M.G. v. Young , 826 F.3d 1259 ( 2016 )

FILED
United States Court of Appeals
Tenth Circuit
PUBLISH June 21, 2016
Elisabeth A. Shumaker
UNITED STATES COURT OF APPEALS Clerk of Court
TENTH CIRCUIT
M.G.; L.J.; F.C.; M.C.,
Plaintiffs - Appellants,
v. No. 15-2090
DAVID C. YOUNG; ROBERT T.
SMITH; JOSEPH R. HUDSON;
MICHAEL CALLAWAY;
RAYMOND D. SCHULTZ, in their
individual capacities; THE CITY OF
ALBUQERQUE,
Defendants - Appellees.
APPEAL FROM THE UNITED STATES DISTRICT COURT
FOR THE DISTRICT OF NEW MEXICO
(D.C. No. 1:13–CV–00023–KG–WPL)
Joel M. Young, Albuquerque, New Mexico, for Plaintiffs–Appellants.
Taylor Sauer Rahn of Robles, Rael & Anaya, P.C. (Luis Robles of Robles, Rael &
Anaya, P.C., and Stephanie Griffin, City of Albuqerque, with her on the briefs),
Albuquerque, New Mexico, for Defendants–Appellees.
Before KELLY, McKAY, and LUCERO, Circuit Judges.
McKAY, Circuit Judge.
Plaintiffs filed a complaint under 42 U.S.C. § 1983 in which they raised
various claims relating to their arrests and now-vacated convictions for
prostitution. The district court, with a magistrate judge presiding by consent of
the parties, dismissed most of Plaintiffs’ claims as barred by the statute of
limitations and granted Defendants’ motion for summary judgment on Plaintiffs’
surviving claims of malicious prosecution. Plaintiffs appeal only the grant of
summary judgment on their malicious prosecution claims against one Defendant,
Mr. David Young.
Mr. Young was employed by the City of Albuquerque as a civilian fleet
manager for the police department. Starting in about 2005, he also served as a
voluntary reserve officer for the police department. A volunteer reserve officer is
a “part-time civilian volunteer who has police authority while on duty and under
the supervision of a fulltime officer.” (Appellants’ App. at 53.)
In separate incidents occurring in 2007 and 2008, Plaintiffs were each
arrested by Mr. Young on charges of prostitution after a brief conversation in his
unmarked vehicle. Mr. Young then filed criminal complaints and prosecuted
misdemeanor prostitution cases against Plaintiffs in municipal court. 1 Each
Plaintiff pled guilty to the charges against her.
1
It is apparently routine in Bernalillo County for police officers to
prosecute their own misdemeanor cases.
-2-
In 2011, an attorney filed a petition for relief from judgment on behalf of
Plaintiffs and nine other women who had pled guilty to prostitution after being
arrested and prosecuted by Mr. Young. As grounds for relief, the petition claimed
that “Petitioners’ guilty pleas, convictions, judgment, and sentences . . . were the
result of fraud upon the court by an individual named David C. Young who
abused and misrepresented his position and authority as an agent of the City of
Albuquerque when seizing, detaining, and prosecuting Petitioners in those cases,”
when he was in fact a volunteer reserve officer who had no authority to make
arrests or to prosecute criminal matters on the city’s behalf. (Id. at 135-36.) The
petition further alleged that Mr. Young’s misrepresentations about his position
and authority, as well as his “lack of credentials necessary to serve as a police
officer or prosecutor,” constituted exculpatory evidence, caused the criminal
proceedings to be “premised on fundamental errors that completely undermine the
factual basis for Mr. Young’s prosecution of Petitioners,” and rendered the guilty
pleas and resulting convictions “unknowing, involuntary, and void.” (Id. at 136.)
Instead of filing a response to the petition, the city entered into a
stipulation with the petitioners agreeing that the requested relief should be
granted. Thereafter, the state district court entered a short stipulated order in
which it “f[ound] that it is appropriate to grant the relief to which the parties have
stipulated,” i.e., setting aside the petitioners’ guilty pleas, vacating and
dismissing with prejudice their judgments and sentences, and ensuring that the
-3-
court’s and the government’s records reflected this disposition of their criminal
cases. (Id. at 142-43.)
Following the dismissal of their criminal cases, Plaintiffs filed this federal
§ 1983 action in which they alleged, among other claims, that Mr. Young
subjected them to malicious prosecution in violation of the Fourth and Fourteenth
Amendments of the U.S. Constitution.
