Weekly Case Digests May 4, 2020 May 8, 2020.

Byline: Rick Benedict

7th Circuit Digests

7th Circuit Court of Appeals

Case Name: National Immigrant Justice Center v. United States Department of Justice

Case No.: 19-2088

Officials: RIPPLE, SYKES, and SCUDDER, Circuit Judges.

Focus: Freedom of Information Act Deliberate Process Privilege

Receiving confidential advice is essential to sound decision-making. The law of privilege owes its existence to that reality and finds application in many settings, including decision-making within the executive branch of our national government. Consider the setting front and center in this appealimmigration. Congress has empowered the Attorney General with enforcement, rulemaking, and adjudicatory authority. The exercise of that power is of great consequence on many fronts, including in the direction of the nation's immigration policy and the lives of many noncitizen immigrants. Those very same reasons explain why the Attorney General, as part of exercising the responsibility conferred by Congress, will seek and receive confidential input from a range of advisors within the Department of Justice.

Unsettled by decisions made by Attorneys General across three presidential administrations, the National Immigrant Justice Center invoked the Freedom of Information Act and sought access to all records of communications to and from the Attorney General in certain immigration appeals certified for executive decision. The Department of Justice honored aspects of the requests but withheld many responsive documents on the basis of FOIA's exemption for communications protected by the deliberative process privilege. The district court found the withholding proper, and so do we. To conclude otherwise would chill the deliberations that department and agency heads like the Attorney General undertake in confidence to execute the weighty responsibilities of their offices.

Affirmed

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7th Circuit Court of Appeals

Case Name: Jeffrey Orr, et al. v. Louis Shicker, et al.

Case No.: 19-1380; 19-1387; 19-1732

Officials: WOOD, Chief Judge, and BAUER and BRENNAN, Circuit Judges.

Focus: Abuse of Discretion Class Certification

Plaintiffs are current and former inmates of the Illinois Department of Corrections (IDOC) who have been diagnosed with hepatitis C. They filed this lawsuit over ten years ago after fruitless efforts to receive treatment for their disease while incarcerated. Invoking 42 U.S.C. 1983, their complaint alleges that the diagnostic and treatment protocols for IDOC inmates with hepatitis C violate the Eighth and Fourteenth Amendments. After many years, many motions, and the consolidation of many cases, the district court granted class certification and preliminary injunctive relief. The defendantsIDOC, Wexford Health Sources, Inc., and several doctorsasked us to accept an appeal from that decision under Federal Rule of Civil Procedure 23(f). We agreed to do so and now reverse the grant of class certification and vacate the injunction.

Vacated and remanded

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7th Circuit Court of Appeals

Case Name: John Hall, et al. v. City of Chicago

Case No.: 19-1347

Officials: BAUER, EASTERBROOK, and ST. EVE, Circuit Judges.

Focus: Unlawful-stop Claim

Plaintiffs in this case ask us to address the proper scope of a Terry stop. Police officers stopped Plaintiffs numerous times for violating a City ordinance while they were panhandling on the streets of Chicago. During the course of these street stops, the officers typically asked Plaintiffs to produce identification ("ID"). The officers then proceeded to use the provided ID cards to search for any outstanding warrants for their arrest or investigative alertsa process we will call a "warrant check" or a "name check." Plaintiffs contend the officers would not return their IDs to them until after completing the name checks.

Plaintiffs brought an action under 42 U.S.C. 1983 against the City of Chicago, claiming that name checks unnecessarily prolong street stops and that the delays constitute unreasonable detentions in violation of the Fourth Amendment. They also assert that the City maintained an unconstitutional policy or practice of performing these name checks pursuant to Monell v. Department of Social Services of City of New York, 436 U.S. 658 (1978). Plaintiffs' Monell claim arises under several possible theories: that the Chicago Police Department ("CPD") Special Order regulating name checks omitted essential constitutional limits, that CPD failed to train on these same constitutional limits, and that former Superintendent Garry McCarthy promulgated an unconstitutional policy by promoting name checks in conjunction with every street stop.

We conclude that officers may execute a name check on an individual incidental to a proper stop under Terry v. Ohio, 392 U.S. 1, 16 (1968), as long as the resulting delay is reasonable. Plaintiffs have failed to establish that they suffered an underlying constitutional violation such that the City can be held liable under Monell. We therefore affirm.

Affirmed

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7th Circuit Court of Appeals

Case Name: U.S. Futures Exchange, LLC, et al. v. Board of Trade of the City of Chicago, Inc., et al.

Case No.: 18-3558

Officials: MANION, KANNE, and BRENNAN, Circuit Judges.

Focus: Anti-trust Violation

This antitrust case comes to us from the commodities and futures marketplace. As USFE tells it, Defendants torpedoed its new futures exchange by delaying the regulatory approval process and enacting an internal rule that deprived the new exchange of liquidity. The real question is whether Defendants violated the antitrust laws in doing so. We hold they did not.

Affirmed

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7th Circuit Court of Appeals

Case Name: United States of America v. Edmundo Manriquez-Alvarado

Case No.: 19-2521

Officials: EASTERBROOK, KANNE, and ST. EVE, Circuit Judges.

Focus: Immigration Removal Order

Edmundo Manriquez-Alvarado, a citizen of Mexico, has entered the United States repeatedly by stealth. How often we do not know, but the record shows that he was ordered removed in 2008, 2010, 2012, 2014, and 2017, each time following a criminal conviction. (His record includes convictions for burglary, domestic violence, trafficking illegal drugs, and unauthorized reentry.) The gaps between the removal orders stem from the time it takes to catch him, plus time he spends in prison following his convictions.

Manriquez-Alvarado was found in the United States yet again in 2018 and indicted for illegal reentry. 8 U.S.C. 1326(a), (b)(2). His drug crime is defined by 8 U.S.C. 1101(a)(43)(B) as an "aggravated felony". This increases the maximum punishment for unauthorized reentry. After the district court denied his motion to dismiss the indictment, Manriquez-Alvarado pleaded guilty and was sentenced to 39 months' imprisonment. The plea reserved the right to contest on appeal the denial of the motion to dismiss.

All of the convictions for reentry rest on the 2008 removal order. Manriquez-Alvarado contends that this order is invalid because immigration officials never had "jurisdiction" to remove him. That's because a document captioned "Notice to Appear" that was served on him in February 2008 did not include a date for a hearing. Pereira v. Sessions, 138 S. Ct. 2105 (2018), holds that a document missing this information does not satisfy the statutory requirements, 8 U.S.C. 1229(a)(1), for a Notice to Appear. We held in Ortiz-Santiago v. Barr, 924 F.3d 956 (7th Cir. 2019), that Pereira identifies a claims processing doctrine rather than a rule limiting the jurisdiction of immigration officials. Manriquez-Alvarado wants us to...