Weston v. City of Chi.
| Decision Date | 27 May 2021 |
| Docket Number | Case No. 20 C 6189 |
| Parties | DEMOND WESTON, Plaintiff, v. CITY OF CHICAGO, ESTATE OF MICHAEL KILL, ANTHONY MASLANKA, WILLIAM MOSER, JOHN PALADINO, DAN MCWEENY, ANDREW CHRISTOPHERSON, JEROME RUSNAK, VICTOR BRESKA, and UNKNOWN EMPLOYEES OF THE CITY OF CHICAGO, Defendants. |
| Court | U.S. District Court — Northern District of Illinois |
MEMORANDUM OPINION AND ORDER
In this civil rights action brought pursuant to 42 U.S.C. § 1983, plaintiff, Demond Weston, accuses numerous Chicago police officers of violating his constitutional rights by fabricating evidence against him and coercing him to confess to a murder he did not commit. Defendants move to dismiss certain of plaintiff's claims and to strike certain allegations in his complaint. For the following reasons, the motions are denied.
The following is a summary of the allegations of plaintiff's complaint, which the Court must assume true at the pleading stage. On May 29, 1990, around 10 p.m., there were three shootings in or near Chicago's West Englewood neighborhood. On June 8, 1990, there was another shooting in which a man named Curtis Sims was killed. The following day, plaintiff, then seventeen years old, was walking to a store in his neighborhood when he was arrested by defendants Kill, Breska, and Rusnack. Defendants took him to the Area 3 Detective Headquarters, without explaining to plaintiff why he had been arrested or giving him a Miranda warning. Once there, plaintiff was locked in an interrogation room and handcuffed to a chair, without being Mirandized or allowed to call his mother.
For hours, defendants interrogated plaintiff about the Sims murder, and he told them, truthfully, that he knew nothing about it and was not involved in any way. The officers surrounded plaintiff and physically abused him in an effort to coerce him to confess. After several hours, defendants also accused plaintiff of committing the unsolved May 29 shootings. Scared, injured, and exhausted, plaintiff finally agreed to give a statement to an Assistant State's Attorney falsely implicating himself in the May 29 shootings. Defendants told plaintiff exactly what to say, and he gave a statement in which he said that he participated in planning and executing an attack by members of the Gangster Disciples on members of a rival gang, the Vice Lords. The statement was fabricated by and fed to plaintiff by Moser and other defendant officers. Each of the defendant officers was present at some point during his interrogation and participated in the coercion that forced plaintiff to make a false statement. Plaintiff was charged with murder and attempted murder in connection with two of the May 29 shootings.
Meanwhile, defendants were also interrogating another man, Dwayne Macklin, having been informed that he had been involved in the Sims shooting. They physically and psychologically abused Macklin to coerce him to sign a statement falsely implicating plaintiff in one of the May 29 shootings, which took place at 57th Street and Wolcott Avenue. The statement contained the same fabricated account of a planned attack by Gangster Disciples on the Vice Lords that had been fed to plaintiff. Macklin had not been able to tell the officers anything aboutplaintiff's involvement until they provided the information that his statement ultimately contained. Similarly, the officers approached Deneen Coats, a surviving victim of another of the May 29 shootings, which took place at 5530 South Justine Street. Like Macklin, she did not identify plaintiff as the shooter until defendants instructed her to select plaintiff's photograph from a photo array.
Based solely on the fabricated and coerced evidence, plaintiff was wrongfully convicted of committing the 57th Street and Justine Street shootings and sentenced to 75 years' imprisonment. Plaintiff filed a direct appeal, multiple petitions for post-conviction relief, and a petition for a writ of habeas corpus. Over the years, some of the defendant officers became notorious for coercing false confessions from suspects under the direction of disgraced Chicago Police Commander Jon Burge. Plaintiff alleges that the abuse he suffered was part of a pattern and practice of similar abuse and misconduct by Chicago police officers, including the defendant officers, which resulted in dozens of wrongful convictions like plaintiff's. Plaintiff filed a petition for a new trial in 2014, and the motion was granted in 2016. Subsequently, Special Prosecutor Robert Milan moved to vacate plaintiff's conviction and dismiss the charges against him. On December 19, 2019, plaintiff was released, after nearly thirty years in prison. In October 2020, this lawsuit followed.
