Supreme Court Will Decide On Limits To Defendant Claims Of False Arrest
The 7th Circuit Court of Appeals said the clock for the statute of limitations begins to run at the time of discovery of an alleged 4th Amendment violation and that a plaintiff must bring a charge against the officers within the proscribed period.
Andre Wallace was 15 in 1994 when Chicago police arrested him on a murder charge. He confessed during questioning, which he later claimed was coercive and violated the 4th Amendment.
At trial, Wallace testified that he killed John Handy in self-defense. Wallace was convicted and served eight years in prison before various challenges to police tactics resulted in the suppression of the confession and all other evidence and Wallace was released.
Wallace filed civil rights damages claims against the officers nine years after the alleged false arrest, but the 7th Circuit rejected the damages claim because the Illinois statute of limitations of two years had expired.
The Supreme Court agreed to review Wallace’s argument that the statute of limitations for a civil rights claim of false arrest should begin at the time that a prisoner is released rather man at the time of discovery of an alleged police violation.
The 2nd, 6th, 7th and 10th circuits have rendered subsequent opinions that Crawford is not retroactive. But the 9th Circuit found that Crawford represented a sharp turn in jurisprudence and should be applied retroactively to all cases in which hearsay evidence was admitted without the defendant being able to directly confront the witness.
Thirty-six states have filed amicus briefs against retroactivity.
The case before the court-like many cases of hearsay testimony-involves sexual assault of a child. Hearsay evidence is also popular in domestic violence prosecutions.
In Crawford, the Supreme Court set a higher standard for hearsay evidence, limiting its use in a criminal trial only if the person who made the out-of-court statement is unavailable to testify and the defendant had a prior opportunity to confront the witness about the hearsay evidence.
The states said Crawford had already had a profound impact on prosecutors and making the decision retroactive as Bockting seeks to do would further expand the number of cases that would have to be retried.
In Ayers v. Belmontes, 05-493, the high court will decide whether a jury must be directly told to consider a capital defendant’s potential for reform as a mitigating factor.
The 9th Circuit Court of Appeals decided that jury instructions don’t go far enough in allowing the introduction of mitigating factors to reduce the penalty against the defendant.
Fernando Belmontes, who had a juvenile and adult history of violent crime, entered a home for a burglary, found a young woman at home and bludgeoned her to death with an iron bar. Belmontes stole her stereo, sold it for $100 and bought beer.
At trial, the 9th Circuit ruled, that the jury didn’t take into consideration the mitigating factor that Belmontes had shown improvement during an earlier incarceration at the California Youth Authority.
The Supreme Court has been asked to decide whether juries should receive more specific instructions to include the possibility of future reform as a mitigating factor.
In U.S. v. Resendiz-Ponce, 05-998, the Supreme Court will decide whether an omission of an element of a criminal offense in an indictment is a 5th Amendment violation that invalidates the indictment.
Juan Resendiz-Ponce, a Mexican citizen, was indicted for attempting to illegally reenter the United States, but the indictment did not explicitly allege an overt act beyond submission of a false identification card at the border.
Without any other act than submitting a false ID, the 9th Circuit Court found the indictment invalid and reversed the conviction.
Resendiz-Ponce had earlier been deported for illegal entry. He returned and was convicted again of kidnapping his stepdaughter, whom he had impregnated, and ordered deported.
Despite his history, the 9th Circuit said the government made a fatal error in failing to identify an overt act of an illegal attempt to reenter the United States.