Stewart v. Wagner, No. 15-2394 (8th Cir. 2016)
Annotate this CaseAfter plaintiff was convicted of murder and the charges were subsequently dropped when another person confessed to the murder, plaintiff filed a civil damage action against five individuals and Stone County, Missouri, alleging various claims under 42 U.S.C. 1983 and Missouri state law. The district court granted summary judgment and dismissed Stone County, the County Sheriff, and the Sheriff’s criminal investigation supervisor. The court denied the motions of Stone County Prosecutor Matt Selby, lead investigator Karl Wagner, and investigator Orville Choate, who has not appealed, rejecting their claims of absolute, qualified, and official immunity. Selby and Wagner appealed. Plaintiff argues that investigators Wagner and Choate violated his right to due process as defined in Brady v. Maryland. In this case, the district court erred by failing to adopt the more precise mens rea standard adopted in the court's controlling opinion, Villasana v. Wilhoit. Therefore, the district court must apply this controlling standard when the issue again arises on remand, whether before, during, or after trial. The court also concluded that, on this record, it was error to deny Prosecutor Selby qualified immunity because plaintiff failed to present sufficient evidence that Wagner and Selby violated clearly established Fourth Amendment rights of which a reasonable person would have had. Finally, the court concluded that the district court erred in denying Wagner and Selby qualified immunity from the Sixth Amendment damage claim because no section 1983 precedents give these defendants fair and clear warning of what the Constitution requires, and plaintiff failed to put in the summary judgment record evidence of whether defense counsel at trial moved to suppress or exclude testimony by Parker and Pollard because it was obtained in violation of the Sixth Amendment. Accordingly, the court reversed in part and remanded for further proceedings.
Court Description: Loken, Author, with Riley, Chief Judge, and Benton, Circuit Judge] Civil case - Civil rights. In action alleging defendants violated plaintiff's civil rights in connection with a murder prosecution in which a retrial ordered by the Missouri Supreme Court was dropped after another person confessed to the murder, the district court denied defendants' motions for summary judgment based on qualified immunity; held: (1) the district court applied the wrong standard in determining whether plaintiff had established the requisite mens rea for his claim that defendants Wagner and Choate violated his right to due process under Brady when they caused the prosecution not to disclose evidence favorable to his defense; while a prosecutor's duty to disclose is absolute, to recover damages from other law enforcement officers, a section 1983 plaintiff must show that these other law enforcement officers intended to deprive the defendant of a fair trial, and the district court erred in adopting the amorphous "bad faith" mens rea standard set out in White v. McKinley, 519 F.3d 806 (2008), rather than the more precise standard set out in the earlier controlling case of Villasana v. Wilhoit, 368 F.3d 976 (8th Cir. 2004); (2) with respect to plaintiff's claim that Prosecutor Selby and Detective Wagner procured fabricated statements to create probable cause, the claim should have been evaluated under the Fourth Amendment rather than under a substantive due process analysis; on this record it was error to deny Prosecutor Selby qualified immunity on this claim because plaintiff failed to present sufficient evidence that Wagner and Selby violated clearly established Fourth Amendment rights of which a reasonable person would have known; (3) with respect to plaintiff's claim that Wagner and Selby violated his Sixth and Fourteenth Amendment right to counsel when they obtained a false confession through the use of jailhouse informants, the defendants were entitled to qualified immunity as there are no Section 1983 precedents giving the defendants fair and clear warning of what the Constitution requires; further plaintiff has failed to put into the summary judgment record evidence of whether his attorney in the criminal matter moved to suppress or exclude the statements by the informants because it was obtained in violation of the Sixth Amendment, whether such a motion was granted or denied and, if denied, whether the issue was pursued on appeal. [ September 09, 2016
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