Andre Wallace was arrested for the murder of John Handy in 1994, and he confessed while in custody. A state appellate court found that he had been arrested without probable cause, making the confession inadmissible under Brown v. Illinois, 422 U.S. 590 (1975). The appellate proceedings finally ended in 2001 and the case was remanded for a new trial. The prosecution apparently concluded it could not convict without the excluded confession and dropped the charges in April, 2002, and he was released. Almost a year later, Wallace filed suit against the city of Chicago and the police officers under 42 U.S.C. § 1983, the federal statute providing a civil cause of action for civil rights violations.

The statute of limitations for § 1983 is borrowed from state law, and in Illinois it is two years. If the statute began running in 1994, the suit was very late. If it began running in 2002, it was timely.

By analogy to the tort law of false imprisonment, the Court held that the statute of limitations began to run when Wallace's detention without legal process ended. That was the point where he ordered held by a magistrate, which was in 1994. The complicating issue here is the rule of Heck v. Humphrey, 512 U.S. 477 (1994), under which a criminal defendant cannot use a § 1983 action to litigate an issue that would render his conviction invalid. The Heck rule was created to prevent defendants from using civil suits to do an end-run around the limitations on habeas corpus, including the exhaustion rule and the rule of Stone v. Powell, 428 U.S. 465 (1976), against relitigating Fourth Amendment claims.

In Fourth Amendment cases, the constitutional violation is typically completed before the criminal trial begins. The civil plaintiff could file his civil suit at a time when he has not yet been convicted. In that event, today's opinion says the federal district court can (and implies it should) "stay the civil action until the criminal case or the likelihood of a criminal case is ended." Further, "If the plaintiff is ultimately convicted, and if the stayed civil suit would impugn that conviction, Heck will require dismissal; otherwise, the civil action will proceed, absent some other bar to suit." Although the Court doesn't mention it, if the final state resolution of the matter is a rejection of the federal claim, that resolution is binding and cannot be relitigated in a federal civil suit. See Allen v. McCurry, 449 U.S. 90 (1980). But what if the defendant ultimately prevails in the criminal case after his civil case has been dismissed under Heck? Footnote 4 on page 10 of the opinion says,

Had petitioner filed suit upon his arrest and had his suit then been dismissed under Heck, the statute of limitations, absent tolling, would have run by the time he obtained reversal of his conviction. If under those circumstances he were not allowed to refile his suit, Heck would produce immunity from §1983 liability, a result surely not intended. Because in the present case petitioner did not file his suit within the limitations period, we need not decide, had he done so, how much time he would have had to refile the suit once the Heck bar was removed.

Wouldn't it be simpler to keep the federal civil case on ice until the final resolution of the state criminal case?

Of course, the simplest solution of all for Fourth Amendment cases would be to just overrule Mapp v. Ohio, 367 U.S. 643 (1961) and make the civil remedy the only remedy.

In press coverage of this case, the AP blows it, referring to Wallace as "a man wrongly imprisoned for more than eight years...." The detention that the Illinois court decided was unlawful was the brief period from arrest to arraignment. It is possible that Wallace was innocent of the murder and that his confession was coerced and false, but we don't know that. It is also possible that he is the guilty murderer who went free by operation of the search-and-seizure exclusionary rule, as predicted by Judge Cardozo so many years ago.