CA7: “We’re not inclined to construct a [4A] constitutional basis for [plaintiff’s] claims when she has failed to do so herself”

Plaintiff is a lawyer who attempted to report a $22M theft committed by a client learned in unprivileged information. The state ignored her. Ultimately, she was charged as an aider and abetter of the client, and acquitted at trial. She then sued over the prosecution and lost on prosecutorial immunity grounds. She also framed a Fourth Amendment claim as a malicious prosecution claim and lost that too for statute of limitations and failure to flesh it out so the court would understand it. Katz-Crank v. Haskett, 2016 U.S. App. LEXIS 21855 (7th Cir. Dec. 8, 2016)*:

3. Claims Against the State Officials and Investigators

The state officials and the county investigators do not enjoy absolute immunity from suit in their individual capacities, so we turn now to the substance of the federal claims against them. Katz Crank brings claims under § 1983 for malicious prosecution, abuse of process, and a violation of the Fourth and Fourteenth Amendments. The complaint doesn’t identify any constitutional basis for the first two claims, and Katz Crank’s brief doesn’t either. Indeed, her brief doesn’t address the substance of these claims at all; she focuses instead on the scope of the defendants’ immunity under the Indiana Tort Claims Act. We’re not inclined to construct a constitutional basis for Katz Crank’s claims when she has failed to do so herself. In the interest of completeness, however, we note that the Fourth Amendment claim doesn’t appear to be one for false arrest; that claim would be time barred in any event. See Wallace v. Kato, 549 U.S. 384, 391 (2007) (explaining that the limitations period for a Fourth Amendment claim for arrest without probable cause begins to run when the detainee appears before a magistrate). Rather, the Fourth Amendment claim appears to be simply a repackaged claim for malicious prosecution.

Our circuit doesn’t permit this maneuver; we’ve held that a federal claim for malicious prosecution implicates (or at most may implicate) the right to due process, not the Fourth Amendment, and that no federal malicious prosecution As we’ve noted, however, Katz Crank hasn’t made this argument because she hasn’t bothered to identify the basis of her federal claims (other than pointing very generally to the Fourth and Fourteenth Amendments). Nor has she made any effort to explain how the allegations in her complaint suffice to state a federal malicious prosecution claim. Our own review convinces us that they do not.