Snodderly v. R.U.F.F.

• Decision Date: 07 February 2001
• Docket Number: No. 99-3688,99-3688
• Parties: (7th Cir. 2001) Bill R. Snodderly, Kathy Snodderly, and Derick Snodderly, a minor, Plaintiffs-Appellants, v. R.U.F.F. Drug Enforcement Task Force, Board of Commissioners of Union County, IN, Board of Commissioners of Shelby County, IN, et al., Defendants-Appellees
• Court: U.S. Court of Appeals — Seventh Circuit

Page 892

239 F.3d 892 (7th Cir. 2001)

Bill R. Snodderly, Kathy Snodderly, and Derick Snodderly, a minor, Plaintiffs-Appellants, v. R.U.F.F. Drug Enforcement Task Force, Board of Commissioners of Union County, IN, Board of Commissioners of Shelby County, IN, et al., Defendants-Appellees.

No. 99-3688

In the United States Court of Appeals For the Seventh Circuit

Argued September 13, 2000

Decided February 7, 2001

Appeal from the United States District Court for the Southern District of Indiana. No. 98 C 195--John D. Tinder, Judge. [Copyrighted Material Omitted] Before Flaum, Chief Judge, and Bauer and Kanne, Circuit Judges.

Bauer, Circuit Judge.

Plaintiffs-Appellants Bill Snodderly et al. ("Snodderly") appeal from the dismissal of a host of federal and state claims which they brought against several police officers, an inter-district drug enforcement task force, and various Indiana municipalities for damages they claimed to have suffered when Bill Snodderly was arrested and prosecuted on baseless drug charges. The district court dismissed all of the federal claims save for the malicious prosecution claim against several prosecutor- defendants as barred by Indiana's two-year statute of limitations, which is applicable to all causes of action brought in Indiana under 42 U.S.C. sec. 1983. Finding that the prosecutor- defendants were absolutely immune from suit on the federal malicious prosecution claim, the court dismissed this claim as well, and declined to exercise pendent jurisdiction over any of the remaining state law claims. For the reasons set forth below, we affirm.

BACKGROUND

We take the following factual account from the plaintiffs' complaint as true, as we must on review of a motion to dismiss. Snodderly owns the C.C. Tavern in West College Corner, Indiana. On October 4, 1993, the R.U.F.F. Drug Enforcement Task Force sent Michael Zinman, an undercover informant, to West College Corner to attempt to buy illegal drugs from potential suspects. Later that day, Zinman informed R.U.F.F. Officer Patrick that he had made arrangements to purchase two ounces of marijuana from a man named "Bill," who had been identified to Zinman as a bartender at the C.C. Tavern. Officer Keith contacted Officer Marcum to determine the identity of "Bill the Bartender," and Marcum sent Keith a photograph of Snodderly. That evening, Officer Haehl of the R.U.F.F. Task Force accompanied Zinman (who was "wired" with audio recording equipment) to the C.C. Tavern and made the pre- arranged drug purchase as planned. Either before or during the purchase, Bill the Bartender told Zinman and/or Haehl where he lived and what type of vehicle he drove.¹ Zinman and Haehl subsequently returned to the C.C. Tavern several times in hopes of purchasing more drugs from Bill the Bartender. However, they never saw him at the tavern again.

The R.U.F.F. officers made Snodderly the focus of their investigation, operating on the assumption that he was "Bill the bartender." The officers did not follow up on leads that might have indicated that Snodderly was not Bill the Bartender (for example, they apparently did not compare Bill the Bartender's description of his residence and vehicle with Snodderly's residence and vehicle). Together with two Indiana state prosecutors,² Officer Haehl prepared an affidavit for an arrest warrant against Snodderly, which included "false" representations as to the existence of probable cause. Snodderly was arrested by R.U.F.F. Officer Keith on April 15, 1994³ in the presence of his wife, son, and many neighbors, and was detained for some unspecified time before posting bond and being released on the same day. Snodderly was charged with bulk sale of marijuana. The charge was dismissed by an Indiana state court on February 5, 1997.