After dismissing Plaintiffs’ other claims as barred by the statute of
limitations, the district court determined Mr. Young was entitled to summary
judgment on Plaintiffs’ malicious prosecution claims because they had not met
their burden of demonstrating that their criminal cases were terminated in a way
that indicated their actual innocence of the charges against them. Plaintiffs now
appeal this decision.
We review the district court’s grant of summary judgment de novo,
applying the same legal standard as that court. See Twigg v. Hawker Beechcraft
Corp., 659 F.3d 987, 997 (10th Cir. 2011). Summary judgment is appropriate “if
the movant shows that there is no genuine dispute as to any material fact and the
movant is entitled to judgment as a matter of law.” Fed. R. Civ. P. 56(a).
Because “[j]ury verdicts may not be based on speculation or inadmissible
evidence or be contrary to uncontested admissible evidence,” the movant is
entitled to judgment as a matter of law if the jury could only reach a verdict in the
nonmovant’s favor based on such impermissible considerations. Truck Ins. Exch.
-4-
v. MagneTek, Inc., 360 F.3d 1206, 1216 (10th Cir. 2004).
Under our precedents, a § 1983 malicious prosecution claim includes five
elements: “(1) the defendant caused the plaintiff’s continued confinement or
prosecution; (2) the original action terminated in favor of the plaintiff; (3) no
probable cause supported the original arrest, continued confinement, or
prosecution; (4) the defendant acted with malice; and (5) the plaintiff sustained
damages.” Wilkins v. DeReyes, 528 F.3d 790, 799 (10th Cir. 2008). To satisfy
the second element of this test, the plaintiff must show more than just the
withdrawal or vacating of criminal charges—the plaintiff must demonstrate that
the criminal proceedings were dismissed for reasons indicative of innocence, and
not because of an agreement of compromise, an extension of clemency, or
technical grounds having little or no relation to the accused’s guilt. Id. at 802-04;
see also Cordova v. City of Albuquerque, 2016 WL 873347, at *3-6 (10th Cir.
Mar. 8, 2016) (rejecting the argument that we should set aside our indicative-of-
innocence standard for certain types of dismissals and reiterating that, even where
criminal charges were unambiguously dismissed by the criminal court, a
malicious-prosecution plaintiff still bears the burden of demonstrating that the
dismissal was indicative of innocence). “Where the case is disposed of in a
manner that leaves the question of the accused’s innocence unresolved, there
generally can be no malicious prosecution claim by the accused.” Dobiecki v.
Palacios, 829 F. Supp. 229, 235 (N.D. Ill. 1993).
-5-
On appeal, Plaintiffs’ main argument is that Mr. Young’s
misrepresentations about his position and authority constituted material evidence
that calls his reliability into question and thus proves their innocence. As an
initial matter, we find no legal support for Plaintiffs’ argument that evidence
going to the reliability of a key witness necessarily proves the accused is actually
innocent of the charges against her. Plaintiffs rely on the Supreme Court’s
statement in Giglio that a Brady violation justifies a new trial “[w]hen the
reliability of a given witness may well be determinative of guilt or innocence.”
Giglio v. United States, 405 U.S. 150, 154 (1972) (citation omitted). However,
this statement does not support Plaintiffs’ argument: the entitlement to a new
trial under Giglio simply means that an accused should have the opportunity to
argue to a jury that the witness’s unreliability creates reasonable doubt regarding
the accused’s guilt—it does not prove as a matter of law that the accused must be
innocent. Thus, the mere fact that Mr. Young’s reliability has been called into
question does not itself indicate that Plaintiffs must be innocent of the charges
against them. Moreover, the key question for us to decide is not whether we
ourselves are persuaded that Plaintiffs were actually innocent of the charges
against them; rather, we must review the state court’s decision to decide whether
a reasonable jury could find—based on more than just speculation—that the state
court vacated Plaintiffs’ convictions for reasons indicative of innocence.
