Opinion ID: 2633344
Heading Depth: 3
Heading Rank: 2

Heading: False imprisonment cases

Text: Moreover, the vast majority of federal false imprisonment cases involve claims that the plaintiff should never have been arrested at all, rather than that the plaintiff should have been released earlier. Wrongful arrest cases provide little guidance to us in deciding this case because they involve very different policy implications from failure-to-release cases. The decision whether to arrest someone must often be taken on a moment's notice with incomplete information. For that reason, permitting plaintiffs to sue the government for good-faith arrest decisions that later prove to be incorrect could endanger public safety by deterring the police from making proper arrests. Requiring state officials to release inmates on time creates no such danger: If the state officials are keeping accurate records, the inmate's release date is no surprise, and indeed requires no decision at all from prison officials. The public safety implications of releasing the prisoner have presumably been taken into account by the sentencing court. There appear to be no cases that analyze the false imprisonment provision of § 2680(h) in light of the independent duty exception, and the two cases cited in footnote 39 of the court's opinion provide little guidance on the subject. Both cases involve claims similar to Kinegak's, and both courts conclude that the claims are essentially ... for false imprisonment, [13] but neither case discusses the independent duty exception. Because these cases simply assume what they conclude that a claim based on the failure to release an inmate on time is necessarily a false imprisonment claimand because the vast majority of federal jurisdictions have not addressed this issue, it is likely that a claim analogous to Kinegak's would be allowed to proceed in some federal jurisdictions. [14] For this reason, the two federal cases concerning failure to release an inmate on time, like FTCA cases generally, have not left Zerbe a remnant of abandoned doctrine. [15]