On February 13, 1998, Snodderly filed a complaint in the United States District Court for the Southern District of Indiana against the R.U.F.F. Drug Enforcement Task Force, several municipalities in Indiana that organized the Task Force, various R.U.F.F. officers and state prosecutors who participated in his arrest and prosecution, and various John and Jane Does. The complaint, as subsequently amended, asserted a claim under sec. 1983 for damages resulting from Snodderly's arrest and prosecution, which occurred in violation of the Fourth, Eighth, and Fourteenth Amendments to the United States Constitution. Specifically, Snodderly claimed that the "[d]efendants deprived [him] of his rights to be secure in his person and property, freedom from unreasonable arrest, search and seizure, freedom from false arrest, unlawful arrest, freedom from arrest without probable cause, freedom from unreasonable bail bond, freedom from malicious prosecution, and due process of law." The gravamen of Snodderly's sec. 1983 claim is that the defendants caused him to be arrested without probable cause, and continued to prosecute him while knowing that he was not guilty of the crime charged. Snodderly also asserted a smorgasbord of pendent state law claims against various individual defendants, including a claim for false arrest against Officer Keith,⁴ a claim for unlawful arrest against defendants Keith, Haehl, and other officers, and a claim for malicious prosecution against Haehl and various prosecutor-defendants. In support of the latter claim, Snodderly claimed that on or about April 6, 1994 (nine days before Snodderly's arrest), Haehl and two prosecutors filed an affidavit with the clerk of Union Circuit Court in Indiana charging Snodderly with the Class D felony of dealing in marijuana, even though they had no probable cause to do so. Snodderly further stated that the trial court granted him a motion to suppress photo-lineup evidence when "it was found that the photographic line-up had been destroyed approximately two years earlier."

The district court dismissed all of Snodderly's claims. Noting that Indiana's two-year statute of limitations for personal injuries applies to sec. 1983 claims, and that Snodderly had filed his original complaint on February 13, 1998, the court ruled that any sec. 1983 claims that accrued more than two years prior to that date were time-barred. Applying this rule, the court held that all of Snodderly's sec. 1983 claims against the police officers were time-barred, because they were based on actions alleged to have taken place more than two years prior to the filing of Snodderly's complaint. The court then dismissed the only remaining federal claim-- namely, the claim that the prosecutor-defendants pressed forward with the prosecution of Snodderly despite their knowledge that they lacked evidence to establish his guilt on the charged offense--on the ground that prosecutors are absolutely immune from such charges. Having dismissed all of Snodderly's federal claims, the court declined to exercise supplemental jurisdiction over the state law claims, and dismissed those claims for lack of jurisdiction. Snodderly subsequently filed this appeal, challenging only the district court's dismissal of his sec. 1983 claims against the police officers.⁵

DISCUSSION

We review the district court's dismissal of a plaintiff's complaint de novo, and we will only affirm a dismissal "if it is clear that [the plaintiff] can prove no set of facts consistent with his complaint which would entitle him to relief." Sneed v. Rybicki, 146 F.3d 478, 480 (7th Cir. 1998) (citation omitted). We must accept all well-pleaded facts in the complaint as true, and draw all reasonable inferences in favor of the nonmoving party. See id. However, "we are not obliged to accept as true conclusory statements of law or unsupported conclusions of fact." Id.

Snodderly argues that the district court erred in dismissing his sec. 1983 false arrest claim as time-barred. While he agrees with the defendants that Indiana's two-year statute of limitations for personal injury actions applies to claims brought under sec. 1983, he takes issue with the district court's conclusion as to when the limitations period began to run on his claim. Specifically, Snodderly maintains that under Heck v. Humphrey, 512 U.S. 477 (1994), as interpreted by Edwards v. Balisok, 520 U.S. 641 (1997), his cause of action for false arrest did not accrue until the legal proceedings brought against him had terminated in his favor, and that therefore the applicable two-year limitations period did not begin to run until the drug-related charges for which he was arrested were dropped on February 5, 1997. Since he filed his false arrest claim within two years of that date, Snodderly contends that the claim was timely and should not have been dismissed.⁶ While we reject Snodderly's interpretation of Edwards and his argument regarding the application of Heck to claims for false arrest in general, we agree with his contention that his claims against the R.U.F.F. officers did not accrue until the charges against him were dismissed, and were therefore timely brought.

Heck involved a sec. 1983 damages claim asserted by a prison inmate against a police investigator and two prosecutors who had participated in the prosecution against him. (The inmate had been convicted and sentenced on a charge of voluntary manslaughter.) The inmate's claim stated that the prosecutors and the investigators, while acting under color of state law, had engaged in an unlawful and unreasonable investigation which led to his arrest, that they had knowingly destroyed exculpatory evidence, and that they had caused an illegal voice identification procedure to be used at his trial. The inmate sought punitive and compensatory damages, but did not seek release from custody. The Supreme Court framed the question before it as "whether money damages premised on an unlawful conviction could be pursued under sec. 1983." In answering that question in the negative, the Court held that "in order to recover damages for allegedly unconstitutional conviction or imprisonment, or for other harm caused by actions...