A recent decision by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit has dismissed attorney Connie Reguli’s civil rights appeal on statute-of-limitation grounds. Reguli, a civil rights attorney, had pursued First Amendment retaliation claims against a police officer who searched her private Facebook records to prosecute her criminal trial. The court ruled that the timeframe to file such a suit started when Reguli discovered the search happened in January 2020, instead of when she learned about the reasoning behind the search.
The three-judge panel affirmed this statute-of-limitations ruling in a July 31 opinion, declaring that Reguli filed her claim outside the one-year statute of limitations for a Section 1983 claim in Tennessee. The search warrant, obtained due to Reguli’s critical commentary about the police, had contributed to her now-overturned and dismissed custodial interference conviction.
For the detailed court opinion and further context, the full article is available here.