Evidence — gang affiliation

Listen to this article

United States Court of Appeals For the Seventh Circuit

Civil

Evidence — gang affiliation

Even if it was error to admit Facebook photographs of the plaintiff making gang signs, the error was harmless.

“The defendants—we’re not sure why—don’t defend the admission of the photographs (though neither do they, as the plaintiff mistakenly insists in his reply brief, ‘concede that it was an abuse of discretion for the court to allow the photographs into evidence’), but argue only that any error in admitting them was harmless. We agree. Morrow’s case rested entirely on the highly implausible proposition, supported by two extremely unreliable witnesses (him and Bell), that the police fabricated the drug bust—simply arrested four persons at random, one of them only 14 years old, because officer May wanted to be reassigned from patrol duty to the narcotics squad, though no evidence was presented that he wanted that, that he wouldn’t have had to do surveillance as a narcotics officer, that he was too timid or decrepit to do surveillance, that assignment as a narcotics officer would have paid more, that it would have been a safer job, that he was a drug addict himself, or that he was a rogue officer and would have shaken down drug dealers had he been rewarded for the drug bust that snagged Morrow by being made a narcotics officer.”

Affirmed.

12-1329 Morrow v. May

Appeal from the United States District Court for the Northern District of Illinois, Kocoras, J., Posner, J.