### In the 

# United States Court of Appeals For the Seventh Circuit

____________________ No. 16

- 3118
M ERYL S QUIRES

- C ANNON , Plaintiff

- Appell ant ,

v.

D ENNIS W HITE , et al ., Defendant s

- Appell ee s

.

____________________ Appeal from t he United States District Court for t he Northern District of Illinois, Eastern Division

. No. 15 C V 6876

— Virginia M. Kendall , Judge

.

____________________
A RGUED J UNE 1, 2017

— D ECIDED J ULY 19, 2017

____________________

Before P OSNER , E ASTERBROOK , and H AMILTON , Circuit Judges

. P OSNER , Circuit J udge

. The plaintiff and her husband used
to own and live on a 400

- acre estate and horse farm in Ba rrington Hills, Illinois (a wealthy suburb of Chicago in Cook County, Illinois). The y leased the horse farm, which they called “Horizon Farms,” to a company t hey owned called Royalty Farms, LL C , which managed the farm’s operations, inclu d ing the care of the horses, which at one point reached2 No. 16

- 3118

50 in number. But there was a mortgage on the couple’s property , and it was foreclosed in 2013

. T he Forest Preserve Distr ict of Cook County

— a county commi s sion that owns more than 69,000 forested acres in the county

— b ought the property at the foreclosure sale. Royalty Farms, LLC , was not a party to the foreclosure proceeding , but neverth e less the Circuit Court of Cook County issued an order (called a Dispossession Order) , the validity of which has not been cha l lenged , directing the plaintiff and her husband to vacate the pr o p erty.
The F orest Preserve D istrict is not interested in feeding or breeding or otherwise operating a h orse farm on the pro p erty that it obtained in the foreclosure; and , unsurprisingly therefore, it requested that the plaintiff and her husband move the horses off the property . But taking the allegations in the plaintiff’s complaint to be true, for a time t he Forest Preserve District tolerate d the continued presence of se v eral horses (a fter the foreclosure sale , the number of horses on the property dropped from 50 to 7 )

. T he plaintiff continued vi s iting the property daily to feed or otherwise tend to the

rem aining horses, although the Dispossession Order had set a deadline of November 18 , 2013, for the couple to vacate the property; nine months later the plaintiff was continuing her daily vi s its.
She entered the property once again on the morning of August 13 , 2014

. This time, however, she was arrested and pros e cuted in state court by the Cook County sheriff for criminal trespass

— but she was acquitted in a bench trial b ecause the judge could not conclusively d e termine that she’d ever been told not to enter the prop erty. In fact she had been told, in an email by the Forest Preserve District’s lawyer thatNo. 16

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she had received and read the night b e fore her arrest , that any entry by her into the pro p erty would be a trespass and that “continued trespassing [would] be ad dressed by the p olice

. ” A year later she brought this federal suit, naming as d efendant s the For est Preserve Distri ct, its general counsel, its

ou t side lawyer and his law firm ( he was not an employee of the District but rather a member of a law firm

— Hollan d & Knight) , fifteen unnamed members of either the staff or board of the Forest Preserve District, and the three F orest Pr eserve District police officers who had a r rested her . The suit accused the defendants of false arrest and mal i cious prosecution. The a ccusation had and has no merit , and the district court was therefore right to dismiss the suit

. And though she’d been acquitted in the state prosecution, there was probable cause to arrest her for criminal trespass, which under Ill i nois law is trespass plu s knowledge that the owner of the property trespassed upon has not authorized the tre spass , 720 IL CS 5/21

- 3(a)(1 )

– ( 3)

— conditions clearly fulfilled in this case. As a criminal tres passer she was of course liable to be arrested , and couldn’t plead ignorance of the trespass since , as noted , she had received a warning

— and defied it. The plaintiff argues that we know that the Forest Pr eserve District notified her that she was not permitted to enter the property only because of documents attached to the d efendan ts’ motion to dismiss her complaint : those documents

were a copy of the email warning sent the day before the a rrest and a copy of the plaintiff’s affidavit, submitted in state court, a c knowledging that she was aware of that email . It’s true that, if matte rs outside the pleadings are pr e sented to a court on a Rule 12(b)(6) motion, the court no r mally must4 No. 16

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treat the m o tion as one for summary judgment and give all parties a re a sonable opportunity for discovery . Fed. R. Civ. P. 12(d). But the plaintiff does not dispute the veracity of these documents; indeed, in the district court she wit h drew a contention, made in one of her briefs, that she had not r eceived notice that she was prohibited from ente r ing the property. So she was not deprived of “the opportunity t o conduct disco v ery and to present contrary evidence on a point of genuinely disputed fact.” Williamson v. Curran , 714 F.3d 432, 442 (7th Cir. 2013).
She claims to have been arrested without probable cause because she entered the Forest Preserve land as an employee of Ro y alty Farms, LLC, rather than in propria persona . But neither her status as an employee of Royalty Farms, nor Royalty Farms’ rights if any (probably none) in what was

now Forest Preserve land , is relevant to whether there was probable cause for her arrest, since the order approving the foreclosure sale stated that the Forest Preserve District “is entitled to and shall have possession of the mortgaged real estate ... no sooner than 30 days from the entry of this Order [entered May 5, 2014], with out further Order of Court”

— and the Forest Preserve District, in notifying her that she was unwelcome on its property, clearly forbade her to return for any reason, in any capacity: “The Cannons cannot enter the pro p erty any more, and have no reason to do so.” The Forest Pr e serve and its police did not have to rule out the remote po s sibility that Royalty Farms had a property right , unmentioned in the order approving the foreclosure sale , that would entitle its agents to enter the property over the Forest Pr eserve’s objection

. Cf. Hurem v. Tavares , 793 F.3d 742, 745

– 46 (7th Cir. 2015).No. 16

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What is true is that an alternative to the arrest would have been for the police, upon accosting her on what was

now Forest Preserve land, to have told her she was trespas sing and that they would escort her from the pro p erty and that if she refused they would arrest her. S he might have r efused and therefore have been arrested, for remember that she’d defied the arrest warning that she had received the night before , but her compl aint suggests that she might have been willing to leave the propert y . In any event the fact that the police had an alternative did not make the arrest unla wful, for they had an unquestionable right to arrest her b ecause they had probable cause to believe h er a criminal tre spasser. And remember that although she was pros e cuted for the criminal trespass, she was acquitted. She vi o lated the law, but was not punished for the violation , and so has little to complain about

. The judgment of the district court dism issing her suit is
A FFIRMED

.