Court Opinion

ID: 9498736
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-05 17:26:43.57758+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T17:59:02.556381
License: Public Domain

POSNER, Circuit Judge,
dissenting from denial of rehearing en banc.
The panel decision creates an intercir-euit conflict on a recurrent issue: when does a claim for damages arising out of a false arrest or other search or seizure forbidden by the Fourth Amendment, or a coerced confession forbidden by the due process clause of the Fifth Amendment, accrue, when the fruits of the search or the confession were introduced in the claimant’s criminal trial, and he was convicted? The panel holds that, except in the rare case in which a violation of the Fourth Amendment is an element of the crime with which the defendant is charged, it always accrues at the time of the arrest, search, or confession. Every other case to address the issue, including our own Gauger v. Hendle, 349 F.3d 354 (7th Cir.2003), holds that it usually accrues then, but not if the Fourth or Fifth Amendment claim, if valid, would upset the conviction. If it would, the claim does not accrue unless and until the conviction is vacated. In other words, a civil rights suit is not a permissible vehicle for a collateral attack on a conviction.
That is the holding of Heck v. Humphrey, 512 U.S. 477, 114 S.Ct. 2364, 129 L.Ed.2d 383 (1994). The Court said that the district court must “consider whether a judgment [in the civil rights suit] in favor of the plaintiff would necessarily imply the invalidity of his conviction or sentence; if it would, the complaint must be dismissed unless the plaintiff can demonstrate that the conviction or sentence has already been invalidated.” Id. at 486-87, 114 S.Ct. 2364. The Court gave the following example of “a § 1983 action that does not seek damages directly attributable to conviction or confinement but whose successful prosecution would necessarily imply that the plaintiffs criminal conviction was wrongful”: “A state defendant is convicted of and sentenced for the crime of resisting arrest, defined as intentionally preventing a peace officer from effecting a lawful arrest.... He then brings a § 1983 action against the arresting officer, seeking damages for violation of his Fourth Amendment right to be free from unreasonable seizures. In order to prevail in this § 1983 action, he would have to negate an element of the offense of which he has been convicted. Regardless of the state law concerning res judicata, ... the § 1983 action will not lie.” 512 U.S. at 486 n. 6, 114 S.Ct. 2364 (emphasis in original). Faced with this flat statement, the panel carves the exception to its new rule that I mentioned in the first paragraph but does not give a reason for limiting the Court’s *431exception to the particular illustration that the Court gave. The panel says only: “we are convinced that a clear accrual rule is superior to a case-by-case approach.” It does not explain the source of its conviction.
Its accrual rule is not “clear,” as I’ll point out; it is also inconsistent with the principles of accrual. A suit cannot be filed — the claim on which it is based cannot have accrued — at a time when, because a condition precedent to suit has not been satisfied, the suit must be dismissed. The panel holds that the suit must be filed within the limitations period for section 1983 suits (usually two years) from the date of the arrest, search, or, as in this case, confession, even if at the end of the two years the plaintiffs conviction has not been vacated and even if the only evidence of his guilt presented at his criminal trial was the challenged evidence or confession. This is so, the panel holds, even though, to quote Heck, a judgment in the plaintiffs favor in the civil suit “would necessarily imply the invalidity of his conviction” because it would wipe out all of the evidence against him.
And if the plaintiff waits to sue until his conviction is vacated, he will not have the full statutory period within which to sue because he will be able to avoid dismissal only by appealing to the doctrine of equitable tolling. (That’s assuming equitable tolling is available in Heck cases, a question the panel leaves open.) Equitable tolling permits a plaintiff to delay suing beyond the statutory limitations period if he is unable despite all due diligence to sue within the period; but as soon as he is able to sue he must. He is denied the benefit of the full statutory period. Unterreiner v. Volkswagen of America, Inc., 8 F.3d 1206, 1213 (7th Cir.1993); Cada v. Baxter Healthcare Corp., 920 F.2d 446, 452-53 (7th Cir.1990).
So the panel’s decision puts the squeeze on these plaintiffs, contrary to normal principles of accrual, which do not force you — in fact do not allow you — to sue before you have a claim. If you have been convicted and success on your civil rights claim would undermine your conviction, you have no civil rights claim unless and until you get the conviction set aside. If the search turned up no evidence, or the confession was excluded at the criminal trial, or the other evidence of guilt was overwhelming, the claim does not challenge the conviction and so it accrues at the time of the search. But that is not every case.
