Wrongful arrest & prosecution

These cases begin where a criminal case ended badly and unjustly: charges dropped, a case dismissed, an acquittal, an exoneration. Nothing about that ending compensates the person who lived through it, and nothing about it requires anyone to answer for how the case was built. That is the work of a civil claim.

Section 1983 is the federal statute that allows a person to sue government officials who violate their constitutional rights. In this area the right at issue is usually the Fourth Amendment: the rule that the government may not seize a person without probable cause. A false-arrest claim asks whether there was cause at the moment of the arrest. A malicious-prosecution claim reaches further, to the charge pursued afterward and to what the officer told prosecutors, magistrates, and grand juries to keep it alive.

Both are hard cases. Qualified immunity protects officers unless the law they broke was clearly established, and the facts usually have to be rebuilt years later from reports, dispatch logs, lab results, body-camera video, and the officer’s own sworn testimony. The firm litigates these cases through summary judgment, appeal, and trial.

Initial consultation is free. Most civil rights matters are handled on a contingency basis: you owe no attorney fee unless we recover for you.

An arrest without probable cause violates the Fourth Amendment. The firm represents people arrested on no valid basis, held on a mistaken or fabricated identification, or detained after officers knew or should have known there were no grounds. These claims often turn on what the officers knew at the moment they acted, reconstructed from reports, dispatch records, and video.

A related claim arises when the detention itself becomes the injury: someone held for days or months on a charge that could not survive a look at the file, or kept in custody after the basis for holding them disappeared.

Malicious prosecution reaches beyond the arrest to the case built afterward: a criminal charge pursued without probable cause and resolved in the accused person’s favor. These cases hold officers accountable for manufacturing or distorting the basis for a prosecution, and for the months or years a person spends fighting charges that should never have been brought.

The claim requires that the prosecution ended in the accused person’s favor, which is why the civil case usually cannot begin until the criminal case is over. It does not require proof that the officer set out to ruin someone. It requires proof that the officer pursued a charge without probable cause.

Some prosecutions are not merely mistaken. An officer writes a report that does not match the recording, a field test is reported as positive when it was not, a witness is steered toward an identification, or evidence pointing at someone else never reaches the defense.

These are among the most serious claims in this area and among the hardest to prove, because the proof is usually in the government’s own files. The firm pursues them through discovery of the investigative file, the officer’s history, and the department’s practices, and has recovered on claims that a detective left exonerating evidence out of what he told prosecutors.

An arrest used to punish or silence someone raises a First Amendment claim alongside the Fourth Amendment one. The firm has resolved matters combining false-arrest and free-speech claims, and litigates free-speech cases beyond the policing context on the First Amendment page.

The Georgia Innocence Project works to overturn wrongful convictions. Its work and this firm’s meet at the point where a conviction comes undone: a prosecution has to end in the accused person’s favor before a civil claim for it can be brought at all.

Richard C. Mitchell, Of Counsel to the firm, served on the Georgia Innocence Project’s board of directors from 2019 to 2023, including as its vice chair. The Georgia Innocence Project lists the firm among its pro bono partners.

The two halves of that work met in Devonia Inman’s case. After DNA testing the Georgia Innocence Project had secured, and a habeas petition its attorneys consulted on, Mr. Inman was exonerated in December 2021 of a murder for which he had spent 23 years in prison. Zack Greenamyre and Samantha J. Funt then brought his civil rights case against the City of Adel and the officers involved.

Prior results do not guarantee a similar outcome. Every case turns on its own facts.

The verdict for a woman falsely arrested on drug charges that a field test had already disproved was covered by The New York Times. The firm separately secured a $1.5 million settlement from the City of Atlanta for a man jailed for fifteen months after a detective left out evidence that cleared him, covered by The Atlanta Journal-Constitution and WABE.

In 2025 the Eleventh Circuit held that a Georgia man could sue probation officers for malicious prosecution after they sought his arrest and he was jailed for 104 days, despite his having complied with the terms a court had set. The court found a clearly established constitutional violation and denied the officers qualified immunity. The ruling was written up by the Institute for Justice.

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