Williams v. Dart, 19-2108

• Decision Date: 23 July 2020
• Docket Number: No. 19-2108,19-2108
• Citation: 967 F.3d 625
• Parties: Taphia WILLIAMS, et al., individually and on behalf of those similarly situated, Plaintiffs-Appellants, v. Thomas J. DART, Cook County Sheriff, et al., Defendants-Appellees.
• Court: U.S. Court of Appeals — Seventh Circuit

967 F.3d 625

Taphia WILLIAMS, et al., individually and on behalf of those similarly situated, Plaintiffs-Appellants,

v.Thomas J. DART, Cook County Sheriff, et al., Defendants-Appellees.

No. 19-2108

United States Court of Appeals, Seventh Circuit.

Argued March 31, 2020

Decided July 23, 2020

Rehearing Denied August 21, 2020

Sara Garber, Attorney, Thedford Garber Law, Adele D. Nicholas, Attorney, Law Office of Adele D. Nicholas, Chicago, IL, for Plaintiffs-Appellants.

Sean O'Callaghan, Attorney, O'Mara & O'Callaghan, LLC, Chicago, IL, for Defendants-Appellees.

Before Kanne, Wood, and Hamilton, Circuit Judges.

Hamilton, Circuit Judge.

"In our society," the Supreme Court has said, "liberty is the norm, and detention prior to trial or without trial is the carefully limited exception." United States v. Salerno , 481 U.S. 739, 755, 107 S.Ct. 2095, 95 L.Ed.2d 697 (1987). Not as a statistical matter, says the Bureau of Justice Statistics. See Jail Inmates in 2018 , at 5 (2020), available at bjs.gov/content/pub/pdf/ji18.pdf (in 2018, 490,000 jail inmates (two thirds of total) had not been convicted of offense). To better enforce the norm and police the exceptions more carefully, Cook County, Illinois, like other jurisdictions across the country, recently revised its pretrial detention policies in favor of broader access to pretrial release.

The plaintiffs in this case allege that defendant Thomas Dart, the Cook County Sheriff, disagreed with the revised policies and substituted in their place policies of his own making that denied them release. Plaintiffs are nine black residents of Chicago, arrested and charged with felonies, whom the Cook County trial courts admitted to bail subject to electronic monitoring supervised by the Sheriff. According to plaintiffs, the Sheriff independently reviewed plaintiffs’ bail orders and decided they should not be released on those conditions. As a result, plaintiffs were neither released on monitoring nor left at liberty. Instead, they languished in the Sheriff's jail for up to two weeks after the bail orders were issued while their families and lawyers scrambled to find out what was happening. Motions for rules to show cause were filed. Two plaintiffs were released in the dead of night, hours before the motion hearings could be held.

Plaintiffs allege federal constitutional and state-law claims on behalf of the nine named plaintiffs and a putative class of other arrestees whose bail orders were disregarded by the Sheriff. After three rounds of pleading, the district court dismissed most of the suit for failure to state a claim. Plaintiffs abandoned the balance and took this appeal. We reverse in part and remand. Plaintiffs’ allegations are sufficient to proceed on federal constitutional claims for wrongful pretrial detention and denial of equal protection, and on state-law claims for contempt of court.

I. Factual and Procedural Background

A. Plaintiffs’ Allegations

Because the case comes to us on bare pleadings, we assume the following facts to be true and state them in the light most favorable to plaintiffs. Manistee Apartments, LLC v. City of Chicago , 844 F.3d 630, 633 (7th Cir. 2016). In September 2017, with the support of the other branches of government, the Cook County Circuit Court implemented new pretrial release policies aimed at reducing the use of cash bail. This was done for the sake of fairness (poor people cannot afford it) and public safety (the most successful robbers and drug dealers can). For people arrested on felony gun charges, the new policies resulted in rates of pretrial release subject to electronic monitoring that were eleven times higher than before. Before the reforms, 0.7 percent of persons on release were charged with a new violent crime before trial. After the reforms, from September 2017 to February 2018, rates of recidivism on the same or similar charges for people charged with gun felonies rose but remained low (2.5 percent).

By February 2018, despite the low re-arrest rates in gun cases, the Sheriff had taken a dim view of these developments. The Sheriff superintends the Cook County Jail, and since 1989 his office has operated Cook County's electronic monitoring program. In a public letter to the president of the Cook County board of commissioners and in the press, the Sheriff expressed his view that the wrong people from the wrong neighborhoods were being released on monitoring. Accordingly, the Sheriff announced, he would begin to "closely scrutinize all individuals" ordered released on monitoring by the courts. "Those who are deemed to be too high a security risk ... will be referred back to the court for further evaluation" within forty-eight hours.

