Source: s3://data.kl3m.ai/documents/govinfo/USCOURTS/USCOURTS-ca7-16-01065/USCOURTS-ca7-16-01065-0/pdf.json

Nature of Suit Code: 555
Nature of Suit: Prisoner - Prison Condition
Cause of Action: 

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United States Court of Appeals 

For the Seventh Circuit

Chicago, Illinois 60604

Submitted September 7, 2016*

Decided October 13, 2016

Before

DIANE P. WOOD, Chief Judge

RICHARD A. POSNER, Circuit Judge

FRANK H. EASTERBROOK, Circuit Judge

No. 16‐1065

POMPII R. VAUGHN, JR.,

Plaintiff‐Appellant,

v.

CLAYTON J. CHAPMAN, et al.,

Defendants‐Appellees.

Appeal from the United States District

Court for the Central District of Illinois.

No. 15‐3281

James E. Shadid,

Chief Judge.

O R D E R

After state criminal charges against Pompii Vaughn were dismissed, he sued

everyone involved in the criminal case: the Illinois county where he was prosecuted; the

judge, prosecutor, and public defender involved in the case; and the two Illinois state

troopers who conducted the traffic stop that led to his arrest. Vaughn has asserted both

federal and state theories in his complaint. He is currently imprisoned, and so the

district court screened his complaint as required by 28 U.S.C. § 1915A. It concluded that

                                                 

* We have unanimously agreed to decide the case without oral argument because

the briefs and record adequately present the facts and legal arguments, and oral

argument would not significantly aid the court. See FED. R. APP. P. 34(a)(2)(C).

NONPRECEDENTIAL DISPOSITION

To be cited only in accordance with Fed. R. App. P. 32.1

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this action is precluded by the judgment in an earlier suit Vaughn pursued arising from

the same prosecution and dismissed the case. Vaughn has appealed.   

Vaughn’s complaint is lengthy, and for purposes of this appeal we accept its

allegations as true. See Parker v. Lyons, 757 F.3d 701, 704 (7th Cir. 2014). Vaughn, a felon

then living in Arizona, was driving through Illinois on August 20, 2013, when he was

stopped by state trooper Clayton Chapman. In Chapman’s incident report, which

Vaughn appended to his complaint, the trooper says that he stopped Vaughn for

speeding and having an obstructed windshield (caused by an air freshener). Vaughn

alleges that the real reason he was stopped was Chapman’s suspicion that Vaughn and

his female passenger were smuggling drugs—both are black and the car had Arizona

license plates.   

Vaughn acknowledges in his complaint that during the stop Trooper Chapman

quickly discovered that Vaughn was driving on a suspended license and was wanted

on a warrant from Wisconsin. Despite the lack of any sign of contraband, Chapman

called for a drug‐sniffing dog, which arrived with another state trooper, Kevin Howell,

about 20 minutes into the stop. Vaughn alleges that Howell “signaled” the dog to give a

false alert so that the troopers would have an excuse to search the car. Their search did

not turn up any drugs, but it did reveal a pistol in the trunk. Vaughn denied possessing

or even knowing about the gun. His passenger (who owned the car) did not claim the

weapon either. She was allowed to leave with the car after several hours of roadside

investigation, but Vaughn was taken to the Sangamon County jail. By then Trooper

Chapman had contacted Arizona authorities, who responded (whether before or after

Vaughn was taken to the jail is unclear) that Vaughn was suspected of committing an

armed robbery and aggravated assault a few days earlier. A spent casing of the same

caliber as the pistol had been found during the investigation of the Arizona offenses.

Two days later, Vaughn was charged by an assistant state’s attorney with

possessing a firearm as a felon in violation of 720 ILCS 5/24‐1.1(a). Vaughn alleges that

Trooper Chapman pushed the prosecutor to charge him in order to give Arizona

authorities more time to build their case. (The day before the Illinois charge was filed,

Vaughn had waived extradition to Wisconsin, but Vaughn’s complaint does not say

what became of that state’s charge.) Vaughn was detained in Sangamon County until

December 2014, when the assistant state’s attorney dismissed the charge to allow the

Arizona prosecution to proceed. All the while, Vaughn says, he had been urging his

public defender and the state judge to expedite his trial.   

