Alexander Carter v. COOK COUNTY SHERIFF and COOK COUNTY , ILLINOIS

In the
United States Court of Appeals
For the Seventh Circuit
____________________
No. 24-1025
A LEXANDER C ARTER , et al.,
Plaintiffs-Appellants,
v.
C OOK C OUNTY S HERIFF and C OOK C OUNTY , I LLINOIS ,
Defendants-Appellees
____________________
Appeal from the United States District Court for the
Northern District of Illinois, Eastern Division.
No. 22-cv-01893 — Jeremy C. Daniel, Judge.
____________________
A RGUED S EPTEMBER 11, 2024 — DECIDED J ULY 3, 2025
____________________
Before S YKES , Chief Judge, and BRENNAN and P RYOR , Circuit
Judges.
PRYOR , Circuit Judge. Invoking 42 U.S.C. § 1983, a group of
nine named plaintiffs led by Alexander Carter filed a putative
class action suit against the Cook County Sheriff. They sought
damages for constitutional violations stemming from a policy
at the Cook County Jail of destroying an inmate’s govern-
ment-issued identification card if left unclaimed in jail storage
after the inmate is transferred out of the Cook County Jail to

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2 No. 24-1025
the Illinois Department of Corrections (IDOC). The plaintiffs
argued that this policy, under which they were given a lim-
ited window of time to arrange for the recovery of their gov-
ernment-issued identification cards, violated the Fourth,
Fifth, and Fourteenth Amendments of the Constitution. The
district court granted the Sheriff’s motion to dismiss, finding
each claim foreclosed by precedent. We affirm.
I. BACKGROUND
A. Factual Background
We review de novo a district court’s dismissal of a com-
plaint for failure to state a claim, accepting all well-pleaded
factual allegations as true and making all reasonable infer-
ences in the plaintiffs’ favor. Chaidez v. Ford Motor Co., 937
F.3d 998, 1004 (7th Cir. 2019).
When a person is arrested and detained at the Cook
County Jail, the Sheriff seizes and inventories the detainees’
property and categorizes the items as either “compliant” or
“non-compliant.” Compliant property includes clothing,
keys, credit cards, and government-issued identification
cards. Under direction of the Sheriff, the jail stores all compli-
ant property until the owner is either released or transferred
to the IDOC.
When a person is transferred from the Cook County Jail to
the IDOC, the inmate must complete a “Shipment Dona-
tion/Designator Form,” which contains the jail’s designate-or-
destroy policy. The top of the form states:
You are being shipped to the Illinois Depart-
ment of Corrections or to another facility and
cannot take any of the items above with you.
You have two choices. You can donate the items

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No. 24-1025 3
or designate someone to pick them up. Below
are two sections, Donation Authorization and
Authorization for Property Pickup. DO NOT
FILL OUT BOTH SECTIONS.
The form explains how a designated third party can retrieve
a detainee’s property. Towards the bottom, the form warns:
If the property is NOT picked up within 45 days
of the date of this letter, it will be removed from
storage and disposed of accordingly.1
Each of the nine named plaintiffs—Alexander Carter, La-
marcus Cargill, Jimmy D. Hitchcock, Dashaun Riley, Arland
Scott, Charles Smith, Eugene Washington, Amy Won, and
Deshawn Wright—was at one point arrested and detained at
the Cook County Jail. During the booking process, the jail in-
ventoried the arrestees’ personal property, which included
government-issued identification cards. Between January
2019 and March 2021, each plaintiff was transferred from the
county jail to IDOC. The Sheriff did not, however, ship the
plaintiffs’ identification cards with them to the IDOC. Instead
of forwarding the property to IDOC, the Sheriff applied its
designate-or-destroy policy to eventually destroy each plain-
tiff’s government-issued identification cards.
1 The plaintiffs did not include this form in their complaint, but they did
attach it to their response to the defendants’ motion to dismiss. We may
consider the form because its purpose was to illustrate the facts the plain-
tiffs expected to prove. Geinosky v. City of Chicago, 675 F.3d 743, 745 n.1 (7th
Cir. 2012). We note also that the form itself describes a 45-day property
recovery window, but the complaint recites a 60-day window. This typo-
graphical error does not affect our analysis.