While this policy debate aired in public, within the confines of the Cook County Jail the Sheriff had already begun his "administrative review" of the courts’ bail orders and was refusing to comply with them in cases of his choosing. Contrary to the Sheriff's public statements, plaintiffs allege, no efforts were made to remand detainees to the court within forty-eight hours or otherwise to make alternative arrangements. Families and nonprofits posted four- and five-figure bonds on behalf of detainees and then—nothing, for days and even weeks. No notice or explanation was given to the persons detained or to their lawyers, their families, or anyone else.

For example: On February 23, 2018 a nonprofit posted $5,000 bond on behalf of plaintiff Taphia Williams. Sixty hours later she had not been released. After repeated telephone calls, a jail officer informed the nonprofit's agent that Williams's case was "under review" and assured him: "Your person will be taken care of in the order that the bond was posted." Williams's counsel filed this lawsuit on the evening of February 26. Williams was released early the next morning. This was the first and shortest of these plaintiffs’ confinements.

Plaintiff Tony Mason posted $7,500 bond on February 26 but had not been released as of March 2, when his counsel moved for a rule to show cause why the Sheriff should not be held in contempt of the court's bail order. A hearing on the motion was set for 9:00 a.m. on March 7. The Sheriff released Mason at 4:00 a.m., five hours before the hearing. Plaintiff Gregory Cooper's story is essentially the same.

After posting $1,000 bond on his son's behalf, the father of plaintiff Xavier Webster was reduced to pleading by text message with a policy staffer in the Sheriff's office before his son was released nine days later.

Plaintiff Joshua Atwater, having spent a year on the Sheriff's monitoring program already, was re-arrested on February 21 after mistakenly missing a court date. He had bail reinstated by the court on the same terms as before on March 6. The Sheriff did not release him to monitoring until March 12, on the condition that he have no contact with his five children—a release condition not imposed by the court but cut by the Sheriff from whole cloth.

B. This Lawsuit

Williams filed this lawsuit in the Northern District of Illinois on February 26, 2018, while still in custody, seeking damages and an injunction, together with a motion to certify a class of all arrestees who had been, were, or would be ordered released on monitoring but detained by the Sheriff as a result of "administrative review." The other named plaintiffs were joined as they became known. Defendants are the Sheriff in his individual and official capacities, and Cook County itself (only because it pays for the Sheriff's office, so we will not refer to it again). See Carver v. Sheriff , 324 F.3d 947 (7th Cir. 2003).

On April 12, 2018 plaintiffs filed a second amended complaint pleading Fourth and Fourteenth Amendment claims under 42 U.S.C. § 1983 and state-law claims for race discrimination and contempt of court. 740 Ill. Comp. Stat. 23/5 ; 55 Ill. Comp. Stat. 5/3-6020 ; see 28 U.S.C. §§ 1331, 1367. On the Sheriff's motion under Federal Rule of Civil Procedure 12(b)(6), the district court dismissed plaintiffs’ Fourth Amendment claim with prejudice, sustained the procedural due process claim on the merits and the contempt claim by default, and dismissed the others with leave to replead. Plaintiffs’ third amended complaint followed on October 15 with more factual detail and a substantive due process claim in place of the Fourth Amendment claim. On the Sheriff's renewed Rule 12(b)(6) motion, the court dismissed all claims with prejudice except the procedural due process claim, which it again sustained. The court also took up for the first time plaintiffs’ motion for class certification, now as to only the surviving claim, and denied the motion.

Plaintiffs stipulated to dismissal with prejudice of the surviving claim. The district court entered final judgment in the Sheriff's favor on May 29, 2019. This appeal followed. Because plaintiffs have twice confirmed, once in their opening brief and again at argument, that the stipulated dismissal of the procedural due process claim was indeed with prejudice to refiling, we are satisfied they are not attempting an unauthorized interlocutory appeal. See JTC Petrol. v. Piasa Motor Fuels , 190 F.3d 775, 776–77 (7th Cir. 1999). The district court's judgment was final and our jurisdiction is secure. 28 U.S.C. § 1291.

II. Analysis

We review de novo the district court's decisions on motions to dismiss for failure to state a claim under Rule 12(b)(6). Manistee Apartments, LLC v. City of Chicago , 844 F.3d 630, 633 (7th Cir. 2016). We cannot review its class certification decision, as we will explain.

A. Fourth Amendment

Plaintiffs’ core claims fit most comfortably within the language and jurisprudence of the Fourth Amendment, so we devote most of our attention to it. The Fourth Amendment protects the right of the people to be secure in their persons against unreasonable seizures. Manuel v. City of Joliet , ––– U.S. ––––, 137 S. Ct. 911, 917, 197 L.Ed.2d 312 (2017). It "establishes ‘the standards and procedures’ governing pretrial...