The proper response is to adopt a presumption against the unlikely result. (The panel does not discuss that alternative.) The presumption would be that even if the plaintiffs Fourth or Fifth Amendment defense had prevailed in the criminal proceeding against him, he still would have been convicted, either because the violation had not produced evidence used against him in that proceeding or because, though it had, there was plenty of other evidence to convict him. The presumption would be rebutted if, for example, the only evidence of his guilt was evidence seized in a search that he challenges in his section 1983 suit. This is not a hypothetical case; it is our twin Okoro cases, Okoro v. Bohman, 164 F.3d 1059, 1061 (7th Cir.1999), and Okoro v. Callaghan, 324 F.3d 488 (7th Cir.2003). The plaintiff, who had been convicted of a drag offense on the basis of heroin found during a search of his home, brought a federal civil rights suit in which he claimed that he had offered to sell the police jewels (which he claimed they stole from him in response to his offer), not drugs. His conviction was never reversed or otherwise nullified. We-held the suit barred by Heck because if he was believed he should not have been convicted, since *432the heroin was essential to the conviction; and so his Fourth Amendment suit for the allegedly stolen jewelry was barred. Hudson v. Hughes, 98 F.3d 868, 872 (5th Cir.1996), is a similar case with the same result.
Another clear case is Gauger itself. His conviction, we pointed out, “rested crucially on the statements that he made to the police when he was questioned after being arrested. Earlier we said that he might well have been prosecuted even if his version of the interrogation had been accepted, because his version was incriminating though not as much so as the prosecutors’ version. With no statement at all in evidence, however, he could not have been convicted of guilt of his parents’ murder beyond a reasonable doubt; the other evidence — the lack of forced entry or signs of struggle, for example — was probative merely as corroboration of his statements construed as a confession or at least as damaging admissions. So when he showed that the statements were the product of a false arrest and hence were inadmissible at his criminal trial, he successfully impugned the validity of his conviction, as the state implicitly conceded when it dropped the charges against him following the reversal of his conviction.” 349 F.3d at 361-62.
There will be tough borderline cases, but the tough cases are not resolved by the decision today. They will simply be fought out as equitable-tolling cases rather than accrual cases — if equitable tolling is available, a question on which the panel, as I noted, reserves judgment: so much for the panel’s having adopted a “clear rule.” If equitable tolling is unavailable, then Fourth and Fifth Amendment claimants will automatically file within the statutory period dated from the search — and then plead with the district court to disobey Heck and not dismiss the suit, even if it is not yet ripe because the conviction has not been set aside and its validity depends on the validity of the search. As the Sixth Circuit sensibly observed in Shamaeizadeh v. Cunigan, 182 F.3d 391, 399 (6th Cir.1999), “just as a convicted prisoner must first seek relief through habeas corpus before his § 1983 action can accrue, so too should the defendant in a criminal proceeding focus on his primary mode of relief-mounting a viable defense to the charges against him — before turning to a civil claim under § 1983.” The panel does not discuss that observation.
The panel denies that it is creating an intercircuit conflict. It says that there is already a conflict and it is just taking sides. Citing five cases, the panel states flatfootedly: “The First, Third, Eighth, Tenth, and Eleventh Circuits have held that false arrest claims accrue at the time of the arrest .... By aligning ourselves with one side of this debate, we do not break any new ground.” That is incorrect. None of those cases hold that such claims always accrue at the time of arrest. All they hold is that normally a Fourth Amendment claim accrues them. Not one of them even says (as distinct from holds) that it always does, and two of the five explicitly allow for later accrual in exceptional cases.
The five cases are Nieves v. McSweeney, 241 F.3d 46, 52-53 (1st Cir.2001); Beck v. City of Muskogee Police Dept., 195 F.3d 553, 558 (10th Cir.1999); Montgomery v. De Simone, 159 F.3d 120, 126 (3d Cir.1998); Simmons v. O’Brien, 77 F.3d 1093, 1097 (8th Cir.1996), and Datz v. Kilgore, 51 F.3d 252, 253 n. 1 (11th Cir.1995) (per curiam). Nieves acknowledges that there may be cases “in which a section 1983 claim based on a warrantless arrest will not accrue at the time of the arrest.” 241 F.3d at 52 n. 4. Even the passage that the panel quotes from Nieves acknowledges that a section 1983 claim does not always *433accrue at the time of arrest. Id. Beck also acknowledges such a possibility. 195 F.3d at 558-59. In Montgomery, the plaintiffs claims, which were for false arrest and false imprisonment, were unrelated to the outcome of the criminal prosecution against her. Her “claim for false arrest ... covers damages only for the time of detention until the issuance of process or arraignment, and not more. In addition, Montgomery’s section 1983 false imprisonment claim relates only to her arrest and the few hours she was detained immediately following her arrest. Montgomery therefore reasonably knew of the injuries that form the basis of these 1983 claims on the night of her arrest.” 159 F.3d at 126 (citations omitted).
