Caseflicks

Supreme Court of the United States • 1993

Buckley v. Fitzsimmons

509 U.S. 259 | 113 S. Ct. 2606 | 125 L. Ed. 2d 209 | 1993 U.S. LEXIS 4400

Full access

Unlock the video and quiz

The written brief is free to read below. Subscribe to watch the video explainer and take the quiz.

Create an account Log in

Takeaway

In short, this case holds that absolute prosecutorial immunity protects advocacy in the judicial process, not police-style investigation before probable cause or public statements to the press; those functions receive only qualified immunity.

Background

After the highly publicized 1983 rape and murder of Jeanine Nicarico, Du Page County prosecutors and sheriff’s officers investigated petitioner Thomas Buckley. Buckley alleged that, before there was probable cause to arrest him, the prosecutors worked alongside police investigators, rejected three inconclusive bootprint analyses, and searched for an expert willing to identify Buckley’s boot as the source of a print at the crime scene. They allegedly obtained a favorable but unreliable opinion from anthropologist Louise Robbins.

A special grand jury was later convened to investigate the unsolved crime. Buckley was indicted, arrested, and held on a $3 million bond. At trial, Robbins’s testimony was central to the prosecution’s case, but the jury deadlocked. Buckley remained jailed for two additional years, until the charges were dropped after Robbins died and another person confessed.

Buckley brought a damages action under 42 U.S.C. § 1983 against the prosecutors, alleging, among other things, fabrication of bootprint evidence during the preliminary investigation. He also alleged that State’s Attorney Fitzsimmons made false and inflammatory statements, and released Buckley’s mug shots, at a press conference announcing the indictment shortly before a primary election. The District Court granted the prosecutors absolute immunity on the fabrication claim but not on the press-conference claim. The Seventh Circuit held that absolute immunity applied to both. The Supreme Court reversed as to both challenged immunity rulings, while expressly leaving open whether the alleged conduct was protected by qualified immunity and assuming that Buckley had adequately alleged actionable constitutional violations.

Issues

Issue #1

Whether prosecutors have absolute immunity under § 1983 for allegedly fabricating evidence during a preliminary, pre-arrest investigation of an unsolved crime.

Holding

No. Prosecutors receive only qualified immunity, not absolute immunity, when they perform investigative functions normally performed by police or detectives before they have probable cause to arrest a suspect.

Reasoning

Section 1983 contains no express immunity defense, and qualified immunity is the ordinary rule for public officials. Absolute immunity is a narrow exception, available only when the official seeking it shows that the particular function has a firm basis in common-law immunity and is sufficiently connected to the judicial process. The inquiry is functional: it turns on what the prosecutor was doing, not simply on the prosecutor’s title or on where the plaintiff’s injury ultimately occurred.

Under Imbler v. Pachtman, a prosecutor has absolute immunity for initiating and pursuing a prosecution and for conduct intimately associated with the judicial phase of the case. That protection can include professional evaluation of evidence assembled by police and trial preparation after the prosecutor has decided to seek an indictment. But Imbler and Burns v. Reed also distinguish these advocacy functions from administrative and investigative work, for which a prosecutor ordinarily receives only qualified immunity.

Buckley alleged that the prosecutors sought a favorable bootprint expert while working hand in hand with sheriff’s detectives during the preliminary investigation of an unsolved crime. At that stage, the prosecutors did not contend that they had probable cause to arrest Buckley or begin judicial proceedings. Their work was therefore investigative: they were searching for clues and corroboration that might establish probable cause, rather than evaluating an existing case for presentation in court.

The Court rejected the Seventh Circuit’s focus on whether the alleged injury arose during later criminal proceedings. Immunity attaches to the function performed, not to the eventual location or timing of the harm. Likewise, the later use of evidence before a grand jury or at trial cannot retroactively convert earlier investigative conduct into protected advocacy.

No historical common-law tradition gave prosecutors absolute immunity for fabricating evidence during the preliminary investigation of an unsolved crime. It would also be anomalous to give a prosecutor absolute immunity for personally conducting investigative work while Burns affords only qualified immunity when a prosecutor merely advises police about an unarrested suspect. When prosecutors and police perform the same investigative function, they receive the same level of immunity.