To decide whether Plaintiffs have met their burden of demonstrating a
-6-
favorable termination, “we look to the stated reasons for the dismissal [of the
criminal proceedings] as well as the circumstances surrounding it in an attempt to
determine whether the dismissal indicates [Plaintiffs’] innocence.” Wilkins, 528
F.3d at 803. In this case, one of the key circumstances surrounding—and indeed
triggering—the vacation of Plaintiffs’ criminal convictions was the 2011 filing of
the petition for relief. Although somewhat unspecific in its legal reasoning, this
petition appears to raise several related arguments for vacating the convictions:
(1) the petitioners’ convictions were void because the criminal charges were filed
and prosecuted by an individual who had no prosecutorial authority; (2) the
validity of the convictions was undermined because Mr. Young lacked the
authority to arrest the petitioners on criminal charges in the first place; (3) the
convictions must be vacated because they arose from a fraud on the court by the
arresting officer and prosecuting official, who misrepresented his authority to
arrest and prosecute individuals for criminal charges; (4) Plaintiffs would not
have pled guilty if they had known they might be able to challenge the charges
against them on this basis; and (5) Mr. Young’s misrepresentations about his
position and authority constituted exculpatory evidence that undermined the
factual basis for the convictions. Although the petition did not elaborate on this
last argument, the state court could presumably have read the petition to make the
same argument Plaintiffs raise in this appeal—that Mr. Young’s
misrepresentations about his position and authority, if known by Plaintiffs at the
-7-
time, could have been used to impeach his substantive testimony on the criminal
charges against Plaintiffs, and thus made it less likely that the prosecution could
have secured convictions against Plaintiffs.
The city responded to the petition by stipulating to the relief requested by
Plaintiffs, for reasons that are undisclosed on the record. The state court then
accepted the stipulation and stated that it found it appropriate to grant the
requested relief, without any explanation of its reasoning.
Thus, there are no “stated reasons” given for the vacation of Plaintiffs’
convictions. While the petition provides some evidence of possible reasons why
the state court may have found it appropriate to grant the stipulated relief,
Plaintiffs have presented no evidence from which a fact-finder could determine
which of these possible reasons the state court found persuasive. Contrary to
Plaintiffs’ argument, the fact that the state court ultimately granted the relief
requested in the petition does not prove that the court fully accepted and agreed
with every single argument they raised.
Under these circumstances—given the petition’s inclusion of both
evidentiary and technical grounds for vacating Plaintiffs’ convictions, the
debatable nature of Plaintiffs’ evidentiary argument, 2 the parties’ stipulation, and
2
We do not here decide whether we would reach the same result if
Plaintiffs had presented an evidentiary argument to the state court that was based
on more than just the withholding of general impeachment evidence.
-8-
the state court’s acceptance of the stipulation without further discussion or
analysis—a reasonable jury could not permissibly find that Plaintiffs met their
burden of showing their convictions were vacated in a way indicating their
innocence. It is conceivable that the state court was swayed by Plaintiffs’
implicit argument that Mr. Young’s misrepresentations about his position with the
police department constituted such strong impeachment evidence that the factual
basis for their pleas was undermined, indicating their actual innocence of the
charges against them. However, we cannot make this determination on the basis
of the record before us, and a jury could only reach this conclusion through
impermissible speculation. The evidence in the summary judgment record simply
would not support a finding that the state court’s vacation of the charges against
Plaintiffs must have been based on concerns about the evidentiary support for
these charges, and not on, for instance, the technical argument that a criminal
conviction secured by an individual with no prosecutorial authority is void and
therefore must be vacated. Since Plaintiffs bear the burden of proof on this point,
their inability to demonstrate that their convictions were vacated for reasons
indicative of innocence is fatal to their malicious prosecution claims. We thus
conclude that the district court did not err in granting Defendants’ motion for
summary judgment on these claims.
Because we affirm the district court’s grant of summary judgment based on
Plaintiffs’ failure to satisfy the favorable-termination element of the malicious
-9-
prosecution test, we need not consider the parties’ arguments on the question of
probable cause, which is a separate element of the test. Although Plaintiffs
contend that we should consider probable cause as part of our analysis of
favorable termination, “[t]he favorable termination element and the probable
cause element are distinct requirements that a malicious prosecution plaintiff must
satisfy to prevail and therefore should not be conflated.” Kossler v. Crisanti, 564
F.3d 181, 193 (3d Cir. 2009). Plaintiffs’ arguments on the question of probable
cause are not pertinent to our analysis of whether they have shown that their
convictions were terminated for reasons indicative of innocence.
Finally, in urging us to reverse the district court’s grant of summary
judgment, Plaintiffs rely heavily on several policy arguments. Although we
sympathize with Plaintiffs’ concerns about possible abuses of police power and
authority, we are not persuaded that these concerns require (or permit) us to vary
from our settled law on malicious prosecution. Contrary to Plaintiffs’ dire
warnings, our holding today does not foreclose all possibility of relief in any
future case involving a guilty plea or the withholding of material evidence; we
simply hold, based on the facts before us, that Plaintiffs in this case have not met
their burden of showing that their convictions were vacated for reasons indicative
of innocence.
The district court’s entry of summary judgment is accordingly
AFFIRMED.
-10-