Document ID: ./input/supremecourt_opinions/opinions/21pdf/20-659_3ea4.pdf
Page Number: 21.0

6 

THOMPSON v. CLARK 

ALITO, J., dissenting 

erroneous. 

The  Court  claims  that  the  “gravamen”  of  petitioner’s
Fourth  Amendment  claim  is  the  same  as  that  of  a  mali-
cious-prosecution claim: the “wrongful initiation of charges
without probable cause.”  Ante, at 6.  But what the Court 
describes is not a Fourth Amendment violation at all.  As 
explained, that Amendment protects against “unreasonable 
searches and seizures”—not the unreasonable “initiation of 
charges.”  In  fact,  “the  specific  provisions  of  the  Bill  of 
Rights  neither  impose  a  standard  for  the  initiation  of  a 
prosecution”  nor  “require  a  pretrial  hearing  to  weigh  evi-
dence according to a given standard.”  Albright, 510 U. S., 
at 282 (Kennedy, J., concurring in judgment); see also 4 W. 
LaFave, J. Israel, N. King, & O. Kerr, Criminal Procedure
§14.2(a), pp. 329, 331 (4th ed. 2015) (noting that the Con-
stitution does not require “screening” of the decision to pros-
ecute “by some neutral body” to ensure “some minimal evi-
dence supporting the charge,” and “the sole constitutional 
protection” is “what the Fourth Amendment requires to jus-
tify physical restraints”). 

The Court also says that the initiation of charges must be 
“wrongful,” but it is not clear what that means.  If that term 
simply refers to the lack of probable cause, then the Court 
has failed to capture the “gravamen” of malicious prosecu-
tion because that tort requires not just that the defendant 
initiated charges “without probable cause” but also—as the 
name of the tort suggests—that this was done with “mal-
ice.”  See 1 Hilliard §4, at 416 (“want of probable cause” is 
not enough “without malice”); 1 Newell §6, at 7 (“The plain-
tiff must show that the defendant acted from malicious mo-
tives in prosecuting him”).  Cf. ante, at 6, n. 5 (claiming to 
reserve the question whether the claim requires malice). 

If, on the other hand, the Court uses the term “wrongful”
to require “malice,” then the claim it has endorsed is even
more incompatible with the Fourth Amendment, which al-