3rd Circuit: What Reasonable Officer Would Know It’s Not OK To Deliberately Arrest The Wrong Person For A Crime?

There but for the grace of whatever god goes any of us. Who among us is worthy to judge the actions of someone who has the power to do right, but uses it to do wrong? Apparently, none of us. Not even the Third Circuit Court of Appeals. (h/t Short Circuit)

We like to believe power is directly proportional to responsibility. And, in return for our delusion, we get to see this belief shattered repeatedly.

In this case, it’s just more cops being cops and deciding they’d rather prosecute the person they can find, rather than make the effort to find the actual criminal. And, in this case, a victim of crime was treated as the perpetrator of another, far more serious crime — something that saw him locked up for 18 months for a crime he didn’t commit.

Jorge Rivera-Guadalupe lived in rooming house in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. It wasn’t a great place to live, according to Rivera. It was “noisy” and filled with people that apparently abused drugs and alcohol. In May 2017, Rivera was mugged in the hallways of this house. His friend, Christopher Valkosak, came to stay with him, ostensibly to help him defend himself in case he was attacked again.

It didn’t take long for history to repeat itself, as the Third Circuit decision [PDF] notes:

Around eleven o’clock the next evening, Valkosak was standing in the doorway of Rivera Guadalupe’s unit, facing the exterior hallway, when, in his telling, two strangers suddenly appeared. One of the men—“a dark-skinned male in a black hoodie”—shot Valkosak in the stomach. According to Valkosak, Rivera-Guadalupe then fetched a gun from under his mattress and left the room, presumably to chase the shooter.

The cops were called and then things got extremely fucked up incredibly fast. Detective Jacob Pierce arrived at the house to investigate the shooting of Valkosak. A neighbor told the detective that a “tall Black male” dressed in black had been standing in the hallway arguing with Valkosak. When Valkosak tried to punch the intruder, he was shot. The shooter then fled the scene, exiting through the back door.

For some reason, Detective Pierce felt this justified a search of Rivera’s room. So, he went and got a warrant — something he probably only managed to obtain by creating an entirely brand new narrative that would justify this intrusion.

In his application, Det. Pierce included the neighbor’s description of the shooter as a Black male but omitted various details the neighbor gave about Rivera-Guadalupe himself that were inconsistent with the description of the shooter, including that Rivera-Guadalupe is short, of Puerto Rican descent, and walks with a limp.

Pierce searched the room and found marijuana, a knife, IDs belonging to Rivera and Valkosak. However, he didn’t find a gun, which was the sort of evidence Pierce needed to “prove” Rivera had shot Valkosak. Undeterred, he arrest Rivera on attempted homicide charges. A preliminary hearing was held, in which the prosecution’s only witnesses were Det. Pierce, Valkosak, and Valkosak’s roommate — a person who had been nowhere near the crime scene. Det. Pierce’s testimony also excluded the fact that he had received a tip identifying the shooter as someone other than Rivera and, apparently deliberately, neither he nor the prosecutor asked the only witness to the shooting (other than the shooting victim) to testify.

Thanks to all of these admissions, as well as Pierce’s apparently illegal search of Rivera’s room, the judge ruled there was probable cause to continue to detain Rivera until trial. By the time this series of wrongs was (somewhat) righted, Rivera had spent more than a year in jail.

The DA’s Office charged Rivera-Guadalupe with nine offenses, including attempted homicide and possession of marijuana. But at the outset of trial, it dropped five of those charges and proceeded to trial on just two firearms charges and the charges of robbery and theft by unlawful taking. The jury eventually acquitted Rivera-Guadalupe of all four. By that time, however, Rivera-Guadalupe had been incarcerated for over eighteen months—from May 26, 2017, through December 11, 2018.

The lower court took all of this into account and denied qualified immunity to Detective Pierce. For some goddam reason, the Third Circuit insists the lower court was wrong. It says the doctrine of “any crime” applies here. As long as any crime supports arrest and prosecution, the rest of this injustice doesn’t matter. In this case, marijuana possession is a justifiable reason to arrest someone, charge them with attempted homicide, and jail them for 18 months. Nothing legally “malicious” about this says, the Third.

Because the right that Rivera-Guadalupe seeks to vindicate in his malicious prosecution suit was not clearly established at the relevant time, the District Court erred in denying Det. Pierce qualified immunity.

The final indignity is that there is precedent that says this sort of thing is very definitely unconstitutional. Unfortunately, what should have been obvious to cops for forever can’t be considered “obvious” because the US Supreme Court only recently issued a decision telling cops to knock this sort of shit off. And the Third Circuit — despite being ahead of the game in this case — chose to let this go unsettled for years, resulting in completely unearned immunity for the detective who has the utter gall to claim he’s an investigator.

This past year, the Supreme Court held in Chiaverini v. City of Napoleon that “the presence of probable cause for one charge does not automatically defeat a Fourth Amendment malicious-prosecution claim alleging the absence of probable cause for another charge.” 602 U.S. 556, 561 (2024).

But was that right clearly established when Detective Jacob Pierce, the Appellant in this case, arrested Appellee Jorge Rivera-Guadalupe in 2017? No, we conclude, because although we anticipated the holding of Chiaverini nearly twenty years ago in Johnson v. Knorr, 477 F.3d 75 (3d Cir. 2007), tension between Johnson and Wright v. City of Philadelphia, 409 F.3d 595 (3d Cir. 2005), continued to produce confusion within our circuit that persisted until Chiaverini.

Well… thanks for nothing. You had a 17-year head start and managed to do nothing with it. And now someone who was jailed for 18 months for a crime no one but this errant so-called “detective” believed he committed has nowhere to go with his lawsuit. Maybe he can get framed for something else in the future to take advantage of this extremely belated re-appraisal of malicious prosecution. Heads, the government wins. Tails, the plaintiff loses. Same as it ever was.