Police Officers May Violate Suspect's Due Process Rights by Withholding Exculpatory Evidence from Prosecutors, Causing a Lengthy Post-Arrest Detention

In Tatum v. Moody, published September 17, 2014, the 9th Circuit affirmed a jury verdict in favor of a man who was held after arrest for 27 months on suspicion of committing multiple robberies, against police officers who withheld exculpatory evidence from the prosecutors in the case.  After the plaintiff was arrested, robberies with the same modus operandi as those the plaintiff was suspected of committing occurred, and a suspect was arrested for those robberies.  The officers did not reveal to prosecutors that another suspect had been arrested.  Instead, they announced in their reports that their arrest of the plaintiff had ended the spree of robberies.  After two preliminary hearings, prosecutors finally learned of the second suspect, and that his fingerprints matched those on evidence from a robbery of which the plaintiff was accused.  The prosecutors immediately dropped the charges against the plaintiff, who was later found factually innocent.  The 9th Circuit held that the plaintiff stated a cause of action for violation of the 14th Amendment Due Process Clause, because his due process right to liberty was infringed by his lengthy imprisonment based on the officers' deliberate indifference to his rights.  The court limited the constitutional rule it announced to detentions of unusual length, caused by the investigating officers' failure to disclose highly exculpatory evidence to prosecutors, and due  to conduct that is culpable because the officers understood the risks to the suspect's rights from withholding the information or were deliberately indifferent to those risks.