Fourth Circuit on Duke Lacrosse

A couple of weeks late on this. The Fourth Circuit held that all the Fourth Amendment claims by the Duke lacrosse players against the investigating police officers should have been dismissed on qualified immunity grounds.The court did allow state law malicious prosecution claims by the three indicted players, but not by the 30+ players who never were indicted, to proceed. Some thoughts follow.

1) The claim by the three indicted players for a Fourth Amendment malicious prosecution violation failed because the independent decision of the prosecutor to seek and indictment (and the independent decision of the grand jury to indict) broke the causal chain between the officers' conduct and the unconstitutional prosecution. Absent allegations that the officers affirmatively misled or unduly pressured the prosecutor to seek that indictment, his acts insulate the officers from liability. The court further rejected the argument that the police and Nifong conspired to seek an unconstitutional indictment and prosecution, emphasizing the duty of police and prosecutors to work together in seeking to establish probable cause and to seek indictments; a "conspiracy" thus could be alleged in every case. On a related point, the court in a footnote rejected an overlapping Fourteenth Amendment substantive due process claim against the officers for fabricating evidence. Substantive due process is not available when there is an "explicit textual source" for a constitutional claim; because the claim could be brought under the Fourth Amendment, the Fourteenth Amendment could not provide the basis for a claim.

This result seems correct, although it illustrates well the difficulty (if not impossibility) of using § 1983 to challenge misconduct in the criminal justice system. A prosecutor enjoys absolute immunity in seeking and obtaining an indictment, while his conduct insulates police officers from liability, at least absent affirmative lies or concealment of evidence. The court was a bit too dismissive of the possibility of a conspiracy to indict, although that may have been because the complaint itself showed Nifong as the bad actor, taking weak evidence, which the officers themselves insisted was weak, and moving forward with an indictment. On the other hand, because police never themselves initiate a prosecution, perhaps the Fourth Amendment is the wrong source; perhaps cases of fabricated evidence should be handled under substantive due process--after all, it is hard to imagine what misconduct could be more "outrageous" than fabricating evidence.

2) The claims against the City of Durham had to be dismissed once the court held that there was no underlying violation. The same for the "stigma-plus" S/D/P claims against police officers who made public statements suggesting the players' guilt. The DA's independent decision to seek the indictment broke any causal connection between the statements and the indictment, eliminating any "plus" necessary to state a claim. The latter was an unfortunate way to resolve it--I would have liked to hear the court take on whether "stigma-plus" was a valid theory of liability.

3) Judge Wilkinson wrote a strongly worded concurrence, criticizing the e plaintiffs' lawyers for overreaching, both in the dramatic numbers of claims asserted (23, 32, and 40, among the three complaints--and the unindicted players, who never got dragged into the system, actually brought more claims than the indicted players), the "sweeping scope" of the litigation, and the "overwrought" nature of the claims and the allegations. Wilkinson had a stronger position against "stigma-plus" claims as inconsistent with SCOTUS precedent; he also read Iqbal to require particular allegations of precisely what each supervisor did to cause the violations alleged; simply naming names, without identifying their conduct, is insufficient.

4) The state-law malicious prosecution claims remain alive against the officers, as do the claims against Duke University (who could not appeal at this non-final stage) and Nifong (who did not appeal the denial of his motion to dismiss. And despite Wilkinson's point that this case continues more than six years after the criminal charges against the three players were dismissed and coming up on seven years since the infamous party, the case goes on.