Plaintiff's complaint consists of the following eleven counts asserting claims pursuant to § 1983 and Illinois law: Count I, for coercing his false confession in violation of his Fifth Amendment self-incrimination rights; Count II, for coercing his false confession in violation of his due process rights; Count III, for violating his due process rights by fabricating and suppressing evidence; Count IV, for malicious prosecution and unlawful pretrial detention under the Fourth and Fourteenth Amendments; Count V, for failure to intervene in the above-listed constitutional violations; Count VI, for conspiracy to commit the above-listed constitutional violations; CountVII, for malicious prosecution in violation of Illinois law; Count VIII, for intentional infliction of emotional distress; Count IX, for civil conspiracy in violation of Illinois law; Count X, against the City of Chicago, for liability under the doctrine of respondeat superior; and Count XI, against the City of Chicago, for indemnification of the defendant officers under 745 ILCS 10/9-102. Plaintiff asserts the § 1983 claims in Counts I through VI against not only the defendant officers but also the City of Chicago, under the theory that the City's pattern of widespread practices caused the deprivation of constitutional rights that plaintiff suffered. See Monell v. Dep't of Soc. Servs. of City of New York, 436 U.S. 658, 691 (1978).
Defendants have filed a motion to dismiss pursuant to Federal Rule of Civil Procedure 12(b)(6) and a motion to strike pursuant to Rule 12(f).
"A motion under Federal Rule of Civil Procedure 12(b)(6) tests whether the complaint states a claim on which relief may be granted." Richards v. Mitcheff, 696 F.3d 635, 637 (7th Cir. 2012). Under Rule 8(a)(2), a complaint must include "a short and plain statement of the claim showing that the pleader is entitled to relief." Fed. R. Civ. P. 8(a)(2). The short and plain statement under Rule 8(a)(2) must "'give the defendant fair notice of what . . . the claim is and the grounds upon which it rests.'" Bell Atl. Corp. v. Twombly, 550 U.S. 544, 555 (2007) (quoting Conley v. Gibson, 355 U.S. 41, 47 (1957)).
Under federal notice-pleading standards, a plaintiff's "[f]actual allegations must be enough to raise a right to relief above the speculative level." Id. Stated differently, "a complaint must contain sufficient factual matter, accepted as true, to 'state a claim to relief that is plausible on its face.'" Ashcroft v. Iqbal, 556 U.S. 662, 678 (2009) (quoting Twombly, 550 U.S. at 570). "A claim has facial plausibility when the plaintiff pleads factual content that allows the court to draw thereasonable inference that the defendant is liable for the misconduct alleged." Id. (citing Twombly, 550 U.S. at 556). "In reviewing the sufficiency of a complaint under the plausibility standard, [courts must] accept the well-pleaded facts in the complaint as true, but [they] 'need[ ] not accept as true legal conclusions, or threadbare recitals of the elements of a cause of action, supported by mere conclusory statements.'" Alam v. Miller Brewing Co., 709 F.3d 662, 665-66 (7th Cir. 2013) (quoting Brooks v. Ross, 578 F.3d 574, 581 (7th Cir. 2009)).
"Section 1983 creates a 'species of tort liability,'" Manuel v. City of Joliet, Ill., 137 S. Ct. 911, 916 (2017) (quoting Imbler v. Pachtman, 424 U.S. 409, 417 (1976)), against any person who, under color of state law, "subjects, or causes to be subjected, any citizen of the United States . . . to the deprivation of any rights, privileges, or immunities secured by the Constitution," 42 U.S.C. § 1983.
Defendants move to dismiss the following claims under Rule 12(b)(6): the coerced-confession due process claim in Count II; the suppression of evidence and suggestive procedures claims in Count III; the pretrial detention claim in Count IV, to the extent it is premised on the Fourteenth Amendment, rather than the Fourth, or purports to assert a federal malicious prosecution claim; the conspiracy claim in Count VI; and any derivative claims, including the failure to intervene, conspiracy, or Monell claims, to the extent they are based on any primary claim that the Court dismisses.
Chavez v. Martinez, 538 U.S. 760, 774 (2003) (quoting Rochin v. California, 342U.S. 165, 172 (1952)). The Seventh Circuit has "acknowledged that a free-standing due process claim may succeed in a situation involving conscience-shocking interrogation tactics." Fox v. Hayes, 600 F.3d 819, 841 (7th Cir. 2010) (citing Wallace v. City of Chicago, 440 F.3d 421, 429 (7th Cir. 2006)).
Section 1983 claims borrow the statute of limitations for personal-injury torts in the state where the cause of action arose. Wallace v. Kato, 549 U.S. 384, 387 (2007). In Illinois, the relevant statute of limitations period is two years. See id.; Dickens v. Illinois, ...
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