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Based on these facts, Vaughn asserts that all of the individual defendants

violated the Fourth Amendment, denied him due process, and committed state‐law

torts. Troopers Chapman and Howell, he says, engaged in abuse of process and

malicious prosecution. The district court dismissed the action at screening, noting that

Vaughn had filed an earlier lawsuit raising the same claims against the “same

defendants,” and that case had been dismissed with prejudice on the ground that the

defendants were immune from suit. See Vaughn v. Scherschlight, No. 15–3197–SEM–TSH,

2015 WL 4778262 (C.D. Ill. Aug. 13, 2015). Vaughn appealed from that decision, but he

later dismissed the appeal voluntarily. The district court held that the final judgment

precludes this new action.

Before this court, Vaughn effectively concedes that a straightforward application

of the doctrine of claim preclusion would bar this action against all of the defendants

except the two state troopers. Vaughn suggests, however, that his earlier suit was

mishandled by the district court and for that reason should not be preclusive. But that is

not the way things work. Vaughn abandoned his appeal from the earlier judgment, and

by doing so he abandoned any contention that his initial lawsuit was dismissed

erroneously. See Tartt v. Nw. Comty. Hosp., 453 F.3d 817, 822 (7th Cir. 2006); Fed’n of

Adver. Indus. Representatives, Inc. v. City of Chicago, 326 F.3d 924, 929 (7th Cir. 2003). The

district court thus correctly found that the earlier lawsuit precludes Vaughn’s suit

against all defendants who appear in both.   

Troopers Chapman and Howell, however, were not defendants in the first suit,

and so Vaughn argues that there can be no preclusion with respect to them. We agree

with him on this point. The federal law of claim preclusion requires “(1) identity of the

claim, (2) identity of parties, which includes those in ‘privity’ with the original parties,

and (3) a final judgment on the merits.” Ross ex rel. Ross v. Bd. of Educ. of Twp. High Sch.

Dist. 211, 486 F.3d 279, 283 (7th Cir. 2007); see also Cannon v. Burge, 752 F.3d 1079, 1101

(7th Cir. 2014). Chapman and Howell were not in privity with the defendants who were

sued. They are being sued in their individual capacity, and their interests were not

represented in the earlier suit. See Gray v. Lacke, 885 F.2d 399, 405 (7th Cir. 1989); Conner

v. Reinhard, 847 F.2d 384, 395–96 (7th Cir. 1988); Beard v. O’Neal, 728 F.2d 894, 897 (7th

Cir. 1984).   

But that is as far as we can go for Vaughn. His claims arise from the August 2013

traffic stop and his arrest, and he did not bring this case until September 28, 2015, more

than two years later. Those claims accrued at the time of the stop, see Wallace v. Kato,

549 U.S. 384, 388 (2007), and so they are barred by the two‐year statute of limitations

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applicable to claims under § 1983 arising in Illinois. See 735 ILCS 5/13‐202; Rosado v.

Gonzalez, No. 15‐3155, 2016 WL 4207961, at *1 (7th Cir. Aug. 10, 2016). A remand to

consider them would thus be futile.

Vaughn’s claims of malicious prosecution, whether we consider them under

federal or state law, fare no better. This court has held that a federal claim for malicious

prosecution exists only when there is no adequate state tort remedy, and Illinois has

one. See Julian v. Hanna, 732 F.3d 842, 845 (7th Cir. 2013); Newsome v. McCabe, 256 F.3d

747, 750–51 (7th Cir. 2001). Other circuits, however, take the position that the existence

of a federal claim does not turn on the availability of a state remedy. See Julian, 732 F.3d

at 846 (collecting cases). The Supreme Court has granted certiorari to resolve this

question, Manuel v. City of Joliet, 590 F. App’x 641 (7th Cir. 2015), cert. granted 136 S. Ct.

