In the
United States Court of Appeals
For the Seventh Circuit
____________________
No. 15‐3307
UCHE P. MORDI,
Plaintiff‐Appellant,
v.
TODD ZEIGLER, et al.,
Defendants‐Appellees.
____________________
Appeal from the United States District Court for the
Southern District of Illinois.
No. 11‐cv‐193‐MJR — Michael J. Reagan, Chief Judge.
____________________
ARGUED APRIL 20, 2017 — DECIDED SEPTEMBER 5, 2017
____________________
Before WOOD, Chief Judge, and BAUER and EASTERBROOK,
Circuit Judges.
WOOD, Chief Judge. In January 2012, proceeding pro se,
Uche P. Mordi, a Nigerian national, filed a civil rights action
under 42 U.S.C. § 1983 against local and state officials for
alleged violations associated with his 2009 arrest in southern
Illinois. The district court screened Mordi’s civil rights
complaint, as required by 28 U.S.C. § 1915A. It dismissed with
prejudice all claims except for those against three of the
2 No. 15‐3307
officers; the surviving claims relied on the Vienna Convention
on Consular Relations, art. 36.1(b), Apr. 24, 1963, 21 U.S.T. 77,
596 U.N.T.S. 261 (“the Vienna Convention”). After the district
court rejected the officers’ assertion of qualified immunity on
the Vienna Convention claims, they took an interlocutory
appeal to this court. We ruled that all three—Todd Zeigler,
Greg Chance, and Gregg Healey—were entitled to qualified
immunity from Mordi’s claim that they violated his rights
under the Vienna Convention, and we remanded “with
instructions to dismiss the action” against these three. Mordi
v. Zeigler, 770 F.3d 1161, 1167 (7th Cir. 2014).
On November 21, 2014, the district court dismissed the
Vienna Convention claims against Zeigler, Chance, and
Healey, and entered final judgment on November 24, thus
disposing of all claims against all parties brought by Mordi’s
January 2012 complaint. In an effort to revive his other
theories for recovery, Mordi filed a motion on
December 18, 2014, requesting that the district court revisit its
section 1915A threshold screening order. The district court
denied Mordi’s motion, and Mordi has now brought a timely
appeal from that decision. With the Vienna Convention claims
off the table, Mordi now argues that Officers Zeigler and
Nathan Zerrusen violated his Fourth Amendment rights
when they stopped the car he was driving. They did so, Mordi
asserts, not because they had probable cause for the traffic
stop, but because they were engaged in impermissible racial
profiling. In addition, he argues, the officers unlawfully
prolonged the stop so that they could bring a drug‐sniffing
dog to the car. We conclude that the district court acted
prematurely, and that Mordi’s Fourth Amendment claim may
move forward.
No. 15‐3307 3
I
Our review of the underlying facts can be brief. At approx‐
imately 1:10 p.m. on March 12, 2009, Mordi and a passenger,
Aderinola Otesile, were traveling southbound on Interstate 57
in southern Illinois. They passed two Illinois state police cars
parked in the median, one facing northbound, the other
southbound. About ten minutes later, the northbound‐facing
car, driven by State Trooper Zeigler, pulled out into the south‐
bound lane, approached Mordi’s car, and signaled for him to
pull over.
Mordi complied immediately. Zeigler approached the ve‐
hicle on the passenger side and asked why the license plate
was not on the front bumper, but instead was inside on the
windshield. Mordi explained that the grille and bumper were
cracked, and so he was not able to attach the plate to the front
bumper. Zeigler also told him that the hood was not closed all
the way; Mordi countered that the space between the hood
and the body of the car was less than an inch.
After that exchange, Zeigler asked Mordi for his license
and insurance, and Mordi furnished both. Zeigler also asked
for Otesile’s identification. At that point Zeigler asked Mordi
to get into the squad car; Mordi did so. By now Zeigler knew
that Mordi was a student at Southern Illinois University, and
so he asked Mordi questions about the school, his travel plans,
and similar things, while he checked out Mordi’s identifica‐
tion. Based on the results, Zeigler asked Mordi about an out‐
standing warrant for failure to appear in a misdemeanor ma‐
rijuana case from White County, Illinois. Mordi said he knew
nothing about any warrant, but he admitted that he had paid
fines and complied with an unspecified disposition related to
4 No. 15‐3307
such an offense. He then commented that he “could only im‐
agine a DUI case pending, if any.”
At some point Officer Zerrusen had joined the group.
