High Court Weighs Immunity For Prosecutors Seattle Case Central To Issue Of Officials Who Lie To Get Arrest Warrants

Prosecutors who lie when seeking arrest warrants should always be shielded from being sued by innocent people who are jailed as a result, government lawyers told the Supreme Court on Tuesday.

The justices seemed skeptical, but they also had doubtful questions for the lawyer of a Seattle-area man who spent a night in jail for a burglary he did not commit. The lawyer argued against giving prosecutors absolute legal immunity in such cases.

Past Supreme Court rulings have given the nation’s prosecutors absolute immunity when they act - even dishonestly - in initiating and prosecuting a criminal case, but not when they perform administrative or investigative work.

The court will use the Seattle case to decide, sometime by June, which function prosecutors carry out when seeking an arrest warrant.

“It all boils down to how you analyze the function,” said Justice Sandra Day O’Connor.

Rodney Fletcher of Auburn, Wash., was arrested in 1993 and charged with stealing computer equipment from a school in Seattle. The charges were quickly dropped, but not before he spent a night in the King County jail.

He later sued Lynne Kalina, a county deputy prosecutor. Fletcher’s lawsuit alleged that she had made statements she should have known to be false.

Kalina filed documents that said Fletcher never had been associated with the school and did not have permission to enter it. She also said someone identified Fletcher as the man who tried to sell computer equipment taken from the school.

Fletcher in fact had done some construction work inside the school months before the burglary, so it was not surprising that his fingerprints were found there. And his lawsuit alleged that no witness linked him to the sale of the stolen computer equipment.

Before the nation’s highest court, King County Prosecutor Norman Maleng argued that Kalina was performing a prosecutorial duty when filing a sworn statement in seeking the arrest warrant.

But O’Connor and Justice David H. Souter, persistently interrupting Maleng, noted that a police officer carrying out the same procedure would not be entitled to absolute immunity.

And Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg asked Maleng, “How can the same act be prosecutorial if done by one person but investigatory if done by another?”

Maleng said that Kalina’s act should be protected because she was simultaneously deciding to begin the process of prosecuting Fletcher.

Several justices voiced doubts about the distinction Maleng and Justice Department lawyer Patricia Millett attempted to draw.

Millett said Kalina “was performing a hybrid function” that should qualify for absolute immunity because part of it was prosecutorial.

But Timothy Ford, Fletcher’s lawyer, argued that his client deserves his day in court to prove his case against Kalina.