III. THE COURT SHOULD PROVIDE VICTIMS OF MALICIOUS PROSECUTION A FOURTH AMENDMENT REMEDY AS A MATTER OF GOOD PUBLIC POLICY The Fourth Amendment is well-suited to ground Section 1983 claims by individuals seeking remedies for extended pre-trial detention due to police misconduct and improper probable cause. As the plurality opinion in Albright noted, “[t]he Framers considered the matter of pretrial deprivations of liberty and drafted the Fourth Amendment to address it….We have in the past noted the Fourth Amendment’s relevance to the deprivations of liberty that go hand in hand with criminal prosecutions.” Albright v. Oliver, 510 U.S. at 274 (citing Gerstein v. Pugh, 420 U.S. at 114). The availability of a Fourth Amendment remedy ensures …show more content…
This includes the availability of damages from the point a person has been initially detained without probable cause until the ultimate termination of the underlying criminal prosecution. John R. Williams, Beyond Police Misconduct and False Arrest: Expanding the Scope of 42 U.S.C. § 1983 Litigation, 8 Suffolk J. Trial & App. Adv. 39, 42-43 (2003). Fourth Amendment malicious prosecution plaintiffs also benefit from a more favorable statute of limitations. Other constitutional claims, including claims for false arrest, accrue from the date of the initial arrest. A malicious prosecution action accrues only upon the ultimate termination of the underlying prosecution in the plaintiff’s favor. Albright v. Oliver, 510 U.S. at 280 (Ginsburg J.); see also Albright v. Oliver, 975 F.2d at 345. An approach that restricts federal malicious prosecution claims to the procedural due process protection of the Fourteenth Amendment, such as that applied by the Seventh Circuit, risks denying the wrongfully convicted access to a federal Constitutional damages remedy except in the very few instances where a state refuses one. See e.g. Newsome v. McCabe, 256 F. 3d at