Spencer v. Pistorius, 14-1704
| Decision Date | 25 March 2015 |
| Docket Number | No. 14-1704,14-1704 |
| Parties | MICHAEL A. SPENCER, Plaintiff-Appellant, v. JOE PISTORIUS, et al., Defendants-Appellees. |
| Court | U.S. Court of Appeals — Seventh Circuit |
NONPRECEDENTIAL DISPOSITION
To be cited only in accordance with Fed. R. App. P. 32.1
Before DIANE P. WOOD, Chief Judge ILANA DIAMOND ROVNER, Circuit Judge JOHN DANIEL TINDER, Circuit Judge
Appeal from the United States District Court for the Northern District of Illinois, Eastern Division.
ORDER
Michael Spencer was driving near his home in Palatine, Illinois, when two police officers from the adjacent City of Rolling Meadows stopped and arrested him without a warrant for promoting prostitution, or "pandering." See 720 ILCS 5/11-16 (current version at 720 ILCS 5/11-14.3 (2015)). State prosecutors never pursued the pandering charge, but Spencer was convicted in state court of possessing cocaine with intent to deliver, see 720 ILCS 570/401, based on drugs and other evidence found in his car by the arresting officers. Spencer spent more than five years in prison on that conviction before the state appellate court overturned it on the ground that his car was searched in violation of the Fourth Amendment and thus the cocaine should have been suppressed.The drug prosecution was dismissed, and no other charges were brought against Spencer.
In this action under 42 U.S.C. § 1983, Spencer has named as defendants the City of Rolling Meadows and the two City police officers, Detective Joe Pistorius and Investigator Mark Hinds, who arrested him and searched his car. Spencer claims that the individual defendants arrested him without probable cause and searched his car unlawfully (and, he adds, the City is required by 745 ILCS 10/9-102 to satisfy any judgment entered against its officers). He also claims, see Monell v. Department of Social Services of the City of New York, 436 U.S. 658 (1978), that the City itself violated the Fourth Amendment because, he maintains, the individual defendants acted under authority of a City policy which effectively gave its police officers unchecked discretion to impound and search a vehicle any time the driver was arrested. The district court granted summary judgment to the defendants, and Spencer appeals. We conclude, based on the undisputed evidence submitted at summary judgment, that Pistorius and Hinds had probable cause to arrest Spencer and, incident to the arrest, lawfully searched the passenger compartment of his car. We further conclude, however, that the undisputed facts presented at the summary judgment stage failed to establish that the two officers had (or reasonably objectively could have believed that they had) probable cause to search the trunk of Spencer's car. As for the City of Rolling Meadows, it must remain in the case as an indemnitor, but summary judgment in its favor on the Monell claim was correct because Spencer submitted too little evidence for a jury to find that the officers were relying on a City policy when they searched his car.
Spencer came to the attention of Rolling Meadows police in late 2005 after a police department employee had sought help in finding her 17-year-old daughter, A.K., who had run away from her Rolling Meadows home. The police did not have reason to believe that the young woman was in danger; she had telephoned her mother the day after she disappeared to say that she was not coming home, and she had called again the following week to report that she was "all right." Defendant Pistorius and other officers began contacting A.K.'s acquaintances. Her mother also reviewed the call log of A.K.'s cellphone to identify recently dialed numbers. One of those numbers, the officers learned, belonged to Spencer. When the officers contacted him, Spencer acknowledged knowing A.K. but not where to find her.
One of A.K.'s acquaintances was Lisa Candir, who told Defendant Pistorius that she had not seen A.K. for three months but had heard that the runaway was "picking up strange guys" at local shopping malls. Pistorius and another officer then interviewed Hanna Leonard at Spencer's house in the Village of Palatine, where she was living. Spencer was home at the time, and both he and Leonard insisted that they did not know A.K.'s whereabouts and invited the officers to search the home. In the basement Pistorius saw photography equipment, lingerie, and feather fans. Meanwhile, around this same time A.K. called home again to wish her sister a happy birthday.
About eleven weeks into their investigation, the police learned that Spencer's cellphone number also was the contact number on an erotic website. The website displayed provocative photographs of women, including A.K. and Candir, who was not a minor. Viewers of the website were invited to call Spencer's cellphone and arrange to hire women as escorts or to provide services including nude modeling, massage, and stripping. The website did not advertise sexual services or prostitution.
