by Sam Rutherford

The Supreme Court of the United States held that a Fourth Amendment malicious-­prosecution lawsuit may proceed where one or more of several charges brought against the plaintiff was supported by probable cause so long as at least one charge was not.

Background

Jascha Chiaverini, a jewelry store owner in Napoleon, Ohio, bought a $45 ring from a petty thief. The ring’s rightful owners found out about the purchase and asked Chiaverini to return the ring. Chiaverini declined, so the owners contacted local police. Local police also requested that Chiaverini return the ring, but he declined pointing to a letter he had recently received from the police department requesting that he retain the ring as evidence. For some unexplained reason, Chiaverini also told police he was operating his jewelry store without a license.

Police responded by filing several criminal complaints in municipal court against Chiaverini. They charged him with two misdemeanors—receiving stolen property and dealing in precious metals without a license—and one felony—money laundering. Officers also submitted a request for an arrest warrant supported by an affidavit setting out their case for probable cause on all three charges but focusing on the felony. For the felony money laundering charge to be valid, Ohio law requires that Chiaverini knew when he purchased the ring that the transaction involved the proceeds of unlawful activity. Ohio Rev. Code § 1315.55(a)(1).

A judge issued the warrants, and Chiaverini was arrested. He spent three days in jail prior to his arraignment. At a preliminary hearing, the officers maintained that Chiaverini had admitted to suspecting the ring was stolen, which Chiaverini denied. The judge again found probable cause and set the case for trial. County prosecutors, however, failed to submit the charges to a grand jury in a timely manner, so the case against Chiaverini was dismissed.

Chiaverini then filed suit in federal court under 42 U.S.C. § 1983, alleging what is commonly referred to as a Fourth Amendment malicious-­prosecution claim. Such claims require the plaintiff to prove that charges were brought against him without probable cause. Chiaverini alleged officers lacked probable cause to arrest and charge him with money laundering for two reasons. First, their claim that he admitted to believing the ring was stolen was a lie. Second, Ohio law requires proof that the ring was worth more than $1,000, which could not be sustained in this case because its value was consistent with what he paid for it—$45.

The U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Ohio granted the officers’ motion for summary judgment and dismissed the case. The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit affirmed, holding that because the misdemeanor charges were supported by probable cause, his malicious prosecution claim failed even if the officers lacked probable cause to arrest and charge him with money laundering. In other words, a single valid charge in a criminal case insulates officers from liability in a Fourth Amendment malicious-­prosecution case relating to other baseless charges. In so ruling, the Sixth Circuit rejected decisions from three other Courts of Appeals that held the presence of probable cause on one of several charges does not automatically defeat a malicious prosecution claim alleging the absence of probable cause on another charge. Williams v. Aguirre, 965 F.3d 1147 (11th Cir 2020); Johnson v. Knorr, 477 F.3d 75 (3d Cir. 2007); Posr v. Doherty, 944 F.2d 91 (2d Cir. 1991). The Supreme Court granted certiorari to resolve the circuit split.

Analysis

The Court began its analysis by setting out the general parameters for a § 1983 case, which “enables an individual to recover damages from a state or local official for the deprivation of a constitutional right.” While such suits are premised on a constitutional violation, “its elements and rules may also be shaped by common-­law tort principles, against whose backdrop § 1983 was enacted.” See Manuel v. Joliet, 580 U.S. 357 (2017). Thus, courts must “identify the ‘most analogous’ common-­law tort to the constitutional harm alleged” and “incorporate that tort’s requirements to the extent consistent with ‘the values and purposes of the constitutional right at issue.’” Manuel.

Fourth Amendment malicious-­prosecution claims had their origin in exactly that method. The Fourth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution provides that “[t]he right of the people to be secure … against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated.” The constitutional violation alleged in a Fourth Amendment malicious-­prosecution claim “is a type of unreasonable seizure—an arrest and detention of a person based on a criminal charge lacking probable cause.” Thus, in Thompson v. Clark, 596 U.S. 36 (2022), the Supreme Court “analogized” a Fourth Amendment malicious prosecution suit to the common-­law tort of malicious prosecution because the “gravamen” of both is the initiation of charges without probable cause—although in the Fourth Amendment context, the charges must also cause a seizure.

