Opinion ID: 3019228
Heading Depth: 5
Heading Rank: 3

Heading: Concocting a False and Fabricated

Text: Confession 13 The Amended Complaint next alleges that the ADAs violated Yarris’s constitutional rights when they “concoct[ed] a false and fabricated confession.” (Am. Compl. ¶ 93.) There is no elaboration in the Amended Complaint regarding the circumstances under which the ADAs fabricated a confession by Yarris. In fact, the only reference to a confession is found in paragraph 40 of the Amended Complaint, which discusses a conversation Yarris had on February 1, 1982, with a prison guard who subsequently “gave a statement and later testified that Yarris said that he had raped Craig, but that another man named Mark had actually murdered her, a statement known to be absolutely false in light of DNA evidence conclusively showing that Yarris was not the rapist.” (Am. Compl. ¶ 40.) Accepting Yarris’s allegations as true and drawing all reasonable inferences in his favor, we must conclude that absolute immunity from this claim is not appropriate at the motion-todismiss stage. As already noted, the key question is whether the ADAs were functioning as the state’s advocates when they engaged in the conduct that gave rise to the evidence-fabrication allegations. See Buckley, 509 U.S. at 274. In Buckley, the Supreme Court denied absolute immunity to prosecutors who had allegedly fabricated evidence that was used to obtain a criminal conviction after it determined that “the prosecutors’ conduct occurred well before they could properly claim to be acting as advocates.” Id. at 275; see also Kulwicki, 969 F.2d at 1467 (stating that prosecutor who fabricated confession would be absolutely immune if he did so while prosecuting the case). In contrast, the allegations here do not indicate whether the fabrication of Yarris’s confession occurred during the preliminary investigation of an unsolved crime, as in Buckley, or after the ADAs had decided to indict Yarris and had begun working as the state’s advocates in the prosecution of Yarris. Accordingly, at this stage of the proceedings, the ADAs cannot establish that they are entitled to absolute immunity for allegedly fabricating Yarris’s confession.