United States District Court, N.D. Illinois, Eastern Division
MEMORANDUM OPINION AND ORDER
HON.
JORGE ALONSO UNITED STATES DISTRICT JUDGE
Plaintiff
brings this pro se civil rights action pursuant to
42 U.S.C. § 1983 against numerous Chicago police
officers and the City of Chicago, asserting claims of
excessive force, false arrest, and failure to provide medical
care. Defendants have filed a partial motion to dismiss. For
the following reasons, defendants' motion to dismiss is
granted in part and denied in part.
BACKGROUND
Plaintiff
filed this suit on June 9, 2016, while in pretrial detention
on charges stemming from the incident that is the subject of
this case. The individual defendants are all Chicago police
officers. Plaintiff alleges that, on the evening of October
23, 2014, near 7958 South Justine in Chicago, defendant
Joseph White shot plaintiff in the back of the head while he
was turned away from him, although plaintiff was unarmed,
posed no threat and had committed no crime. According to
plaintiff, White subsequently prepared a report in which he
falsely claimed that he and officers Delatorre, Brubaker, and
Morrison saw plaintiff discharge a firearm. Delatorre
allegedly “attested to the facts in the report”
and defendant Szefc “approved probable cause for
plaintiff's arrest when there clearly was none.”
(2d Am. Compl. ¶ 20, ECF No. 73.)
Plaintiff
was arrested following the shooting. Defendants Delatorre and
Mendez “were the actual arresting officers, ” and
“the remaining individual defendants abetted the false
arrest.” (Id. ¶¶ 31-32.) In
particular, according to plaintiff, defendants White, Gochee,
Delatorre, and Mendez effected plaintiff's arrest by
handcuffing his hands behind his back and forcing him to his
feet, although he had fallen to the ground, unconscious, and
was bleeding profusely from his head. Defendants provided no
medical care at the scene of the shooting. Eventually, an
ambulance arrived and took plaintiff to Advocate Christ
Hospital. While plaintiff was a patient there, he alleges,
defendants Evans, Golab, and Rider “knowingly
interfered with treatment by interrogating plaintiff
repeatedly and conducting tests on him when the hospital
staff attempted to treat him.” (Id.
¶¶ 38-39.) Further, Evans, Golab, and Rider
“forced the treaters to simply bandage Plaintiff's
wounds and release him to the defendants, ” preventing
plaintiff from recovering from his injuries without permanent
hearing loss and damage to his neck and requiring him to
undergo subsequent surgeries. (Id. ¶¶
40-41.)
Plaintiff
was subsequently charged with first degree murder and two
counts of attempted murder in an incident that took place
near the location where plaintiff was shot and at about the
same time. Plaintiff was held in Cook County Jail awaiting
trial for approximately four years, until October 2018. The
Court stayed this case during the pendency of plaintiff's
state criminal case. On December 4, 2018, plaintiff was
acquitted of all charges. Following the verdict, this Court
lifted the stay, and defendants subsequently filed the
present motion to dismiss.
ANALYSIS
“A
motion under Federal Rule of Civil Procedure 12(b)(6) tests
whether the complaint states a claim on which relief may be
granted.” Richards v. Mitcheff, 696 F.3d 635,
637 (7th Cir. 2012). Under Rule 8(a)(2), a complaint must
include “a short and plain statement of the claim
showing that the pleader is entitled to relief.”
Fed.R.Civ.P. 8(a)(2). The short and plain statement under
Rule 8(a)(2) must “‘give the defendant fair
notice of what . . . the claim is and the grounds upon which
it rests.'” Bell Atl. Corp. v. Twombly,
550 U.S. 544, 555 (2007) (quoting Conley v. Gibson,
355 U.S. 41, 47 (1957)).
Under
federal notice-pleading standards, a plaintiff's
“[f]actual allegations must be enough to raise a right
to relief above the speculative level.” Id.
Stated differently, “a complaint must contain
sufficient factual matter, accepted as true, to ‘state
a claim to relief that is plausible on its face.'”
