{"id":42346,"date":"2020-02-13T10:58:03","date_gmt":"2020-02-13T15:58:03","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/fourthamendment.com\/?p=42346"},"modified":"2020-02-13T10:58:03","modified_gmt":"2020-02-13T15:58:03","slug":"ca11-the-heck-bar-is-to-the-cause-of-action-it-isnt-jurisdictional","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/fourthamendment.com\/?p=42346","title":{"rendered":"CA11: The Heck<\/em> bar is to the cause of action; it isn\u2019t jurisdictional"},"content":{"rendered":"

The Heck bar is to the cause of action; it isn\u2019t jurisdictional. Teagan v. City of McDonough<\/a>, 2020 U.S. App. LEXIS 4055 (11th Cir. Feb. 11, 2020):
\n<\/p>\n

First, the Supreme Court’s own language suggests that Heck deprives the plaintiff of a cause of action\u2014not that it deprives a court of jurisdiction. See id. at 489 (“We do not engraft an exhaustion requirement upon \u00a7 1983, but rather deny the existence of a cause of action. … Just as a cause of action for malicious prosecution does not accrue until the criminal proceedings have terminated in the plaintiff’s favor … so also a \u00a7 1983 cause of action for damages attributable to an unconstitutional conviction or sentence does not accrue until the conviction or sentence has been invalidated.”). As a result, some of our sister circuits have concluded that Heck is an affirmative defense and not a jurisdictional rule. See, e.g., Carr v. O’Leary, 167 F.3d 1124, 1126 (7th Cir. 1999) (“The failure to plead the Heck defense in a timely fashion was a waiver[.]”); Washington v. Los Angeles Cty. Sheriff’s Dep’t, 833 F.3d 1048, 1056 (9th Cir. 2016) (“[C]ompliance with Heck most closely resembles the mandatory administrative exhaustion of PLRA claims, which constitutes an affirmative defense and not a pleading requirement.”). We have not definitively answered that question. See Dixon v. Hodges, 887 F.3d 1235, 1237-40 (11th Cir. 2018) (describing Heck in dicta as “strip[ping] a district court of jurisdiction,” but reversing the district court’s dismissal based on Heck without directly addressing whether Heck is jurisdictional); Topa v. Melendez, 739 F. App’x 516, 518 & n.1 (11th Cir. 2018) (noting that “other circuits have treated Heck as an affirmative defense subject to waiver”).<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The Heck bar is to the cause of action; it isn\u2019t jurisdictional. Teagan v. City of McDonough, 2020 U.S. App. LEXIS 4055 (11th Cir. Feb. 11, 2020):<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[45,121],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-42346","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-45","category-abstention"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/fourthamendment.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/42346","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/fourthamendment.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/fourthamendment.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/fourthamendment.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/fourthamendment.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=42346"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/fourthamendment.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/42346\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":42347,"href":"http:\/\/fourthamendment.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/42346\/revisions\/42347"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/fourthamendment.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=42346"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/fourthamendment.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=42346"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/fourthamendment.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=42346"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}