In Datz, a search case, the court held that the plaintiff did not have to wait until the outcome of his criminal case to bring his civil case because it was uncertain whether a ruling in the civil case that Datz’s search had been illegal would be inconsistent with his criminal conviction, for “even if the pertinent search did violate the Federal Constitution, Datz’ conviction might still be valid considering such doctrines as inevitable discovery, independent source, and harmless error.” 51 F.3d at 253 n. 1. Since Datz was convicted of being a felon in possession of a firearm, and the firearm was found in the search, it might seem that his conviction could not coexist with invalidating the search. But as the state court that upheld his conviction noted, “ammunition for the weapon also was found in two locations in appellant’s house. The police evidence custodian testified appellant contacted him numerous times, by phone and in person, seeking return of ‘his AR-15 rifle.’ ” Datz v. State, 210 Ga.App. 517, 436 S.E.2d 506, 509 (1993). If there is untainted evidence here, the panel’s result might well be correct, but there is no discussion of the other evidence in its opinion. In Simmons the only issue discussed is whether admission of a coerced confession can be a harmless error; as far as appears, no issue was made of whether the admission of the confession had been harmless. 77 F.3d at 1094-95. The panel does not discuss Montgomery, Datz, or Simmons; its characterization of them (e.g., “finding § 1983 coerced confession claim not barred by Heck ”) is consistent with the principle that the claim usually accrues later.
The cases that the panel acknowledges are in conflict with its accrual rule are, besides Gauger, Harvey v. Waldron, 210 F.3d 1008, 1015 (9th Cir.2000); Shamaeizadeh v. Cunigan, supra, 182 F.3d at 399; Covington v. City of New York, 171 F.3d 117, 124 (2d Cir.1999); Cabrera v. City of Huntington Park, 159 F.3d 374, 380 (9th Cir.1998); Brooks v. City of Winston-Salem, 85 F.3d 178, 183 (4th Cir.1996), and Mackey v. Dickson, 47 F.3d 744, 746 (5th Cir.1995). The list is incomplete. Mysteriously omitted, without comment, are Uboh v. Reno, 141 F.3d 1000, 1006 (11th Cir.1998), and Woods v. Candela, 47 F.3d 545, 546 (2d Cir.1995) (per curiam). Nieves, at least, must be added to the list along with Calero-Colon v. Betancourt-Lebron, 68 F.3d 1, 4 (1st Cir.1995), cited in Nieves, as well as our decision in Booker v. Ward, 94 F.3d 1052, 1056 (7th Cir.1996), where we said, examining the proceedings in the Illinois courts, “that success on Booker’s unlawful arrest claim would not necessarily undermine the validity of his conviction.” That’s the test, all right. And note that Beck, one of the cases the panel cites for its rule, expressly declined to reject Covington. 195 F.3d at 559 n. 4.
The panel may have been misled by the reference in Harvey v. Waldron, supra, 210 F.3d at 1015, to “a split in the circuits.” The court in Harvey miseharacter-izes the approach of courts (including itself!) that reject the approach taken by the *434panel today. It describes them as holding that a Fourth or Fifth Amendment claim never accrues until and unless the conviction is vacated. Those courts hold only that such a claim sometimes doesn’t accrue until then, for example if there is no other evidence to support the conviction besides evidence claimed to have been obtained illegally. So in Harvey the court went on to satisfy itself that the evidence alleged to have been illegally seized was essential to Harvey’s conviction. Id. at 1015-16.
The panel is right that there are two groups of cases. But they are consistent. One holds that a Fourth or Fifth Amendment claim accrues at the time of arrest, assuming the conviction does not depend on the evidence alleged to have been illegally seized. The other holds that the claim does not accrue then if the conviction does depend on that evidence.
I count 12 cases to 0 against the panel’s approach, with the other three cases CMontgomery, Simmons, and Datz) noncommittal but consistent with the 12. So one-sided a score should give us pause. If there is a compelling practical reason for flouting conventional statute of limitations principles, forging a lonely path, and creating more work for the Supreme Court, which now faces an intercircuit conflict on a recurrent issue, the panel has not explained what it might be.