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4 No. 24-1025
B. Procedural History
On April 12, 2022, Carter filed a § 1983 class action com-
plaint against the Sheriff, challenging the Sheriff’s designate-
or-destroy policy as unconstitutional.2 Carter added the addi-
tional named plaintiffs in an amended complaint filed on No-
vember 8, 2022. From here, we refer to the plaintiffs collec-
tively as “Carter.”
Carter argued that the designate-or-destroy policy vio-
lated the Fourth Amendment’s prohibition on unreasonable
seizures, the Fifth Amendment’s Takings Clause, and both the
substantive and procedural components of the Fourteenth
Amendment’s Due Process Clause. The Sheriff moved to dis-
miss for failure to state a claim under Rule 12(b)(6) of the Fed-
eral Rules of Civil Procedure. The Sheriff argued that all of
Carter’s claims were foreclosed by this Court’s precedent, and
that Carter had not plausibly pleaded facts that show other-
wise. Carter conceded that our decision in Lee v. City of Chi-
cago, 330 F.3d 456 (7th Cir. 2003), foreclosed his Fourth
Amendment claim, but preserved the topic for appeal in the
hopes of persuading us to reconsider Lee in light of more re-
cent Supreme Court precedent.
The district court granted the motion to dismiss on all
claims. The court accepted Carter’s concession as to the
Fourth Amendment claim and held that Carter’s other claims
were indistinguishable from the Fifth and Fourteenth
2 The complaint also named Cook County as a necessary party. See Carver
v. Sheriff of LaSalle County, 324 F.3d 947, 948 (7th Cir. 2003) (“[A] county in
Illinois is a necessary party in any suit seeking damages from an inde-
pendently elected county officer (sheriff, assessor, clerk of court, and so
on) in an official capacity.”); FED . R. C IV. P. 17, 19.

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No. 24-1025 5
Amendment constitutional arguments we rejected in two
closely analogous cases: Conyers v. City of Chicago, 10 F.4th 704
(7th Cir. 2021), and Kelley-Lomax v. City of Chicago, 49 F.4th
1124 (7th Cir. 2022).
Carter appeals, renewing his Fourth, Fifth, and Fourteenth
Amendment substantive due process claims. He does not ap-
peal the Fourteenth Amendment procedural due process
claim.
II. DISCUSSION
We analyze Carter’s Fourth, Fifth, and Fourteenth
Amendment arguments in turn.
A. Fourth Amendment
The Fourth Amendment protects against “unreasonable
searches and seizures” of property. U.S. C ONST. amend. IV. It
is “well settled,” however, that the government may constitu-
tionally “seize and inventory … [an individual’s] property
upon arrest.” Conyers, 10 F.4th at 706 (citing Illinois v. Lafayette,
462 U.S. 640, 646 (1983) (seizure of property found on an indi-
vidual at the time of arrest is “reasonable” under the Fourth
Amendment). In line with this principle, Carter cannot and
does not challenge the constitutionality of the Sheriff’s initial
seizure of his government-issued identification cards.
Instead, Carter alleges that the Sheriff’s policy of maintain-
ing possession of an inmate’s government-issued identifica-
tion card, even after transferring the inmate to the IDOC, in-
dependently violates the Fourth Amendment—even if the in-
itial seizure of the property was lawful. This argument, as
Carter concedes, runs headlong into our precedent rejecting
the notion that a plaintiff may challenge a “continuing sei-
zure” of lawfully seized property under the Fourth

