Navy Vet Wrongly Arrested Over False Abuse Call Wins Landmark Supreme Court Civil-Rights Ruling

On a January night in 2014, Larry Thompson, a Navy veteran living in Brooklyn, refused to let police into his apartment without a warrant after his sister-in-law, who suffered from mental illness, called 911 with a false report that he was abusing his week-old daughter. Officers forced their way in anyway and arrested him. A medical examination found nothing beyond a diaper rash. Despite the absence of any evidence, Thompson was charged with obstructing governmental administration and resisting arrest, held for two days, and then released when prosecutors dropped the charges without explanation.

Thompson sued Officer Pagiel Clark and the City of New York under 42 U.S.C. Section 1983, alleging malicious prosecution and a cluster of related civil-rights violations including false arrest, excessive force, and denial of medical care. A jury in the Eastern District of New York cleared the defendants on all claims except malicious prosecution, but the case hit a wall: courts in the Second Circuit had required plaintiffs to show their prosecution ended with an 'affirmative indication of innocence,' and a quiet dismissal by a prosecutor did not satisfy that test. Thompson's malicious-prosecution claim was thrown out on those grounds.

Cary London of Shulman and Hill, Thompson's civil-rights trial counsel alongside David A. Zelman, had litigated the case from the district court up, losing before the trial court and the Second Circuit on the affirmative-innocence rule before appellate specialists at the Roderick and Solange MacArthur Justice Center carried the case to the Supreme Court, where Amir Ali argued it. The core argument was that requiring proof of affirmative innocence imposed a burden far beyond what the Fourth Amendment demands. The justices agreed. On April 4, 2022, the Court issued a 6-3 opinion authored by Justice Brett Kavanaugh, holding that a plaintiff satisfies the favorable-termination element simply by showing the prosecution ended without a conviction. Thompson's dropped charges cleared that bar. The ruling broke from an old common-law tradition that had been inconsistently applied across federal circuits and opened the courthouse doors for civil-rights plaintiffs in jurisdictions that had enforced the stricter standard.

The case returned to the Eastern District of New York for a ruling on the surviving malicious-prosecution claim. In 2023, U.S. District Judge Hector Gonzalez granted summary judgment for Officer Clark, finding that no reasonable juror could conclude Clark lacked probable cause to file the criminal complaint. Thompson's attorneys announced plans to appeal that ruling. The Supreme Court victory itself stands as controlling precedent: plaintiffs asserting Fourth Amendment malicious-prosecution claims under Section 1983 no longer need to prove a court or prosecutor declared them innocent, only that the government chose not to convict.