As a general matter, police officers are immune from civil liability for taking a person into custody for alleged criminal conduct without first obtaining an arrest warrant, provided that at the time the officer had “probable cause” to believe that the person had committed a felony. This rule is contained in statute, RSA 507:8-d, and is also supported by the common law doctrine of “official immunity”, which protects police officers when they make discretionary decisions that are not wanton or reckless.
In this case, a Manchester police officer arrested the plaintiff for the serious charges of kidnapping and falsifying physical evidence, and the lesser charge of simple assault. The basis for the arrest was that a kidnapping victim had identified him from a photographic lineup, and that he matched the victim’s description of the assailant. Following his arrest, a grand jury indicted him for the serious charges. However, before trial the charges were dismissed because the complaining witness moved out of the country. This occurred only after the plaintiff had been in jail in pretrial confinement for about seventeen months.
Following his release, the plaintiff sued the officer and the city for the civil torts of false imprisonment and malicious prosecution. He alleged that the arrest itself was unreasonable, because the complaining witness alleged the assailant to be a black male in his early twenties, five feet 10 inches tall, with short dark hair and a beard. The plaintiff, at the time of the arrest, was a black male, aged 33, with a bald head and clean-shaven face. The Superior Court granted a motion to dismiss the case, finding that the department and the officer were immune from civil suit under both RSA 507:8-d and the doctrine of official immunity because the indictment returned by the grand jury acted to show that there was probable cause for the arrest.
Upon appeal, the Supreme Court reversed. It found that the issue of whether there was adequate probable cause at the time of the arrest was a different issue than whether there was adequate proof offered before the grand jury to send the alleged assailant to trial. Accordingly, neither statutory nor common law immunity principles protected the department or the officer from having to fully litigate this matter.