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6 No. 24-1025
Amendment. Lee, 330 F.3d at 466 (holding that the Fourth
Amendment “cannot be invoked by the dispossessed owner
to regain his [lawfully seized] property.”); see also Wilkins v.
May, 872 F.2d 190, 193–95 (7th Cir. 1989) (rejecting Fourth
Amendment “continuing seizure” theory as applied to per-
sons whose detention was alleged to be unlawfully pro-
longed). Carter urges us to reconsider Lee in light of three re-
cent Supreme Court cases.
First, Carter argues that Lee did not engage in a proper his-
torical analysis of the Fourth Amendment, which he contends
is required by New York State Rifle & Pistol Association, Inc. v.
Bruen, 597 U.S. 1 (2022). Bruen is a Second Amendment case
in which the Supreme Court explained that courts may only
uphold a challenged firearm regulation once the government
justifies it “by demonstrating that it is consistent with the Na-
tion’s historical tradition of firearm regulation.” Bruen, 597
U.S. at 24. But Bruen had nothing new to say about the Fourth
Amendment. Although the Court commented that its histori-
cal focus “comports with how we assess many other constitu-
tional claims,” id. at 25, including Fourth Amendment claims,
id. at 37, nowhere within Bruen did the Court suggest that ex-
isting Fourth Amendment cases like Lee were erroneously de-
cided. We decline to stretch the “general language” in Bruen
so dramatically beyond its context to “quite different circum-
stances that the Court was not then considering.” Turkiye Halk
Bankasi A.S. v. United States, 598 U.S. 264, 278 (2023) (quoting
Illinois v. Lidster, 540 U.S. 419, 424 (2004)). Besides, we did en-
gage in a historical analysis of the Fourth Amendment in Lee,
but we concluded that the “text, history, and judicial interpre-
tations” of the Fourth Amendment did not support a

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No. 24-1025 7
“continuing seizure” theory. Lee, 330 F.3d at 461–64; see also
Wilkins, 872 F.2d at 193–94.3 Bruen does not help Carter.
Carter’s second Supreme Court case is Manuel v. City of Jo-
liet, 580 U.S. 357 (2017). In Manuel, the Supreme Court held
that a man who spent weeks in pretrial detention based on
false statements by the arresting officer could challenge his
continued detention as an unreasonable seizure under the
Fourth Amendment. 580 U.S. at 369–70. Carter argues that
Manuel counsels a second look at our rejection of a Fourth
Amendment “continuing seizure” theory in Lee. But we re-
jected this very argument in Conyers.4 10 F.4th at 706, 710. We
explained that Manuel was unhelpful for two reasons:
First, Manuel dealt with pretrial confinement,
not the retention of property. More importantly,
3 Carter offers a somewhat scattered historical analysis of his own, citing
a scholarly article explaining that warrants for the seizure of property
must specify the items to be seized so that a person can “know and under-
stand what property was taken” and can have the power to “get it back.”
Laurent Sacharoff, The Fourth Amendment Inventory As A Check on Digital
Searches, 105 I OWA L. REV. 1643, 1671 (2020). He also cites a Vermont Su-
preme Court case and an Iowa Supreme Court case for the general prop-
osition that a “temporary bailee” of property must take care of that prop-
erty and return it upon request. Crawford v. Newell, 23 Iowa 453, 455 (1867);
Tinker v. Morrill, 39 Vt. 477, 479 (1866). Carter does not explain why or how
any of these sources map onto the context here or why they should lead
us to overrule Lee. Indeed, Carter’s complaint explains that the Sheriff
“safely secures [a detainee’s] property while the detainee remains in the
Sheriff’s custody,” until the recovery window expires.
4 The facts in Conyers concerned a very similar property retrieval policy
pursuant to which arrestees transferred from the custody of the Chicago
Police Department to the Cook County Jail had 30 days to arrange for the
recovery of their property. 10 F.4th at 706–08.

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8 No. 24-1025
even if we were to equate persons and property
for these purposes, it would not help our plain-
tiffs. Manuel was about a defendant's ability to
show that a finding of probable cause—neces-
sary to support the detention—was based upon
fabricated evidence. In other words, were the
seizure and detention flawed from the outset?
No such question arose in Lee, and no such
question exists in our case.
Id. at 710 (citation omitted). This explanation in Conyers for
why the Supreme Court’s decision in Manuel does not under-
cut Lee stands true today.
Still seeking to have us reject Lee, Carter points to a third
Supreme Court case, Thompson v. Clark, 596 U.S. 36 (2022),
which was published after Conyers. Thompson dealt with one
of the necessary elements of a Fourth Amendment claim un-
der § 1983 for malicious prosecution—a favorable termina-
tion of the underlying criminal case. 596 U.S. at 44. The Court
explained that the favorable termination requirement could
be satisfied by showing that “the criminal prosecution ended
without a conviction,” rather than “some affirmative indica-
tion of innocence.” Id. at 49.
Carter argues that Thompson somehow demonstrates that
our analysis of Manuel in Conyers was incorrect. But we disa-
gree. Thompson concerned the narrow question of what con-
stitutes a “favorable termination” for purposes of a malicious
prosecution claim. It did not address whether a county jail’s
continued seizure of property could form the basis of a cog-
nizable Fourth Amendment claim. To the extent that Carter
argues that a malicious prosecution claim extends the Fourth
Amendment’s coverage beyond the initial seizure, we do not

