Douglas Echols v. Spencer Lawton

Where the Eleventh Circuit found a constitutional violation in a prosecutor’s use of libel per se to retaliate against a wrongfully convicted person who then seeks compensation through a legislative means, but held that, because no prior First Amendment retaliation claim in the Eleventh Circuit, entailed libel per se, the claim was not clearly established, and where the First Amendment retaliation violation was deemed to foreclose a substantive due process claim based on the presumption of innocence, the questions presented are:

1. For a constitutional violation to be clearly established so that qualified immunity does not apply, must there be a binding in-circuit precedent at a minute level of specificity that the prior case is a mirror-image of the facts presented, as the Eleventh Circuit requires, or will closely analogous cases, whether in-circuit or based on decisions of other circuits, as the vast majority of circuits recognize, suffice?

2. Does a finding of one constitutional violation deemed not clearly established, foreclose consideration of a substantive due-process claim whether based on the denial of an alternative constitutional violation or on the “shock the conscience” standard, as the Eleventh Circuit held, or should courts undertake an independent analysis of the alternative due-process basis to deny qualified immunity, as the Third, Sixth and Tenth Circuit employ?