Issue #2

Whether a prosecutor has absolute immunity under § 1983 for allegedly false and prejudicial statements made to the press at a press conference announcing an indictment.

Holding

No. A prosecutor’s out-of-court statements to the media are protected, at most, by qualified immunity.

Reasoning

The common law did not recognize absolute immunity for a prosecutor’s or attorney’s statements to the press. Although attorneys historically enjoyed absolute privilege for relevant statements made in judicial proceedings, out-of-court statements generally received only a good-faith form of protection. Fitzsimmons identified no historical basis for extending absolute immunity to his press-conference remarks.

The functional approach leads to the same result. Conducting a press conference is not the initiation of a prosecution, presentation of the State’s case, or preparation for a judicial proceeding. A prosecutor making public comments is not acting as an advocate before a court merely because the comments concern a pending prosecution.

Press communications may be an important part of a prosecutor’s job and may serve a public purpose, but prosecutors in that setting function like other executive officials who communicate with the public. Qualified immunity is presumptively sufficient for executive officials, and policy concerns alone cannot create a new category of absolute immunity under § 1983.

The Court therefore rejected the Seventh Circuit’s theory that absolute immunity depended on the fact that any constitutional injury from the statements would materialize only through later judicial proceedings. That theory improperly shifted attention away from the prosecutor’s specific conduct and role.

Concurrences

Justice Scalia

Reasoning

Justice Scalia agreed that neither alleged function was absolutely immune because the respondents failed to show a well-established common-law privilege for fabricating evidence in a preliminary investigation or for making out-of-court statements to the press in 1871, when § 1983 was enacted. In his view, that absence of historical support made the result straightforward, regardless of any policy arguments favoring broader immunity.

He joined the Court’s opinion but expressed reservations about the historical grounding and vagueness of the broader principle that prosecutors receive absolute immunity for advocacy-related preparation before judicial proceedings begin. He agreed that prosecutors cannot properly claim advocacy status before probable cause to arrest exists, but he urged the Court in future cases to consult common-law history more precisely to identify when pre-proceeding conduct is privileged.

Justice Scalia also stressed that the defendant bears the burden of establishing absolute immunity. If history does not clearly support the claimed privilege, the prosecutor loses the immunity defense. At the same time, he suggested that many claims challenging preparation of false evidence may fail at the pleading stage because mere preparation, as distinct from a constitutionally harmful use of the evidence, may not itself state a § 1983 claim.

Dissents

Justice Kennedy

Reasoning

Justice Kennedy, joined by Chief Justice Rehnquist and Justices White and Souter, agreed that Fitzsimmons lacked absolute immunity for statements at the press conference. He disagreed, however, with the Court’s denial of absolute immunity for the prosecutors’ interactions with the bootprint experts, which he regarded as preparation for prosecution rather than police investigation.

In his view, consulting and evaluating a potential expert witness—even before indictment and before probable cause is fully established—can be a classic advocacy function. The bootprint was plainly central to the prospective prosecution, and the prosecutors’ work with experts could reasonably be understood as assessing whether the testimony could be admitted and whether it would persuade a jury. Subjecting such early witness preparation to damages suits, he argued, would undermine the independent judgment and careful preparation that Imbler sought to protect.

Justice Kennedy objected to what he understood as the majority’s probable-cause boundary between investigative and advocacy conduct. That line, he argued, sits uneasily with absolute immunity for malicious prosecution, a claim that by definition alleges action without probable cause. It could also encourage prosecutors to seek indictments prematurely in order to obtain the shelter of absolute immunity.

He maintained that the functional approach requires a fact-sensitive inquiry rather than a temporal bright line. Prosecutors and police may examine the same evidence before probable cause exists, yet serve different functions: police may be deciding whether to make an arrest, while prosecutors may be determining whether and how evidence could be presented to a grand jury or jury. Conversely, a prosecutor can still conduct unprotected police-style investigation after probable cause or indictment. On the allegations here, he would have classified the expert consultation as protected advocacy preparation.