Williams v. City of New York, 14

• Citation: 508 F.2d 356
• Decision Date: 19 December 1974
• Docket Number: No. 14,D,14
• Parties: Samuel Tito WILLIAMS, Plaintiff-Appellee, v. The CITY OF NEW YORK, Defendant-Appellant. ocket 74-1261.
• Court: United States Courts of Appeals. United States Court of Appeals (2nd Circuit)

Page 356

508 F.2d 356

Samuel Tito WILLIAMS, Plaintiff-Appellee, v. The CITY OF NEW YORK, Defendant-Appellant.

No. 14, Docket 74-1261.

United States Court of Appeals, Second Circuit.

Argued Sept. 11, 1974.

Decided Nov. 1, 1974, Rehearing Denied Dec. 19, 1974.

Bernard Burstein, New York City (Adrian P. Burke, Corp. Counsel of The City of New York, L. Kevin Sheridan, New York City, of counsel), for defendant-appellant.

Harry R. Schwartz, New York City (Harry H. Lipsig and Joseph P. Napoli, New York City, of counsel), for plaintiff-appellee.

Before SMITH, TIMBERS and GURFEIN, ^* Circuit Judges.

J. JOSEPH SMITH, Circuit Judge:

The City of New York appeals from a judgment entered in the United States District Court for the Southern District of New York, Robert L. Carter, Judge, on a verdict assessing $40,000 in compensatory damages and $80,000 in punitive damages against the City for the malicious prosecution of the plaintiff Williams. The court denied, with opinion filed in the Southern District of New York on November 14, 1973, the City's motion to set aside the verdict. Jurisdiction was based on diversity of citizenship, 28 U.S.C. 1332. For reasons discussed below, we affirm the award of compensatory damages and set aside the punitive relief granted.

In 1947 the present plaintiff was arrested on murder charges near his home in New York City. ¹ That the City police acted on no more than mere suspicion seems indisputable. At his trial, Williams' guilt was proved to the jury's satisfaction virtually exclusively on the basis of his confession of guilt in the police station subsequent to his arrest. Although Williams introduced at his criminal trial substantial evidence that this confession was the product of coercion by the police, the jury found, as a necessary ingredient of its ultimate finding of guilt, that his confession was voluntary. He pursued his rights of appeal through the New York state courts, People v. Williams, 298 N.Y. 803, 83 N.E.2d 698 (1949), and petitioned for, and was granted certiorari by the Supreme Court (though only as to his sentence), Williams v. New York, 337 U.S. 241, 69 S.Ct. 1079, 93 L.Ed. 1337 (1949), but to no avail. After his death sentence-- one imposed by the court after a jury recommendation of life imprisonment-- was commuted to a life term by Governor Dewey, Williams persistently sought to upset the conviction by available state and federal collateral means. Following the Supreme Court's decision culminating in Haynes v. Washington, 373 U.S. 503, 83 S.Ct. 1336, 10 L.Ed.2d 513 (1963), decisions which broadened the concept of involuntariness and enlarged the court's responsibility to insure that a confession is voluntary before it is admitted into evidence, Williams was granted relief by this court on appeal from a denial of his petition for a writ of habeas corpus. United States ex rel. Williams v. Fay, 323 F.2d 65 (2d Cir. 1963), cert. denied, 376 U.S. 915 (1964). Subsequent to this ultimate finding in his favor, Williams commenced the suit presently before the court, alleging that the City had, through its agents (the police) maliciously prosecuted him in 1947.

The appellant contends that Williams' conviction, though ultimately upset, bars this malicious prosecution action under New York's common law. Moreover, the City contends the suit must fail for insufficient proof of a basic element of the cause of action, lack of probable cause. Alternatively, the appellant allows for the possible validity of the compensatory damage award and the finding of malicious prosecution upon which it is predicated, but attacks the punitive relief on independent grounds: that it was granted pursuant to an erroneous charge by the court of the applicable law and was not warranted as a matter of law on the basis of the proof presented at trial.

I. MALICIOUS PROSECUTION AND PROBABLE CAUSE

The essential ingredients of a malicious prosecution action are malice in pursuing, and lack of probable cause to pursue the present plaintiff's prosecution. With regard to the issue of probable cause, the focus in this case, the test is both objective and subjective:

A defendant in an action for malicious prosecution cannot make out a case of probable cause, however suspicious the circumstances of plaintiff's guilt, if he knew or believed that plaintiff was not guilty. The existence of probable cause requires the honest and reasonable belief of the defendant who had instituted the proceedings complained of, and if he actually had no belief in the plaintiff's guilt, he cannot establish probable cause.

1 F. Harper & F. James, Jr., The Law of Torts 4.5 at 312-13 (1956). On the objective side, courts have given weight in the form of a rebuttable or conclusive presumption of probable cause to a conviction of the present plaintiff in the court of first instance, his success on appeal notwithstanding.

