Wilson v. Midland County
Case Summary
Years after Erma Wilson completed a suspended sentence for a crime she maintains she did not commit, she learned that one of her prosecutors was, at the very same time he prosecuted her, also moonlighting for the judge who presided over her case. Wilson brought an action pursuant to 42 U.S.C. § 1983 (“Section 1983”) to redress this obvious violation of her right to due process.
The district court dismissed Wilson’s case in light of the Fifth Circuit’s earlier decision in Randell v. Johnson, and a panel of the Fifth Circuit affirmed. Randell held, based on its interpretation of the Supreme Court’s decision in Heck v. Humphrey, that whenever the success of a plaintiff’s Section 1983 claim would necessarily imply the invalidity of a conviction or sentence, the plaintiff must demonstrate a “favorable termination” of the underlying criminal proceedings. For plaintiffs like Wilson who are not incarcerated—unlike the plaintiff in Heck—that rule effectively acts as an absolute bar to their ability to vindicate their constitutional rights in a federal court.
Arguing that Randell is a grievous overreading of Heck, Wilson asked the full Fifth Circuit to rehear her case en banc and consider whether to overrule Randell. The Court agreed to do so.
CAC filed an amicus brief in support of Wilson before the en banc Court arguing that Randell should be overruled for two reasons.
First, we explained that imposing a favorable-termination rule on non-custodial plaintiffs is at odds with the text and history of Section 1983. Section 1983 was passed to create a remedy for injustices wrought by corrupt state judiciaries across the South in the aftermath of the Civil War. Because state courts were often powerless to stop the violence and abuses inflicted on formerly enslaved people and their allies by the Klan, or worse, were actively working in concert with Klansmen, Section 1983 established federal courts as the chief guardians of the people’s constitutional rights.
Depriving non-custodial plaintiffs of a federal forum to vindicate their constitutional rights fundamentally undermines Section 1983. In Heck v. Humphrey, the incarcerated plaintiff could have filed a federal habeas corpus petition because the federal statute codifying that writ applies to all individuals in custody. But not being in custody, Wilson could not seek a writ of habeas corpus from a federal court. Cutting off her access to Section 1983—the only other route to federal court to vindicate her constitutional rights—would leave her without a federal remedy against the precise sort of injustice inflicted by a corrupt state court that Section 1983 was enacted to address.
Second, we argued that in cases like this one, imposing a favorable-termination rule on non-custodial plaintiffs eviscerates the constitutional right to due process. When adjudicating Section 1983 cases, the Supreme Court often borrows procedural rules from the common law at the time that Section 1983 was enacted, but critically, it also requires that those rules be tailored to the particular constitutional right at stake. The latter requirement—ensuring that any borrowed tort rule serves the values and purposes of the asserted constitutional right—has been foregrounded by the Supreme Court in recent decisions.
In this case, we explained that imposition of a favorable-termination rule borrowed from the tort of malicious prosecution is inconsistent with the values and purposes of the Fourteenth Amendment’s Due Process Clause, including the guarantee of a fair trial before an impartial adjudicator. The Supreme Court has repeatedly emphasized that in a fair trial, the same person who made critical decisions in the prosecution of a case cannot also sit in judgement of that case. The Court has also made clear that the right to due process—and vindicating that right—is so important to organized society that even when a plaintiff has suffered no actual damages from a deprivation of her right to due process, she still is entitled to vindicate that right in a court of law.
Finally, we concluded that Erma Wilson’s case, in which Ralph Petty advised both the prosecutors and the judge at the same time and even wrote legal opinions adverse to Wilson, is a textbook due process violation. Due process and the right to a fair trial would be meaningless if an impossible-to-meet procedural hurdle deprived Wilson of access to a federal forum.
On September 13, 2024, the en banc Fifth Circuit issued its decision, affirming the district court’s dismissal of Wilson’s case. Although the court acknowledged that Wilson’s criminal trial was “tainted by egregious due process violations,” it concluded that Wilson could not bring a due process claim under Section 1983 premised on her state court conviction without first having her conviction “set aside, expunged, or otherwise favorably terminated.” The en banc court affirmed the expansive reading of Heck set forth in Randell and claimed that the favorable-termination requirement has deep roots in tort law rules that apply to all plaintiffs regardless of their custodial status. The court failed, however, to grapple with the practical results of wholesale importation of tort law rules to Section 1983: rendering procedural due process a hollow promise.
Judge Don Willet, along with five other judges, dissented, agreeing with our position that denying non-custodial plaintiffs access to a federal forum to vindicate their constitutional rights runs counter to the text and history of Section 1983. As Judge Willet explained, written “against a backdrop of horrific violence, terror, and subjugation,” Section 1983 was a “statute of constitutional accountability [] meant to open courthouse doors, not bolt them shut.” Its passage, as with many other Reconstruction era statutes, reflected congressional efforts to offer people an opportunity to redress constitutional violations directly in federal court without requiring the exhaustion of state remedies—an opportunity that the dissenting opinion said should be available to Wilson in this case.
The dissent also addressed the majority’s reading of Heck, taking the position that the Supreme Court did not establish a blanket rule for all plaintiffs and, instead, created a rule limited to prisoners whose claims are “closely analogous to malicious prosecution.”
Case Timeline
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March 21, 2024
CAC files amicus brief in the Fifth Circuit
Wilson v Midland CAC Amicus Brief -
May 15, 2024
Fifth Circuit hears oral arguments en banc
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September 13, 2024
Fifth Circuit issues its decision