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No. 24-1025 9
read Thompson to stand for that proposition. As the Court ex-
plained, when examining a malicious prosecution claim, the
relevant question is whether the Fourth Amendment’s prob-
able-cause requirement has been met at the outset. Id. at 42
(citing Manuel, 580 U.S. at 363–64, 367–68); see also Conyers, 10
F.4th at 710. We see nothing in Thompson that would disturb
Lee.5
Because Carter’s arguments have not persuaded us to re-
consider Lee, we conclude that the district court correctly dis-
missed Carter’s Fourth Amendment claim.
B. Fifth Amendment
We next address Carter’s argument that the destruction of
his government-issued identification cards constituted a “tak-
ing” within the meaning of the Fifth Amendment. The Tak-
ings Clause of the Fifth Amendment protects against govern-
ment takings of private property “for public use, without just
compensation.” U.S. C ONST. amend. V.
“A person who asserts a Takings Clause claim must show
several things: (1) that the governmental entity took his prop-
erty, either through a physical taking, or through unduly on-
erous regulations; (2) that the taking was for a public use; and
(3) that, no matter what type of property (real or personal)
5 Indeed, we reaffirmed Conyers’s treatment of Manuel in Kelley-Lomax,
which was published after Thompson and concerned the exact same prop-
erty retrieval policy at issue in Conyers. Kelley-Lomax, 49 F.4th at 1125 (“The
Fourth Amendment is satisfied if the seizure is reasonable when it oc-
curs—as seizure of an arrestee’s property is.”).

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10 No. 24-1025
was taken, the government has not paid just compensation.”
Conyers, 10 F.4th at 710–11 (internal citations omitted).
“[P]roperty rights protected by the Takings Clause are
creatures of state law.” Cedar Point Nursery v. Hassid, 594 U.S.
139, 155 (2021). We assume for purposes of this appeal that
inmates have a general property interest in their government-
issued identification cards and that the government took this
property for a public use without compensating the inmates.
Kelley-Lomax, 49 F.4th at 1125; Conyers, 10 F.4th at 711. But be-
cause the government can take abandoned property without
compensation, “the key question [in this appeal] is whether
[the Sheriff] was entitled to treat [Carter’s] property as aban-
doned—that is, intentionally relinquished—when [Carter]
failed to follow the reclamation procedures the [Sheriff] of-
fered.” Conyers, 10 F.4th at 711.
Analyzing the City of Chicago’s similar property destruc-
tion policy, we explained in Conyers that the question of aban-
donment turned on whether a detainee had adequate notice
of the jail’s policy and an opportunity to take advantage of it.
Id. at 711–13 (acknowledging that Fifth Amendment takings
analysis was “intertwined” with due process inquiry). We
found abandonment—and therefore no valid Fifth Amend-
ment takings claim—for three reasons:
First, the detainee knows exactly what has been
taken from him and when that confiscation oc-
curred. Second, the detainee is told both how
(either personally or through a representative)
to get his property back and how quickly he
must do so. Finally, the hard-copy [n]otice
plainly states that ‘[i]f you do not contact the
[Chicago Police Department] to get your