After viewing the website, two Rolling Meadows officers went to Candir's home. She was not present, but the officers spoke with her mother, who reported finding a hotel key and "sexy" clothing in Candir's bedroom. Candir learned from her mother about the officers' visit, and that same evening, January 4, 2006, she went to the police station and was interviewed. Candir asserted that Spencer's website really was a "call girl site" even though it did not advertise paid sexual services. Spencer managed the women, she explained, and received a portion of their fees. Sometimes, Candir added, Spencer supplied the women with drugs and deducted the cost from their cut of the fees. He had recruited her, she continued, to work as a nude model and "call girl." He booked hotel rooms where she and the other women met with clients. Candir confided that she was angry with Spencer because she had gotten caught up in the officers' search for A.K.
One of the officers stepped out of the interview to tell Defendant Pistorius about Candir's admission to working for Spencer as a "call girl." Pistorius and Defendant Hinds then drove to Spencer's neighborhood in Palatine and parked their unmarked car within view of his house. Forty-five minutes passed without incident. When Spencer backed his car from the garage and departed, the two Rolling Meadows officers followed for a short distance before signaling him to stop with their car's emergency lights. By then it was almost 9:00 p.m. Spencer turned into the parking lot of a public high school, parked the sedan in a marked space, shut off the engine, andlocked the car after exiting. Pistorius and Hinds identified themselves and asked if Spencer knew where to find A.K. He said no.
Defendant Pistorius arrested Spencer for pandering, which Illinois defined to include accepting compensation for arranging a prostitute's services. See 720 ILCS 5/11-16 (current version at 720 ILCS 5/11-14.3 (2015)). A frisk of Spencer netted $8,000 in currency from his pants pockets. After three other Rolling Meadows officers had arrived at the school and taken Spencer to the police station, Defendant Pistorius used Spencer's keys to unlock his car. Hinds searched the passenger compartment while Pistorius searched the trunk. Hinds found three cellphones and a laptop. In the trunk Pistorius found a metal box, about 12 inches square, which he unlocked using a key on Spencer's key ring. The box held several bundles of $100 bills and small plastic baggies of cocaine. Spencer's car was towed from Palatine to a commercial auto-repair shop. Two days later A.K. returned home.
State prosecutors declined to pursue the pandering case and instead accused Spencer of possessing the cocaine in the metal box with intent to deliver. See 720 ILCS 570/401. He moved to suppress the drugs and related evidence, but the trial judge denied that motion on the ground that Defendants Pistorius and Hinds had conducted a valid inventory search of Spencer's car. See People v. Spencer, 948 N.E.2d 196, 198-200 (Ill. Ct. App. 2011). Five years later, in March 2011, the Illinois appellate court overturned that ruling and reversed his conviction on the ground that the State had not met its burden of proving that Spencer's car was lawfully impounded and searched. Id. at 205. The City's impoundment policy authorized Rolling Meadows police, after arresting the driver of a car at a location other than a public roadway, to leave the car at the scene if the arrest occurred in (1) "the private driveway or residential parking lot of the arrestee," or (2) a parking lot "open to the public" if both the car's owner and a police supervisor consent to leaving it there. Id. at 203. The State argued that the school parking lot was "private" because, the State maintained, only vehicles with permits could park there, and so Spencer's car had to be towed. Id. at 203-04. But Pistorius admitted at the suppression hearing that he could not recall seeing any sign limiting the lot to school use only or warning that unauthorized vehicles would be towed. Id. at 204. Nor did the State offer any other evidence that the public could not park in the school lot when the school was closed. Given this absence of evidence to support the State's claim that the school lot was "private," the appellate court concluded that the State had not established that the inventory-search exception applied. Id. at 205.
The appellate court concluded that Spencer could not be retried without the cocaine and thus reversed his conviction outright. Spencer, 948 N.E.2d at 206. By this time Spencer's federal lawsuit had been pending for three years. He had filed it without counsel in January 2008, several weeks before he was sentenced in the state trial court and just before expiration of the two-year statute of limitations that governs § 1983 suits arising in Illinois. See Wallace v. Kato, 549 U.S. 384, 387-88 (2007). But the district court had stayed the suit, with Spencer's acquiescence,...
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