It’s easy to get submerged by the wave of bad news generated by the current administration on what often seems to be an hourly basis. Ask me how I know. My time is pretty much split between whatever ICE is doing and whatever Flock is doing, which results a whole lot of bad law enforcement behavior going ignored because it’s almost impossible to see through the Trump flotsam and jetsam.
But this is one of those things that shouldn’t be ignored just because the Trump administration is perpetrating larger and longer-lasting harms on the nation on a daily basis. Call it American exceptionalism, but we’re still willing to do lasting harm at a local level without the involvement of MAGA officials or the people that love them.
Via Gabriel Malor on Bluesky, here comes more bad news on the qualified immunity front, courtesy(?) of the Seventh Circuit Appeals Court. Police misconduct that occurred nearly 50 years ago has been given an official judicial pass because somehow it was impossible for these officers to know that subjecting a fourteen year old person to two days of intense interrogation might violate rights.
The plaintiff is Johnnie Lee Savory, who was picked up by Peoria, Illinois cops on suspicion of murder. A massive amount of coercion was applied to Savory, which naturally resulted in an (involuntary and false) admission of guilt. The conviction was thrown out once because of this interrogation but a retrial ended in a second conviction for Savory. It wasn’t until after he was released on parole (2006) and pardoned by then-Governor Patrick Quinn (2014) that Savory was able to bring a civil rights lawsuit against the officers involved in illegally securing this conviction.
The district court refused to let the defendants walk away from this lawsuit, making it clear it had seen enough evidence to support Savory’s claims of rights violations. From the 7th Circuit decision [PDF]:
The officers and [hired private polygrapher Ed] Bowers moved for summary judgment, arguing that they were entitled to qualified immunity from liability for the unlawful detention, destruction of evidence, and coerced confession claims and that they were entitled to absolute immunity from liability for the fabrication of evidence claim. The district court denied their motion. It found that disputes of material fact precluded review as to the unlawful detention claim, that clearly established law put the officers and Bowers on notice that their tactics to purportedly coerce Savory’s confession were unconstitutional, and that a reasonable jury could find that the officers destroyed and fabricated evidence in violation of clearly established law.
In plainer English, a court within this same circuit looked at the relevant precedent and said officers should have known they weren’t supposed to do the things they did to Johnnie Savory.
These are the things they did:
It was a long interrogation. Officers Haynes and Pinkney began questioning Savory inside an interrogation room around 4:00 pm. At a certain point, Detectives Charles Cannon and John Fiers subbed in. Over the course of the interrogation, officers showed Savory photographs of the crime scene, ignored his question about whether he could go home, and accused him of lying.
[…]
That night, Savory was held in a detention center. Around midnight, the PPD notified Savory’s father that his son was being held. Savory fell asleep at about 1:30 am, and around 8:00 am he was taken back to the PPD to resume questioning. Officers again gave Savory Miranda warnings and then asked him rapid-fire and confusing questions. At 10:00 am, he met with his father. Later, at different points, Savory was forced to remove his clothing so that officers could pluck hairs from his body and to take another polygraph test. During the test, the examiner, Ed Bowers, got close to him, raised his voice, and accused him of being a murderer. After the polygraph, Savory stood by the window and cried. At 7:35 pm, about 29hours after the officers met him at his school, Savory confessed to the murders, though he made no mention of rape or sexual assault.
The cops liked Savory for the murder. The evidence, however, didn’t. After Savory recanted later that night, the cops retrieved a pair of pants from his father that had some blood on them. (As the decision notes, the pants were “unlikely” to have been worn by Savory due to their size. The rest of the evidence was similarly suspect, including supposedly damning testimony by relatives of the victim which was recanted two years after Savory had been convicted and sentenced. Those recanting their statements (with signed affidavits) mentioned being pressured by Peoria PD officers to finger Savory for the crime.
Savory challenged his conviction and asked for DNA testing of the pants used as “evidence” by prosecutors. The court granted the petition, only to discover that the PD had somehow “failed” to preserve this evidence.
In the end, the cops win. The Seventh Circuit looks at all of the above, along with existing precedent, and somehow decides these cops couldn’t have known that coerced confessions and evidence destruction were unconstitutional acts. The cops get a pass because Savory got Mirandized once during his 29 hours of detention and interrogation. And the conviction gets a pass because testimony — even coerced testimony — is given even greater leeway than the acts that generated the bogus confession.
At worst, the false testimony—but not the reports—caused Savory harm. But testimony is covered by absolute immunity.
Nice to know that even false testimony is immune from civil rights lawsuits. But even so, it should not have given a free pass to the officers (and their actions) that generated the false admission of guilt, as the dissent points out:
My colleagues err procedurally by reversing the district court’s denial of qualified immunity to the officers on Savory’s Fourth Amendment unlawful detention claim. And they err substantively by concluding it was not clearly established by 1977 that the officers’ interrogation techniques violated the Fifth Amendment. It clearly was, so the officers are not entitled to qualified immunity on this claim.
The dissent breaks this down to its simplest terms, which makes the majority’s ruling look that much worse:
It was clearly established in 1977 that police could not spend days berating a teenage boy into confessing to murder.
No shit, as the legal experts say. But it’s only the majority ruling that matters. And since this exists now, precedent dating back more than 50 years ago is replaced with a fresh set of easy outs for cops who illegally coerce confessions. The circuit took a step forward decades ago, but this iteration of the court has concluded that this one step was a step too far. And the only inference we can draw from this is that the circuit thinks it’s better to err on the side of cops who [direct fucking quote] “spend days berating” teens into “confessing to murder.”
Well done, Seventh Circuit. Thanks for nothing.