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No. 24-1025 11
property back within 30 days of the date on this
receipt, it will be considered abandoned….’
Id. at 712 (emphasis omitted). These features of the contested
policy were “plain enough to entitle the [government] to treat
as abandoned any property that remains unclaimed after 30
days have gone by.” Id. Since “genuinely abandoned property
does not belong to anyone,” we reasoned, “the [government]
may dispose of it as it sees fit.” Id. (citing Cerajeski v. Zoeller,
735 F.3d 577, 581 (7th Cir. 2013)). With no due process viola-
tion, the plaintiffs’ takings theory also failed. Id. at 715.
As the Sheriff argues here, the parallels between this case
and Conyers are hard to ignore. Here, as in Conyers, Carter was
provided with a written notice clearly outlining how to re-
trieve his property. Yet, like in Conyers, Carter has failed to
demonstrate that he could not avail himself of the property
retrieval procedure, or that he even tried. See id. at 714–15.
Carter does not allege that he was unfamiliar with the Sher-
iff’s designate-or-destroy policy, that it was unfair, or that it
was too difficult to follow. Nor does he allege that he ever
designated a proxy to retrieve his government-issued identi-
fication card (or that he had no one to designate in the first
place). We see no daylight between Conyers and the facts here,
and therefore conclude that the Sheriff was “entitled to treat
[Carter’s] property as abandoned.” Id. at 711.
Carter seems to recognize this reality and now argues that
the Supreme Court’s decision in Tyler v. Hennepin County, 598
U.S. 631 (2023), upended Conyers and requires a finding that
Carter did not abandon his government identification card
when transferred to the IDOC. But the Supreme Court’s deci-
sion in Tyler also does not help Carter.

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12 No. 24-1025
Tyler involved a homeowner, Tyler, whose home was sold
by Hennepin County, Minnesota, after she failed to pay prop-
erty taxes for many years. 598 U.S. at 635. The County paid
itself back taxes from the proceeds of the forced sale and kept
an additional $25,000 in surplus money from the sale. Id. Tyler
sued, arguing that keeping the surplus constituted a Fifth
Amendment “taking.” Id. at 635–36. The County countered
that there was no taking because Tyler had constructively
abandoned her property—and therefore any surplus from a
forced sale—by failing to pay taxes. Id. at 646. The Supreme
Court sided with Tyler finding she had plausibly alleged the
State had taken the surplus in her home without due process
of law. Id. at 643–47.
Addressing the defendant’s abandonment argument, the
Court reasoned that the County could not deem Tyler’s home
abandoned simply because she had failed to pay taxes. Id. at
647. “Abandonment requires the ‘surrender or relinquish-
ment or disclaimer of’ all rights in the property.” Id. at 646
(quoting Rowe v. Minneapolis, 49 Minn. 148 (1892)). The Court
explained that “[i]t is the owner’s failure to make any use of
the property” that causes a property interest to be relin-
quished. Id. at 647. The Supreme Court reasoned that the
County could not rely on Minnesota’s forfeiture scheme be-
cause it did not address abandonment at all. Without a proce-
dure to determine the delinquent taxpayer’s use of the prop-
erty or her intention to relinquish her property rights, the Su-
preme Court found the County’s constructive abandonment
argument failed. Id.
Carter argues that Tyler is analogous to this case because
he, like Tyler, did not intend to abandon his property. He con-
tends that our inference of abandonment in Conyers, which we

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No. 24-1025 13
drew from the inmate’s failure to follow a transparent and ac-
cessible property retrieval procedure, was erroneous because
our focus on process did not account for whether the inmate
“voluntarily relinquish[ed]” their property.
The Supreme Court in Tyler explained that the govern-
ment “has the power to condition the permanent retention of
[a] property right on the performance of reasonable condi-
tions that indicate a present intention to retain the interest.” 598
U.S. at 646 (modification in original) (quoting Texaco, Inc. v.
Short, 454 U.S. 516, 526 (1982)).6 The Court distinguished the
facts in Tyler from Nelson v. City of New York, 352 U.S. 103, 110
(1956), in which property owners were deemed to have for-
feited the surplus from a foreclosure sale of property after fail-
ing to follow the city ordinance for claiming the surplus. See
Tyler, 598 U.S. at 643–44 (discussing Nelson). Because the New
York City ordinance provided a procedure for owners to ex-
press continued interest in retaining their property and recov-
ering the surplus from any tax sale, the Supreme Court found
no Takings Clause violation. Id. at 643–44 (citing Nelson, 352
U.S. at 110).
In this case, the Cook County Jail provides an inmate,
whose property has been seized, an opportunity to reclaim his
property before the jail considers it abandoned or intention-
ally relinquished. The inmate is required to fill out a form des-
ignating a third party to retrieve his property. Such a policy,
if somewhat tedious, provides sufficient process to determine
if the inmate intends to abandon his property for purposes of
6 In Texaco, property owners were deemed to have abandoned mineral
rights after failing to use property and fill out paperwork indicating that
they still claimed ownership over the rights. Texaco, 454 U.S. at 526.

