No malicious prosecution claim for plaintiff who was acquitted in murder case

Malicious prosecution claims are hard to win because, in addition to showing the criminal proceeding terminated in your favor (and an ACD does not count), the plaintiff has to prove the officers proceeded with the prosecution maliciously and there was no probable cause to justify the proceeding. That last element is what dooms this claim.

The case is Frost v. New York City Police Dept., issued on November 12. I wrote about Frost in a different context, at this link, where the Court of Appeals held that the plaintiff was able to proceed with his fabricated evidence claim against the police after proffering evidence that the police coerced an "eyewitness" to claim that plaintiff was involved in a murder for which plaintiff was ultimately acquitted at trial.

That acquittal was a great victory for plaintiff, but that does not mean he can sue the officers who arrested him. Acquittal at trial is an important first step in going after the police, but acquittal does not necessarily mean the police lacked probable cause. This reality is confusing for clients, many of who assume that they can seek money damages after the police put them through the wringer in arresting them in the first place. The problem with that logic is that the case law allows the police off the hook if there was probable cause to arrest, even if the guy was ultimately proven not guilty.

Probable cause exists when the police have information that "would lead a reasonable person to believe the plaintiff is guilty." The Second Circuit (Katzmann, Kearse and Bianco) finds the police had probable cause because they saw surveillance video depicting plaintiff and someone else walking down and then running up a stairwell from which the victim was shot, immediately after the victim was shot. The other guy identified plaintiff as the shooter. The police also believed plaintiff had a motive to shoot the victim, because the victim's friends had assaulted plaintiff the night before. This supports probable cause as a matter of law; there is no reason to bring this issue before a jury. 

While plaintiff says probable cause cannot exist merely because he was near the scene of a crime and a fellow suspect had identified him as the culprit, cases in this Circuit already hold that "an individual's presence in the location from which shots are fired can support a finding of probable cause. The cases cited in support of this proposition are unpublished Second Circuit rulings. While citation to cases like that are frowned upon in the Second Circuit, they can still provide guidance on the issues if they are close enough to the case at hand. To the extent that no published case has supported probable cause on facts like this, then this case provides the precedent once and for all.