In arguing that Williams' suit necessarily fails, the City characterizes the New York cases as conclusively equating a favorable final judgment at the trial level with probable cause to prosecute. The federal rule in this circuit is indeed one of conclusive effect. Dacey v. New York County Lawyers' Ass'n, 423 F.2d 188, 195 n. 12 (2 Cir. 1969), cert. denied, 398 U.S. 929, 90 S.Ct. 1819, 26 L.Ed.2d 92 (1970) (grant of injunction reversed on appeal); Salvage Process Corp. v. Acme Tank Corp., 104 F.2d 105, 107 (2d Cir.), cert. denied, 308 U.S. 599, 60 S.Ct. 131, 84 L.Ed. 501 (1939) (grant of injunction reversed on appeal). The New York common law, however, which governs such substantive matters in this diversity action, Erie R.R. v. Tompkins, 304 U.S. 64, 58 S.Ct. 817, 82 L.Ed. 518 (1938), accords a conviction ultimately upset only the force of prima facie evidence of probable cause. Laster v. Solotaroff, 273 App.Div. 32, 75 N.Y.S.2d 360 (1st Dept. 1947). ² The court was thus correct in giving the plaintiff an opportunity to overcome the presumption of probable cause to prosecute arising from his conviction.

Caminito v. City of New York, 25 A.D.2d 848, 849, 269 N.Y.S.2d 826, 829 (2d Dept. 1966), aff'd, 19 N.Y.2d 931, 281 N.Y.S.2d 338 (1967), establishes the nature of the proof required to overcome this presumption:

(A) conviction establishes prima facie probable cause for the prosecution unless plaintiff (in the malicious prosecution action) can show that the judgment was obtained by fraud, perjury, conspiracy or other undue means.

In the case before us, it was plainly within the jury's province to find 'undue means' in the strong evidence of coercion on the part of the police in obtaining Williams' confession. This is particularly so because of the concurrent lack of evidence to support a reasonable belief by the officers that Williams was guilty when they first brought him to the station. Indeed, if the dubious police practices which secured the present plaintiff's conviction in 1948 do not qualify as 'undue means,' then it is difficult to imagine what might.

The court correctly upheld the jury's finding of malicious prosecution. The assessment of $40,000 in compensatory damages dependent upon that finding must be upheld.

II. PUNITIVE DAMAGES

Unlike compensatory damages, punitive damages are assessed to punish the wrongdoer rather than restore the victim. Accompanying this punitive function-- and perhaps of greater significance, cf. Stevenson v. Hearst Consol. Publications, Inc., 214 F.2d 902, 908 n. 2 (2d Cir.), cert. denied, 348 U.S. 874, 75 S.Ct. 110, 99 L.Ed. 688 (1954)-- is a deterrent one, for the award of punitive damages is intended to deter repetition of the tortious conduct by both the particular defendant adjudged liable and others who might be tempted to imitate his conduct. See, Walker v. Sheldon, 10 N.Y.2d 401, 404, 223 N.Y.S.2d 488, 490, 179 N.E.2d 497 (1961); Costich v. City of Rochester, 68 App.Div. 623, 626, 73 N.Y.S. 835, 837 (4th Dept. 1902). The degree of misconduct needed to support an award of punitive damages against a municipality has been variously defined by the courts. As a general matter of New York law, however, the applicable standard calls for 'the intentional, wanton, willful or malicious commission of some illegal act or . . . such a perverse or obstinate failure to discharge some duty as warrants the presumption of a reckless indifference to the rights of others which is equivalent to intentional misconduct.' Costich v. City of Rochester, supra, 68 App.Div. 623 at 626, 73 N.Y.S. 835 at 837.

If the focus of the punitive damages awarded to Williams were the individual policemen who allegedly wrenched a confession from him by threats and violence, then the standard elucidated above, essentially one of malice, would undoubtedly be met. But this award was made against the officers' employer, the City of New York, and not the officers themselves. And while vicarious liability for compensatory damages requires only that the servant was acting within the broad outlines of his employment, punitive damages are assessed against the employer with far greater reluctance.

The punitive and deterrent underpinnings of a punitive damages award explain this divergence in vicarious liability doctrine. For whereas the purpose of compensatory damages-- compensation of the victim-- is accomplished whether payment comes from the master or his misbehaving servant, that of punitive damages-- to punish the wrongdoer and deter him and others from duplicating his misconduct-- is not. Unless the employer is himself guilty of some tortious act (or omission) because his employee has misbehaved, an award punishing the employer and deterring him and others situated to act likewise (i.e., other employers) makes no sense at all.

In Craven v. Bloomingdale, 171 N.Y. 439, 447-448, 64 N.E. 169, 171 (1902), the New York Court of Appeals outlined the proof needed to obtain punitive damages against a master whose servant had caused the illegal arrest of a customer, quoting Mr. Justice Gray in Lake Shore...