890 (2016), but the answer does not matter in this case. Under both federal and state

law, the existence of probable cause is a complete defense to malicious prosecution, see

Hart v. Mannina, 798 F.3d 578, 587 (7th Cir. 2015); Johnson v. Saville, 575 F.3d 656, 659 (7th

Cir. 2009), and the detailed allegations in Vaughn’s complaint leave no room for doubt

that there was probable cause to charge him with possessing a firearm as a felon.

Probable cause, under federal law, exists “when the totality of the facts and

circumstances within [the officers’] knowledge at the time of the arrest would warrant a

reasonable person in believing the person has committed a crime.” Hart, 798 F.3d at 587.

Under Illinois law the “existence of probable cause in a malicious‐prosecution action is

‘determined by looking to what the defendants knew at the time of subscribing a

criminal complaint’ and not at the (earlier) time of arrest.” Gauger v. Hendle, 954 N.E.2d

307, 329 (Ill. App. Ct. 2011) (quoting Porter v. City of Chicago, 912 N.E.2d 1262, 1273 (Ill.

App. Ct. 2009)). For such an action, probable cause is “a state of facts that would lead a

person of ordinary care and prudence to believe or to entertain an honest and sound

suspicion that the accused committed the offense charged.” Grundhoefer v. Sorin,

20 N.E.3d 775, 780 (Ill. App. Ct. 2014) (quoting Fabiano v. City of Palos Hills, 784 N.E.2d

258, 266 (Ill. App. Ct. 2002)). Here the troopers had discovered a firearm in the trunk of

the car Vaughn was driving and learned from a records search that Vaughn is a felon.

They also learned from authorities in Arizona that Vaughn was a suspect in an

aggravated assault and armed robbery involving a weapon of the same caliber. This

was sufficient.   

Although Vaughn alleges that this evidence was the fruit of an illegal search of

the car, this would not undermine its relevance to the question of probable cause. The

exclusionary rule does not apply in a § 1983 suit against police officers. See Lingo v. City

of Salem, No. 14‐35344, 2016 WL 4183128, at *4 (9th Cir. Aug. 8, 2016); Black v. Wigington,

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811 F.3d 1259, 1267–68 (11th Cir. 2016); Townes v. City of New York, 176 F.3d 138, 145 (2d

Cir. 1999); Wren v. Towe, 130 F.3d 1154, 1158 (5th Cir. 1997). The same is true for a

malicious‐prosecution suit under Illinois law. See Gauger, 954 N.E.2d at 330, 332 (proper

for the jury to consider the confession in determining whether there was probable cause

to prosecute, and “whether he was under arrest [throughout the interrogation] had no

bearing on whether there was probable cause to prosecute him”). Thus, regardless of

whether Troopers Chapman and Howell had justification for searching the trunk of the

car that Vaughn was driving, their discovery established probable cause for the charge

and thus defeated any claim of malicious prosecution. See Johnson, 575 F.3d at 664.

Without an underlying constitutional violation, Vaughn also cannot succeed on a claim

that the defendants conspired to deprive him of his rights. See Sow v. Fortville Police

Dep’t, 636 F.3d 293, 305 (7th Cir. 2011).

Finally we consider Vaughn’s remaining state‐law tort claim against the troopers

for abuse of process. Abuse of process requires “(1) the existence of an ulterior purpose

or motive and (2) some act in the use of process that is not proper in the regular course

of proceedings.” Neurosurgery & Spine Surgery, S.C. v. Goldman, 790 N.E.2d 925, 929 (Ill.

App. Ct. 2004). But this claim, too, is time‐barred. The statute of limitations for suits

against public employees is one year, see 745 ILCS 10/8‐101(a), and commences for a

claim of abuse of process “from the date that the last act giving rise to the cause of

action has accrued.” Withall v. Capitol Fed. Sav. of Am., 508 N.E.2d 363, 367 (Ill. App. Ct.

1987). Vaughn does not allege any improper acts by the troopers after he was charged

in August 2013, and thus his suit was brought too late.

AFFIRMED.

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