The question presented in Chiaverini’s case “is whether a Fourth Amendment malicious-­prosecution claim may succeed when a baseless charge is accompanied by a valid charge,” the answer to which springs from “common-­law principles governing malicious-­prosecution suits when § 1983 was enacted,” the Court explained. At common law, the plaintiff had to show that an official initiated the charge without probable cause, but he or she did not need to show that every charge brought lacked an adequate basis. Citing state supreme court decisions and a leading treatise from the mid 1800s (§ 1983 was signed into law on April 20, 1871, by then president Ulysses S. Grant), the Court reasoned that like the common-­law tort, courts should evaluate a Fourth Amendment malicious-­prosecution claim “charge by charge” to determine whether probable cause existed. Thus, the Court summarized the common-­law rule as follows: “One bad charge, even if joined with good ones, was enough to satisfy the malicious-­prosecution tort’s ‘without probable cause’ element.”

This conclusion, the Court noted, was not meaningfully contested by the defendants. Instead, after abandoning their probable cause defense to Chiaverini’s suit, they focused their arguments on the causation element of a Fourth Amendment malicious-­prosecution claim. As noted above, an essential element of such a claim is that the unlawful charge resulted in a seizure such as Chiaverini’s arrest and three days of detention. The defendants asserted that the proper test is whether, absent the charge lacking probable cause, a judge could still have authorized the plaintiff’s arrest. Chiaverini, for his part, argued that once a tainted charge is included in the request for an arrest warrant, that warrant is “irretrievably tainted” and any seizure resulting from it is unconstitutional. And last, the United States acting as amicus curiae, suggested that the correct standard is a “but-­for test,” meaning that the plaintiff must show that absent the tainted charge would not have authorized the detention.

The Court, however, refused to address this new issue presented for the first time after certiorari was granted, noting that it is “a court of review, not of first view.” Quoting Cutter v. Wilkinson, 544 U.S. 709 (2005). The Court therefore left it to the Sixth Circuit to address the causation element on remand.

Conclusion

Accordingly, the Court vacated the judgment of the Sixth Circuit and remanded Chiaverini’s case for further proceedings consistent with its opinion. See: Chiaverini v. City of Napoleon, 144 S. Ct. 1745 (2024).

Writer’s note: This case is noteworthy for reasons beyond its actual holding, as yet another example of the Supreme Court’s current method of constitutional interpretation known as “originalism.” This mode of constitutional analysis states that the constitution and its various provisions should be interpreted based on how they would have been understood at their adoption. In Chiaverini, therefore, the Court resorted to cases and legal treatises from around the time 42 U.S.C. § 1983 was adopted. The Court has also employed originalism to interpret other constitutional guarantees, for example the Confrontation Clause under the Sixth Amendment and the Second Amendment right to bear arms, to name just a few other examples. See Smith v. Arizona, 2024 U.S. LEXIS 2712 (2024) (Confrontation Clause); New York State Rifle & Pistol Association Inc. v. Bruen, 597 U.S. 1 (2022) (Second Amendment).

While this mode of analysis is not without its critics, especially because it is unclear precisely what history counts in any given context, see, e.g., Vidal v. Elster, 602 U.S. 286 (2024) (Barrett, J., concurring) (noting that the “history and tradition” test followed by the Court was “wrong twice over”), it is nonetheless imperative that litigants bringing constitutional claims of all types not only have a firm grasp on current precedents but must also understand the historical context existing at the time of the constitutional provision’s adoption. This, of course, can be a daunting challenge for pro se prisoner litigants with limited or no access to historically important cases, statutes, and treatises. But this is the world of constitutional interpretation and application we now live in, and litigants must be prepared to confront it if they want any chance of success on the merits of their constitutional claims.   

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