Mordi remained in the squad car for a few minutes while
Zeigler and Zerrusen questioned Otesile, who was still sitting
in Mordi’s car. Zeigler returned to Mordi and told him that
“everything was good,” and that he would issue Mordi a
warning citation. He did so, gave it to Mordi to sign, and
returned Mordi’s identification to him. But the encounter was
not yet over. Zeigler then asked Mordi if there were drugs in
the car, and Mordi responded (somewhat equivocally) “there
shouldn’t be.” Zeigler asked if he could search the car, but
Mordi said no, several times. Some 20 minutes or so into the
stop, at 1:34 p.m., Zeigler radioed for Rob Rich, of the
Effingham County Sheriff’s Department, to come to the car
with his drug‐sniffing dog. Rich arrived ten minutes later; the
dog sniffed the car; and it alerted. The officers ordered Mordi
and Otesile out of the car, searched it, and found crack cocaine
in Mordi’s duffle bag in the back seat.
Mordi and Otesile were taken separately to the state police
station in Effingham. Eventually, however, Mordi was
charged with, and pleaded guilty to, federal drug charges for
possessing with intent to distribute the cocaine. He is now
serving a 120‐month sentence for that conviction.
II
Mordi brought the present case under 42 U.S.C. § 1983 be‐
cause he believes that the officers involved in his stop and de‐
tention violated his Fourth Amendment rights. The district
court received the complaint on March 14, 2011. It is not late,
however, because Mordi was incarcerated at the time, and he
No. 15‐3307 5
mailed his complaint from the prison on March 11, 2011. That
gives him the benefit of the prison mailbox rule, see Taylor v.
Brown, 787 F.3d 851, 858–59 (7th Cir. 2015), under which his
complaint is treated as filed within the two‐year limit. See 735
ILCS 5/13‐202. The district court dismissed with prejudice
some, but not all, counts of Mordi’s complaint. Its decision to
deny qualified immunity to some of the defendants was im‐
mediately appealable. See Behrens v. Pelletier, 516 U.S. 299
(1996). As we noted earlier, we concluded that they were en‐
titled to qualified immunity and in 2014 remanded the case
for further proceedings.
More than two years earlier, on January 19, 2012, the
district court entered a screening order pursuant to
section 1915A. Its order organized the claims presented in
Mordi’s pro se civil rights complaint into separate counts and
dismissed with prejudice all but the Vienna Convention claim
against Zeigler, Chance, and Healey. (No Vienna Convention
claims against other defendants were preserved.) This
included a rejection of Mordi’s assertion that the initial stop
violated his Fourth Amendment rights. The court gave this
point short shrift in its section 1915A screening order, which
in relevant part read as follows:
At the outset, it must be stated that many of Plain‐
tiff’s allegations of unconstitutional conduct by the ar‐
resting and investigating officers, which led to his con‐
viction, cannot be addressed in the context of a § 1983
action. Indeed, Plaintiff’s complaint never requests the
Court to invalidate his conviction. However, Plaintiff
claims that the original traffic stop was a result of im‐
proper “profiling,” the stop was illegally prolonged in
6 No. 15‐3307
order to conduct a canine sniff search, he was pres‐
sured to waive his Miranda rights, his interrogation
was unduly coercive, and the county prosecutors acted
improperly in turning him over to the federal prosecu‐
tor. Such matters are not the proper subject of a civil
rights action under § 1983. See Graham v. Broglin,
922 F.2d 379, 381 (7th Cir. 1991) (release from custody
cannot be sought in a § 1983 action). Challenges to the
constitutionality of a conviction must be raised, if at all,
on direct appeal from the conviction or in a proper
post‐conviction or habeas action, if Plaintiff’s right to
raise such matters was not waived by his guilty plea,
and if any of these actions could be timely filed. Ac‐
cordingly, these allegations will not be further ad‐
dressed in this proceeding, and this count shall be dis‐
missed with prejudice.
Mordi sought reconsideration of this order, but on
September 17, 2015, the district court denied that motion. In
the present appeal, with the assistance of appointed counsel,
he argues only that the district court erred in rejecting his
Fourth Amendment claims against Zeigler and Zerrusen.
III
The distinction on which the district court relied between
a lawsuit that would undermine a conviction, and a lawsuit
focusing on a civil rights violation, is a valid one. See Preiser
v. Rodriguez, 411 U.S. 475 (1973); Heck v. Humphrey, 512 U.S.
477 (1994). Heck, as the Supreme Court later explained in
Wallace v. Kato, 549 U.S. 384 (2007), held that a prisoner may
not raise a claim under section 1983 “which, if true, would
have established the invalidity of his outstanding conviction.”
Id. at 392. In such a case, the prisoner’s only recourse is either
No. 15‐3307 7
direct appeal or a petition for a writ of habeas corpus; if the
time has run for either or both, the prisoner is out of luck, at
least until he is no longer in custody and possibly even then.
See Whitfield v. Howard, 852 F.3d 656 (7th Cir. 2017).
