The lawyer for a man whose illegal arrest led to more than eight years behind bars pleaded with the Supreme Court on Monday to allow his client to sue the police who arrested him.
To do otherwise, lawyer Kenneth Flaxman said, the justice system would be saying, "It's just tough. You're seized for 8 1/2 years, and you can't go to state court, and you can't go to federal court."
Flaxman's client, Andre Wallace, was freed from prison in 2002, after Illinois courts ruled his arrest was illegal, reversed his murder conviction and caused prosecutors to drop charges against him. He had been in custody since his arrest in 1994 for the killing of John Handy.
Yet when Wallace filed a federal civil rights lawsuit a year later against the Chicago police officers who arrested him, federal judges told him he had waited too long and dismissed the suit.
On Monday, justices expressed some sympathy for his predicament, but also some skepticism that he would prevail.