Ashcroft v. Iqbal, 556 U.S. 662, 678 (2009) (quoting
Twombly, 550 U.S. at 570). “A claim has facial
plausibility when the plaintiff pleads factual content that
allows the court to draw the reasonable inference that the
defendant is liable for the misconduct alleged.”
Id. (citing Twombly, 550 U.S. at 556).
“In reviewing the sufficiency of a complaint under the
plausibility standard, [courts must] accept the well-pleaded
facts in the complaint as true, but [they] ‘need[ ] not
accept as true legal conclusions, or threadbare recitals of
the elements of a cause of action, supported by mere
conclusory statements.'” Alam v. Miller Brewing
Co., 709 F.3d 662, 665-66 (7th Cir. 2013) (quoting
Brooks v. Ross, 578 F.3d 574, 581 (7th Cir. 2009)).
“Section
1983 creates a ‘species of tort liability, '”
Manuel v. City of Joliet, Ill., 137 S.Ct. 911, 916
(2017) (quoting Imbler v. Pachtman, 424 U.S. 409,
417 (1976)), against any person who, under color of state
law, “subjects, or causes to be subjected, any citizen
of the United States . . . to the deprivation of any rights,
privileges, or immunities secured by the Constitution,
” 42 U.S.C. § 1983. In his Second Amended
Complaint, plaintiff asserts four claims for deprivation of
his constitutional rights pursuant to § 1983: in Count
I, excessive force against White; in Count II, false arrest
against “all individual defendants”; in Count
III, deliberate indifference to serious medical needs against
White, Gochee, Delatorre, Morrison, Mendez, Evans, Rider, and
Golab; and in Count IV[1], for municipal liability against the City
of Chicago under Monell v. Department of Social
Services, 436 U.S. 658 (1978).
I.
TIMELINESS OF CLAIMS AGAINST GOCHEE AND MORRISON
Section
1983 claims borrow the statute of limitations for
personal-injury torts in the state where the cause of action
arose. Wallace v. Kato, 549 U.S. 384, 387 (2007). In
Illinois, the relevant statute of limitations period is two
years. See id.; Dickens v. Illinois, 753
Fed.Appx. 390, 392 (7th Cir. 2018). Defendants argue that, to
the extent plaintiff asserts claims in Counts II and III
against Gochee and Morrison, the claims are time-barred
because plaintiff did not name them in either of the
complaints he filed in 2016; he first asserted claims against
them in February 2019, more than four years after he was shot
and arrested on October 23, 2014.
In
response, plaintiff argues that, under Manuel v. City of
Joliet, 903 F.3d 667 (7th Cir. 2018), his false arrest
claim did not accrue until he was released from detention.
Plaintiff is correct. See id. at 670 (“The
wrong of detention without probable cause continues for the
duration of the detention. That's the principal reason
why the claim accrues when the detention ends.”).
Plaintiff was not released from detention until October 2018,
so the Second Amended Complaint he filed in February 2019 was
well within the two-year limitations period.[2] To whatever
extent plaintiff can assert a false arrest claim against
Gochee and Morrison (as the Court will explain below, he has
not succeeded in doing so in the Second Amended Complaint),
the claim is not yet time-barred.
The
timeliness of plaintiff's medical claims against Gochee
and Morrison is another matter, but it is better left for a
later stage of the case, both because plaintiff has not
stated a denial of medical care claim against Morrison, as
the Court will explain below, and because the Court lacks
sufficient information to evaluate the timeliness of any such
claim at this time. Defendants argue that these claims do not
relate back to the filing of the original complaint, but
whether claims in an amended pleading relate back because of
a “mistake concerning the proper party's identity,
” Fed.R.Civ.P. 15(c)(1)(C)(ii), depends on “what
the party to be added knew or should have known, not on the
amending party's knowledge or its timeliness in seeking
to amend the pleading.” Williams v. City of
Chi., No. 14 C 6959, 2017 WL 1545772, at *2 (N.D. Ill.
Apr. 28, 2017) (citing Clair v. Cook Cty., Ill., No.
16 C 1334, 2017 WL 1355879, at *3 (N.D. Ill. Apr. 13, 2017)).
The Court cannot determine at this early stage “what
the defendants knew or should have ...