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14 No. 24-1025
the Fifth Amendment. Because this procedure was “plain,”
and because Carter did not allege that he even attempted to
follow it or that doing so would have been futile, we follow
Conyers in concluding that Carter abandoned his government-
issued identification, and any Fifth Amendment takings claim
along with it. Conyers, 10 F.4th at 712.
C. Fourteenth Amendment
Finally, we turn to Carter’s substantive due process argu-
ment. The Fourteenth Amendment’s Due Process Clause pro-
tects against the deprivation of “life, liberty, or property,
without due process of law.” U.S. C ONST. amend. XIV, § 1. The
Clause has both a procedural and substantive component.
Lukaszczyk v. Cook County, 47 F.4th 587, 599 (7th Cir. 2022).
When a plaintiff challenges a government policy on substan-
tive due process grounds, the threshold question is whether
the challenged policy infringes upon a “fundamental right or
liberty.” Id. at 599–600. Fundamental rights have “deep roots
in our history and traditions,” Kelley-Lomax, 49 F.4th at 1125,
so deep that they are “implicit in the concept of ordered lib-
erty,” Washington v. Glucksberg, 521 U.S. 702, 721 (1997) (cita-
tion omitted).
Government actions infringing on fundamental rights re-
ceive heightened scrutiny. Lukaszczyk, 47 F.4th at 599–600. But
if a fundamental right is in not in play, we apply rational-basis
review, which is highly deferential to the government. Good-
paster v. City of Indianapolis, 736 F.3d 1060, 1071 (7th Cir. 2013).
If “some rational basis exists” upon which the challenged pol-
icy could be based, it survives rational-basis review, regard-
less of “whether the reasons given actually motivated” the
policymakers. Id.

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No. 24-1025 15
By arguing that the Sheriff’s designate-or-destroy policy
lacks a rational basis, Carter correctly concedes that rational-
basis review applies. In Kelley-Lomax, we explained that
“property is a fundamental right,” but that “pointing to the
fundamental status of ‘property’ in the abstract” is not
enough to warrant heightened scrutiny. 49 F.4th at 1125. In-
stead, a plaintiff must show that the “actual policy at stake”—
here, the Sheriff’s unwillingness to forward government-is-
sued identification from the Cook County Jail to IDOC— “has
historical provenance.” Id. Carter has not made that showing,
so rational-basis review applies.
As explained in Lee v. City of Chicago, this leads to another
hurdle:
When a substantive-due-process challenge in-
volves only the deprivation of a property inter-
est, a plaintiff must show ‘either the inadequacy
of state law remedies or an independent consti-
tutional violation’ before the court will even en-
gage in … rational-basis review.
330 F.3d at 467 (quoting Doherty v. City of Chicago, 75 F.3d 318,
323–26 (7th Cir.1996)). As discussed above, Carter has aban-
doned his property by not following the procedures for its re-
turn. While Carter alleges that the Sheriff’s designate-or-de-
stroy policy violates Illinois law, he has not alleged the inad-
equacy of Illinois remedies or even the inadequacy of the
Sheriff’s own property recovery procedures. And given that
his Fourth and Fifth Amendment claims are foreclosed by Lee
and Conyers, Carter has not established an independent con-
stitutional violation. Following Lee, we will therefore not en-
gage in rational-basis review. Carter’s Fourteenth Amend-
ment substantive due process claim thus must fail.

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16 No. 24-1025
III. CONCLUSION
For the foregoing reasons, we AFFIRM .

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