By: Derek Hawkins//August 19, 2019//
7th Circuit Court of Appeals
Case Name: Refugio Ruiz-Cortez v City of Chicago, et al.
Case No.: 18-1078
Officials: HAMILTON, BARRETT, and ST. EVE, Circuit Judges.
Focus: Sufficiency of Evidence
Glenn Lewellen, a dirty cop with the Chicago Police Department (CPD), arrested Refugio RuizCortez for possessing cocaine. Lewellen served as the key witness at the trial, where Ruiz-Cortez was convicted. RuizCortez then spent a decade in prison before the federal government discovered Lewellen’s crimes, which included drug conspiracy, racketeering, and, according to the government, perjury at Ruiz-Cortez’s trial. The government prosecuted Lewellen and moved to vacate Ruiz-Cortez’s conviction, recognizing that without Lewellen’s testimony there was no evidence to prosecute Ruiz-Cortez.
Ruiz-Cortez sued the City of Chicago and Lewellen for violating his constitutional rights. See 42 U.S.C. § 1983. He complained that the City and Lewellen withheld material impeachment evidence—namely, evidence of Lewellen’s drug and racketeering crimes. See Giglio v. United States, 405 U.S. 150 (1972); Brady v. Maryland, 373 U.S. 83 (1963). The district court dismissed the claim against the City at summary judgment, concluding that there was no evidence of municipal liability. See Monell v. Dep’t of Social Servs., 436 U.S. 658 (1978). A jury later found for Lewellen, despite his refusal to testify based on the Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination.
We affirm the dismissal of the City. Ruiz-Cortez failed to marshal the evidence needed to meet Monell’s high standard. But we vacate the judgment for Lewellen and remand for a new trial against him. The district court allowed Lewellen to offer innocent explanations for his Fifth Amendment invocation, ones that fly in the face of Fifth Amendment law, and it then failed to instruct the jury about when a Fifth Amendment invocation is proper. Those errors, taken together, made for a fundamentally unfair trial.
Affirmed in part. Vacated and remanded.