Acquitted at trial on homicide charge, but no malicious prosecution case

This plaintiff went on trial on a homicide charge after the police determined he was responsible for killing the two-year-old daughter of his girlfriend. The jury acquitted him. That acquittal is a ticket to the courthouse for malicious prosecution. But these cases are hard to win, and plaintiff's malicious prosecution case will not proceed to a jury because the district court, and the Court of Appeals, finds the police had probable cause to arrest him.

The case is Davis-Guider v. City of Troy, a summary order issued on December 23. Anyone who is acquitted following a criminal trial is probably wondering if they can sue the police over their ordeal. (This plaintiff spent time in jail awaiting his criminal trial). But what happened in this case, and this is an inherent problem in malicious prosecution cases involving felony arrests, is that the jury indicted plaintiff for manslaughter and endangering the welfare of a child. The indictment creates a presumption that there was probable cause to arrest (as the grand jury has cleared the case for trial based on the evidence presented by the prosecution). You can overcome that presumption with evidence that the indictment was procured in bad faith. But that is a difficult hurdle to overcome, and plaintiff cannot overcome it.

Here is the reason why the federal courts have accepted the indictment as evidence of probable cause: while plaintiff called the police after finding the girl unresponsive at 1:09 pm, and he claims he attempted CPR, plaintiff told the police he had been awake by 11:00 am, two hours before he called 911. The autopsy report showed the girl died rom blunt force trauma. The police thought that plaintiff appeared too calm about the girl's death, and her bed was too tidy for plaintiff to have conducted CPR on it, as he had claimed. The police also told the grand jury that it appeared the girl had been fatally struck only 15-20 minutes before plaintiff called 911. This is why the jury indicted plaintiff.

While plaintiff argues the police made mistakes in presenting the case to the grand jury, that does not overcome the presumption of probable cause because there is no evidence these mistakes were made in bad faith. At best, the Court of Appeals (Walker, Nathan and Park) holds, plaintiff only speculates the police acted in bad faith. An example of one of plaintiff's arguments: the police had hastily declared the girl's death a homicide before all the medical tests on her had come back, and the police did not tell the grand jury that EMS's attempts to administer CPR may have contributed to the girl's death. But, the Court of Appeals says, by the time defendants had planned to declare the death a homicide, the medical officer had already noted the girl's body had bone fractures and liver lacerations which were not consistent with any other cause of death.