of action where there has been injury, under color of state law, to the person or to the constitutional or federal statutory rights which emanate from or are guaranteed to the person. In the broad sense, every cause of action under § 1983 which is well-founded results from "personal injuries."

Finally it said (id. at 1948-49) (footnotes omitted):

The rights enforceable under § 1983 include those guaranteed by the Federal Government in the Fourteenth Amendment: that every person within the United States is entitled to equal protection of the laws and to those "fundamental principles of liberty and justice" that are contained in the Bill of Rights and "lie at the base of all our civil and political institutions." These guarantees of liberty are among the rights possessed by every individual in a civilized society, and not privileges extended to the people by the legislature.

What all this means, of course, is that the scope of Section 1983 is not at all limited to the whippings, lynchings and worse (see id. at 1947) that were the "specific historical catalyst" for its 1871 enactment. Such direct physical injury does not mark the outer boundaries of Section 1983 claims. Wilson plainly teaches its references to "personal injury" and "injuries to personal rights" encompass not only such injuries (of which the sheriff's racially-motivated fatal beating of a prisoner in the seminal case of Screws v. United States, 325 U.S. 91, 65 S.Ct. 1031, 89 L.Ed. 1495 (1945) is the archetype) but also the far wider range of harms that this and all other federal courts regularly treat with in Section 1983 litigation.

That leads then to the second level of inquiry: What Illinois limitations statute provides the best fit to the total set of federal harms encompassed in Section 1983? And once again, the search is not simply for the Illinois statute that sounds most like the shorthand phrases Wilson used to describe the broad range of federal torts, for the test must be a commonality of substantive content and not mere similarity of language.

There is reason to emphasize that difference in the nature of the quest. In purely superficial terms Section 13-202, with its reference to "injury to the person," has a deceptive similarity to Wilson's "personal injury" (or perhaps even Wilson's "injuries to personal rights"). But it is crystal clear Illinois courts (which are of course the masters of the meaning of state statutes) have never given the phrase "injury to the person" a comparably broad scope.⁵

Almost exactly a century ago Bassett v. Bassett, 20 Ill.App. 543, 547-48 (4th Dist. 1886) dealt with a wife's damages claim against her husband's father for having enticed her husband to separate himself from her. Bassett defined the limited reach of the direct precursor to Section 13-202:

It is next objected that the court erred in sustaining the demurrer to the Statute of Limitations of two years. The section of the statute upon which the plea is based provides that "Actions for damages for an injury to the person, or for false imprisonment, malicious prosecution, or for a statutory penalty, or for abduction, or for seduction, or for criminal conversation, shall be commenced within two years." Applying the familiar principle that the statute does not bar a cause of action unless it comes clearly within its provisions, we are of the opinion that the section relied upon is not broad enough to include the present case. The cause of action for an injury to the person which is barred in two years is limited to a direct physical injury to the person. If it were intended to include all injuries to personal and relative rights,

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