## Facts

- Hartford police officers pursued and apprehended Timothy Moore, a Black suspect, across a soccer field where Weldon L. Ricketts, a Black soccer coach, was working.
- Ricketts alleged officers used excessive force on Moore after he was subdued and that Ricketts verbally protested the officers’ conduct.
- Ricketts claimed officers then used excessive force against him and arrested him without probable cause, allegedly in retaliation for his criticism.
- Ricketts sued under 42 U.S.C. § 1983, asserting constitutional violations against multiple officers and asserting derivative municipal and supervisory liability against the City of Hartford and the police chief.
- At trial, a disputed recording purportedly captured someone saying “Run him over,” which Ricketts attributed to an officer he identified as his main aggressor; the district court excluded the recording for lack of authentication after an evidentiary hearing.
- A jury returned a verdict for all individual officer defendants; the district court entered judgment for the City and chief on the bifurcated municipal/supervisory claims because those claims depended on an underlying constitutional violation.
- The district court denied Ricketts’s motion for a new trial; Ricketts appealed, challenging the jury-selection process and several evidentiary rulings.

## Issues

1. Whether an allegedly flawed computerized jury-selection process that produced a venire with substantial minority underrepresentation violated the equal-protection component of the Fifth Amendment absent proof of purposeful discrimination.
2. Whether the district court abused its discretion by excluding the tape recording for lack of authentication and by excluding other evidence of police misconduct, and whether any errors affected substantial rights and warranted a new trial.
3. Whether municipal and supervisory liability could stand where the jury found no constitutional violation by the individual officers.

## Decision

- The Second Circuit affirmed the judgment for all defendants and affirmed the denial of a new trial.
- The court held the jury-selection claim failed because Ricketts did not prove intentional discrimination or purposeful exclusion, even if the venire reflected minority underrepresentation.
- The court held the exclusion of the tape recording was within the trial court’s discretion because Ricketts failed to lay an adequate foundation to authenticate the recording and identify the speaker reliably.
- The court upheld the exclusion of other police-misconduct evidence as within the trial court’s discretion based on relevance and admissibility limits.
- Because the jury found for the officers, the court held the derivative claims against the City and police chief necessarily failed.

## Legal Principles

- An equal-protection challenge to jury selection requires proof of purposeful discrimination; statistical underrepresentation alone does not establish a constitutional violation.
- Trial courts have broad discretion over evidentiary rulings; recordings must be authenticated before admission, including a sufficient showing of reliability and speaker identification when disputed.
- Evidentiary error warrants reversal only if it constitutes an abuse of discretion and affects the appellant’s substantial rights.
- Municipal or supervisory liability premised on officer misconduct generally cannot proceed without an underlying constitutional violation by the officers.

## Conclusion

The Second Circuit upheld a defense verdict in a § 1983 excessive-force/false-arrest case, finding no Fifth Amendment equal-protection violation in the venire absent discriminatory intent, no reversible evidentiary error in excluding an unauthenticated recording and other misconduct evidence, and no basis for derivative municipal or supervisory liability after the jury found no officer violation.


Ricketts v. City of Hartford, 74 F.3d 1397 (2d Cir. 1996)