White Joliet Cops & DA Lied to Arrest, Charge & Detain Black Man: Supremes Rule 4th Amendment Applies to Pre-Trial Detention After Arrest

48 Days in Jail Off Lies & Bullshit. The US Supreme Court [official website] ruled [opinion, PDF] Tuesday that Fourth Amendment [text] protections against unreasonable seizure can continue after the legal process has concluded. In Manuel v. City of Joliet [SCOTUSblog materials], the court reversed the lower court in a 6-2 decision. [MORE] The opinion is [HERE] and [MORE] White supremacy/racism is carried out by deception & violence. 

Elijah Manuel, a Black man, was riding through Joliet, Illinois, in the passenger seat of a Dodge Charger, with his brother at the wheel. A pair of white Joliet police officers pulled the car over when the driver failed to signal a turn. According to the complaint in this case, officer Gruber immediately dragged Manuel from the car, pushed him to the ground, handcuffed him, and struck him repeatedly. Gruber yelled at him, saying, “[y]ou remember me, street punk? Now I got you, you fucking nigger.” Manuel claims that the police searched his car and tore it apart in the process.

The policeman then searched Manuel and found a vitamin bottle containing pills. Suspecting that the pills were actually illegal drugs, the officers conducted a field test of the bottle’s contents. The test came back negative for any controlled substance, leaving the officers with no evidence that Manuel had committed a crime. Still, the officers arrested Manuel and took him to the Joliet police station. 

There, an evidence technician tested the pills once again, and got the same (negative) result. But the technician lied in his report, claiming that one of the pills was “found to be . . . positive for the probable presence of ecstasy.”  Similarly, one of the arresting officers wrote in his report that “[f]rom [his] training and experience, [he] knew the pills to be ecstasy.” On the basis of those statements, another officer swore out a criminal complaint against Manuel, charging him withunlawful possession of a controlled substance. 

Manuel was brought before a [white?] county court judge later that day for a determination of whether there was probable cause for the charge, as necessary for further detention. The judge relied exclusively on the criminal complaint—which in turn relied exclusively on the police department’s fabrications—to support a finding of probable cause. Based on that determination, he sent Manuel to the county jail to await trial. In the somewhat obscure legal lingo of this case, Manuel’s subsequent detention was thus pursuant to “legal process”—because it followed from, and was authorized by, the judge’s probable-cause determination.

While Manuel sat in jail, the Illinois police laboratory reexamined the seized pills, and on April 1, it issued a report concluding (just as the prior two tests had) that they contained no controlled substances. But for unknown reasons, the prosecution—and, criticallyfor this case, Manuel’s detention—continued for more than another month. Only on May 4 did an Assistant State’s Attorney seek dismissal of the drug charge. The County Court immediately granted the request,and Manuel was released the next day. In all, he had spent 48 days in pretrial detention. 

The Supreme Court held that those objecting to a pretrial deprivation of liberty may invoke the Fourth Amendment when (as here) that deprivation occurs after legal process commences. The Fourth Amendment prohibits government officials from detaining a person inthe absence of probable cause. It applies at arrest pre-legal-process) arrest, but also for a person's (post-legal-process) pretrial detention - after a finding of probable cause by a judge.

In Manuel's case, cops initially arrested Manuel without probable cause, based solely on his possession of pills that had field tested negative for an illegal substance. Manuel could bring a claim for wrongful arrest under the Fourth Amendment. And the same is true as to a claim for wrongful detention—because Manuel’s subsequent weeks in custody were also unsupported by probable cause, and so also constitutionally unreasonable. No evidence of Manuel’s criminality had come to light in between the roadside arrest and the County Court proceeding initiating legal process; to the contrary, yet another test of Manuel’s pills had come back negative in that period. All that the judge had before him were police fabricationsabout the pills’ content. The judge’s order holding Manuel for trial therefore lacked any proper basis. And that means Manuel’s ensuing pretrial detention, no less than his original arrest, violated his Fourth Amendment rights.