Hamilton v. Village of Oak Lawn

735 F.3d 967, 2013 WL 6087380, 2013 U.S. App. LEXIS 23481
CourtCourt of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit
DecidedNovember 20, 2013
DocketNo. 12-3174
StatusPublished
Cited by6 cases

This text of 735 F.3d 967 (Hamilton v. Village of Oak Lawn) is published on Counsel Stack Legal Research, covering Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit primary law. Counsel Stack provides free access to over 12 million legal documents including statutes, case law, regulations, and constitutions.

Bluebook
Hamilton v. Village of Oak Lawn, 735 F.3d 967, 2013 WL 6087380, 2013 U.S. App. LEXIS 23481 (7th Cir. 2013).

Opinion

POSNER, Circuit Judge.

Allan Lorincz, a man in his mid-80s retired from the University of Chicago Medical Center, where he had been a distinguished dermatologist, was dying of Parkinson’s disease in the spring of 2010 when, according to the plaintiff, Maisha Hamilton, he hired her to help him in his home with various “end-of-life tasks.” She was a friend of a wayward daughter of Lorincz. A defrocked physician, the daughter was, during the events giving rise to this law-suit, serving jail time for criminal contempt.

After working 88 hours for Lorincz, Hamilton asked him for $5,720 in back wages ($65 an hour times 88 hours). In response to her request he gave her a check for $10,000, the $4,280 difference representing, according to her, a “bonus.” Two other adult children of Lorincz were told, in a phone call surprisingly from Hamilton herself, that their father was dying and had just given her a $10,000 check. Knowing that Hamilton had a criminal conviction for fraud, they suspected that she’d extracted the check by preying on the weakness of their father’s mind in his terminal state. On the basis of Hamilton’s call, one of the children (Alice Dale) phoned the police and told the dispatcher who answered the phone that Hamilton was taking advantage of their desperately impaired father to obtain money to which she was not entitled. The other child (Donald Lorincz) went to their father’s house.

Hamilton, who was at the house when the police arrived to investigate Alice’s [969]*969accusation, asked them to let her leave with her check. They told her she couldn’t leave — with or without it. Although Lor-incz told the police that he wanted Hamilton to have the $10,000 and wanted the' police to leave, they remained for about two hours, trying to determine whether the children’s accusation of elder abuse warranted arresting Hamilton or taking other measures. From the children and from Hamilton herself the police learned that she was not a home health care provider but a convicted fraudster. She had been a psychologist, but her license had been revoked after her felony conviction for a $435,000 Medicaid fraud. See People v. Hamilton-Bennett, No 02 CR 16455 (Cook County Circuit Court, Sept. 21, 2004). The police also learned that Lor-incz already had professional home health care aides when Hamilton had “rushed” to his side; that another person at the residence (Davy Cady) who was not a member of Lorincz’s family had for unknown reasons been offered $5,000 by Lorincz; and that thinking Lorincz was on the verge of death Hamilton had summoned a notary public to witness him grant a power of attorney to her.

Although we’re not certain that the police knew it at the time, Hamilton has a history of bizarre lawsuits against government officials. She had attempted to intervene as a plaintiff in the Justice Department’s prosecution of Illinois Governor Blagojevich, arguing that in retaliation for her reporting 40 incidents of public corruption he had conspired to kidnap her and force her into involuntary servitude, had “destroyed Sankofa World, a $900 million ‘edutainment’ theme park that Hamilton was developing in the Florida panhandle,” and had thwarted business ventures that she had negotiated with Daimler Chrysler, Lockheed Martin, and a Ghanaian exporter of honey. United States v. Blagojevich, No. 08 CR 888, ECF Dkt. No. 527, 743 F.Supp.2d 794 (N.D.Ill. July 27, 2010). She had also tried to remove a state perjury prosecution against her to federal district court on the ground that the prosecutors had conspired to-kidnap and enslave her in order to suppress her testimony about corruption. People v. Hamilton-Bennett, No. 05 C 7169, ECF Dkt. No. 1 (N.D.Ill. Dec. 22, 2005). And she had sued the attorney general of Illinois, the governor of Virginia, and dozens of others alleging a conspiracy to enslave her by having caused her to be arrested for her Medicaid fraud. Hamilton v. Madigan, No. 10 C 6449, ECF Dkt. No. 1 (N.D.Ill. Oct. 7, 2010).

So the police had entered a house in which it appeared that two delusional persons (Davy Cady was the other, as the reader is about to discover) had sought large sums of money and a power of attorney from a dying old man in the absence of any members of the man’s family. (Regarding Cady see, e.g., Cady v. Sheahan, 467 F.3d 1057, 1063 (7th Cir.2006); Cady v. Village of McCook, 57 Fed.Appx. 261, 263 (7th Cir.2003) (“Cady denied to the district court that he was all wet and talking to himself, but conceded that he may have been perspiring heavily, may have doused himself with water to cool down, or may have been practicing a foreign language or singing a hymn”); Cady v. Cook County, No. 02 C 8333, 2003 WL 21360898, at *4 (N.D.Ill. June 11, 2003) (suit against the Cook County law library complaining among other horrors of “the Library’s failure to provide a working heavy duty stapler with enough staples”).) No wonder the police lingered for two hours, wondering what to do. Finally they decided not to arrest Hamilton but instead ordered her to leave the house, and she did — but without the $10,000 check, which the police forbade her to take.

Lorincz died four months after the police visit. Hamilton sued his estate, claim[970]*970ing that it owed her $74,610 in unpaid wages, including the $10,000 she hadn’t gotten because the police hadn’t let her take the check. In re Estate of Allan Lorincz, 10 P 6117 (Cook County Probate Division, Oct. 12, 2010). A month after losing that suit she filed the present one in federal district court under 42 U.S.C. § 1983, charging the police with violating her Fourth Amendment rights first by detaining her in the doctor’s house and then by forcing her to leave it. Additional federal claims in her complaint — that Alice Dale and Donald Lorincz had conspired with the police to violate Hamilton’s rights and that the Village that employed the police officers was liable for their violations of her rights — fell with her Fourth Amendment charge against the police. Sow v. Fortville Police Department, 636 F.3d 293, 304-05 (7th Cir.2011). The judge relinquished jurisdiction over her remaining claim, a state law claim of tortious interference with contract.

Detaining a person for two hours is too long to constitute a Terry stop, a type of police detention that is constitutionally permissible without need for probable cause to arrest. United States v. Place, 462 U.S. 696, 709-10, 103 S.Ct. 2637, 77 L.Ed.2d 110 (1983); see also United States v. Alpert, 816 F.2d 958, 964 (4th Cir.1987). By the end of the two hours, after talking to the children, to Lorincz’s professional home helpers, and to Hamilton and Cady, the police had probable cause to arrest Hamilton. But we don’t know at just what point in the two-hour investigation they acquired that probable cause. If what may have begun as a Terry stop became by passage of time an arrest before the police acquired probable cause, the arrest was unlawful. E.g., Sibron v. New York, 392 U.S. 40, 62-63, 88 S.Ct. 1889, 20 L.Ed.2d 917 (1968); Club Retro, L.L.C. v. Hilton, 568 F.3d 181, 204 (5th Cir.2009).

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Cite This Page — Counsel Stack

Bluebook (online)
735 F.3d 967, 2013 WL 6087380, 2013 U.S. App. LEXIS 23481, Counsel Stack Legal Research, https://law.counselstack.com/opinion/hamilton-v-village-of-oak-lawn-ca7-2013.