Civil Rights — false arrest

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United States Court of Appeals For the Seventh Circuit

Civil

Civil Rights — false arrest — statute of limitations

The statute of limitations for a false arrest claim is not tolled until the underlying criminal charge is dismissed.

“Serino argues that the statute did not begin to run until March 31, 2010, the day the state dropped his second criminal charge. He invokes Heck v. Humphrey, 512 U.S. 477 (1994), in which the Supreme Court held that a § 1983 claim based on an unconstitutional conviction does not accrue until the conviction has been invalidated. Id. at 489–90. Serino’s theory is that the Heck rule operated to delay the accrual of his false arrest claim—a claim that could imply that the charges against him were meritless—until there was no longer a pending state criminal proceeding. But this argument is a non-starter, because Heck relied on the principle ‘that civil tort actions,’ as opposed to habeas corpus petitions, ‘are not appropriate vehicles for challenging the validity of outstanding criminal judgments.’ Id. at 486 (emphasis added). And in Wallace, the Supreme Court explicitly clarified that ‘the Heck rule for deferred accrual is called into play only when there exists a “conviction or sentence that has not been … invalidated,” that is to say, an “an outstanding criminal judgment.”’ 549 U.S. at 393 (emphasis omitted). Here, as in Wallace, Serino was never convicted. As such, at the time Serino’s false arrest claim began to accrue, ‘there was in existence no criminal conviction that the cause of action would impugn.’ Id. Heck cannot help Serino here.”

Affirmed.

13-1058 Serino v. Hensley

Appeal from the United States District Court for the Southern District of Indiana, Young, J., Flaum, J.