Due Process Violation and Equal Protection Claims

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7^th Circuit Court of Appeals

Case Name: Taphia Williams, et al., v. Thomas J. Dart, et al.,

Case No.: 19-2108

Officials: KANNE, WOOD, and HAMILTON, Circuit Judges.

Focus: Due Process Violation and Equal Protection Claims

“In our society,” the Supreme Court has said, “liberty is the norm, and detention prior to trial or without trial is the carefully limited exception.” United States v. Salerno, 481 U.S. 739, 755 (1987). Not as a statistical matter, says the Bureau of Justice Statistics. See Jail Inmates in 2018, at 5 (2020), available at bjs.gov/content/pub/pdf/ji18.pdf (in 2018, 490,000 jail inmates (two thirds of total) had not been convicted of offense). To better enforce the norm and police the exceptions more carefully, Cook County, Illinois, like other jurisdictions across the country, recently revised its pretrial detention policies in favor of broader access to pretrial release.

The plaintiffs in this case allege that defendant Thomas Dart, the Cook County Sheriff, disagreed with the revised policies and substituted in their place policies of his own making that denied them release. Plaintiffs are nine black residents of Chicago, arrested and charged with felonies, whom the Cook County trial courts admitted to bail subject to electronic monitoring supervised by the Sheriff. According to plaintiffs, the Sheriff independently reviewed plaintiffs’ bail orders and decided they should not be released on those conditions. As a result, plaintiffs were neither released on monitoring nor left at liberty. Instead, they languished in the Sheriff’s jail for up to two weeks after the bail orders were issued while their families and lawyers scrambled to find out what was happening. Motions for rules to show cause were filed. Two plaintiffs were released in the dead of night, hours before the motion hearings could be held.

Plaintiffs allege federal constitutional and state-law claims on behalf of the nine named plaintiffs and a putative class of other arrestees whose bail orders were disregarded by the Sheriff. After three rounds of pleading, the district court dismissed most of the suit for failure to state a claim. Plaintiffs abandoned the balance and took this appeal. We reverse in part and remand. Plaintiffs’ allegations are sufficient to proceed on federal constitutional claims for wrongful pretrial detention and denial of equal protection, and on state-law claims for contempt of court.

Affirmed in part. Reversed and remanded in part.

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Derek A Hawkins is trademark corporate counsel for Harley-Davidson. Hawkins oversees the prosecution and maintenance of the Harley-Davidson’s international trademark portfolio in emerging markets.