A plaintiff is the master of his own complaint, however,
and so we must examine what Mordi is asking for, before we
can decide whether he may pursue his section 1983 action or
if the Heck line of cases stands in his way. See Gilbert v. Cook,
512 F.3d 899, 901–02 (7th Cir. 2008). As the Supreme Court put
it in Muhammad v. Close, 540 U.S. 749, 751 (2004), “Heck’s re‐
quirement to resort to state litigation and federal habeas be‐
fore § 1983 is not … implicated by a prisoner’s challenge that
threatens no consequence for his conviction or the duration of
his sentence.” In addition, “when a defendant is convicted
pursuant to his guilty plea rather than a trial, the validity of
that conviction cannot be affected by an alleged Fourth
Amendment violation because the conviction does not rest in
any way on evidence that may have been improperly seized.”
Haring v. Prosise, 462 U.S. 306, 321 (1983). Mordi insists that he
is complaining only about the improper racial profiling that
led to his traffic stop, and about the officers’ decision to pro‐
long his detention while they waited for the drug‐sniffing dog
to arrive. If he were to prevail on either or both of these points,
his conviction would be unaffected. We recognized as much
in Evans v. Poskon, 603 F.3d 362 (7th Cir. 2010), where we
wrote:
Many claims that concern how police conduct
searches or arrests are compatible with a conviction.
For example, an arrest without probable cause violates
the fourth amendment but does not imply the invalid‐
ity of a conviction, because courts do not “suppress the
8 No. 15‐3307
body” of the accused. See United States v. Alvarez–
Machain, 504 U.S. 655 (1992). Similarly, a courtʹs deci‐
sion not to suppress illegally seized evidence can lead
to a conviction without blotting out a § 1983 challenge
to the seizure.
Id. at 363–64. We therefore held in Evans that the plaintiff was
“entitled to an opportunity to prove that the defendants used
unreasonable force during and after his arrest.” Id. at 364.
Mordi makes a similar point: even if he were to prevail on his
racial‐profiling and prolonged‐detention arguments, the dis‐
covery of the cocaine found within the car would be just as
secure, his guilty plea would stand, and his conviction would,
too. All he can hope for in his Fourth Amendment case would
be some form of damages for the loss of his time and the dig‐
nitary insult inflicted by racial discrimination.
Despite the fact that Mordi insisted in his complaint that
he was not challenging his conviction (a point that the district
court recognized), the state urges us to read the complaint as
if he were. There is an exception to the Heck bar, under which
a challenge may be brought to actions such as searches and
seizures or a false arrest that do not have any necessary effect
on the validity of a conviction. See Wallace, 549 U.S. at 397; see
also Dominguez v. Hendley, 545 F.3d 585, 589 (7th Cir. 2008),
cert. denied, 556 U.S. 1235 (2009) (“Even if no conviction could
have been obtained in the absence of the violation, the
Supreme Court has held that, unlike fair trial claims, Fourth
Amendment claims as a group do not necessarily imply the
invalidity of a criminal conviction, and so such claims are not
suspended under the Heck bar to suit.”).
The state acknowledges the Wallace exception, but, it ar‐
gues, there is an exception to that exception. The second‐layer
No. 15‐3307 9
exception comes into play if a plaintiff’s allegations necessarily
imply the invalidity of a conviction (even one based on a
guilty plea); in that case, it says, the Heck bar springs back into
existence. It rests its argument on Okoro v. Callaghan, 324 F.3d
488 (7th Cir. 2003), where we held that defendant Okoro’s ef‐
fort to complain about a search was just a disguised way of
asserting his innocence. Okoro wanted to argue that the po‐
lice, who were searching for heroin, had actually stolen gems
and cash from him. Id. at 489. We found that Okoro was really
raising a fundamental argument about the evidence that was
used to convict him—that there were no drugs and that he
was framed. If a jury believed those allegations, the basis of
his conviction would have been wiped out. In keeping with
our normal practice of looking beyond labels and judging
cases on the basis of their substance, we held that Okoro’s at‐
tempted section 1983 action was Heck‐barred.
The worst one can say about Mordi’s case is that he made
a few half‐hearted attempts to assert his innocence between
the time the police arrested him and the time he found himself
facing federal charges. But those efforts did not make their
way into his complaint as anything but background infor‐
mation or an account of what he said at the time. Unlike
Okoro, Mordi is not asking for any form of relief that would
undermine his guilty plea or his conviction. He is raising a
civil rights complaint, and he is raising the type of complaint
that Wallace says accrues at the time of the stop and arrest. In
addition, even if Mordi filed a complaint that included some
Heck‐barred contentions and other cognizable arguments, we
have held that the proper response is not to toss the entire
complaint. Instead, the judge must carve off any Heck‐barred
contentions and proceed with what remains. Evans, 603 F.3d
at 364; Gilbert, 512 F.3d at 902.
10 No. 15‐3307
IV
The district court cut off this case at the screening stage,
based on a finding that it could not properly proceed under
section 1983. This was in error, and so we REVERSE and
REMAND for further proceedings consistent with this opinion.