Ted Velleff v. SHERIFF OF COOK COUNTY and COOK COUNTY, ILLINOIS

United States Court of Appeals
For the Seventh Circuit
Chicago, Illinois 60604
Argued September 11, 2024
Decided July 9, 2025
Before
DIANE S. SYKES, Chief Judge
MICHAEL B. BRENNAN, Circuit Judge
DORIS L. PRYOR, Circuit Judge
No. 23-2785
TED VELLEFF,
Plaintiff-Appellant,
v.
SHERIFF OF COOK COUNTY and
COOK COUNTY, ILLINOIS,
Defendants-Appellees.
Appeal from the United States District
Court for the Northern District of
Illinois, Eastern Division.
No. 17-cv-08120
Steven C. Seeger,
Judge.
O R D E R
Plaintiff-Appellant Ted Velleff, on behalf of himself and a putative class,
challenged as unconstitutional, under 42 U.S.C. § 1983, a policy at the Cook County Jail,
Illinois, run by the Cook County Sheriff, pursuant to which an inmate’s government-
issued identification card may be destroyed if left unclaimed in jail storage for 45 days
after the inmate is transferred from the Cook County Jail to state prison. The district
court denied class certification and granted the Sheriff summary judgment. For the
reasons discussed below, we affirm.
NONPRECEDENTIAL DISPOSITION
To be cited only in accordance with F ED. R. APP . P. 32.1

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No. 23-2785 Page 2
I. F ACTUAL B ACKGROUND
When a person is arrested, the Cook County Jail seizes and inventories their
property. Under the direction of the Cook County Sheriff, the jail stores all compliant
property until the arrestee is either released or transferred to the Illinois Department of
Corrections (IDOC).
When a person is transferred from the Cook County Jail to IDOC, he must fill out
a property disposal form. The form gives the inmate an opportunity to designate a third
party to pick up the inmate’s property from jail storage within a specified window of
time. The form warns: “If the property is NOT picked up within forty-five (45) days …
it will be removed from storage and disposed of accordingly.” The 45-day property
retrieval window thus requires the inmate to arrange for the retrieval of their property
within a certain window of time, and if they don’t, the Sheriff may destroy the property.
The property disposal form asks the inmate to acknowledge the Sheriff’s designate-or-
destroy policy and property retrieval window with a signature. The Sheriff enforces the
policy even though IDOC facilities accept compliant personal property from sending
jails. In other words, if the Sheriff were to send government-issued identification cards
to IDOC along with their owners, IDOC would accept them.
Ted Velleff was arrested and brought to the Cook County Jail on either
September 9 or 25, 2013 (the record is unclear), and again on September 27, 2016. He
was subsequently transferred to IDOC on January 24, 2014, and on August 1, 2017,
respectively. On the day of each transfer, Velleff signed a property disposal form
describing the jail’s designate-or-destroy policy.1 Both times, Velleff failed to designate
anyone to retrieve his property within the specified window of time. No one retrieved
Velleff’s property in 2014 or 2017, and Velleff himself did not try to recover his property
until this lawsuit.
II. RELEVANT DISTRICT COURT PROCEEDINGS
On April 19, 2021, Velleff was added as a named plaintiff in a putative class
action lawsuit challenging Cook County Jail’s designate-or-destroy policy. The
litigation originally began on November 9, 2017, and already featured two other named
plaintiffs. Because this appeal concerns only Velleff, we describe only the district court
proceedings relevant to Velleff’s claims.
1 The 2014 version of the form contained a 30-day property retrieval window while the
2017 version offered a 45-day window.

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No. 23-2785 Page 3
Invoking 42 U.S.C. § 1983, which allows plaintiffs to sue government officials for
constitutional violations, Velleff argued that the Sheriff’s policy violated both the
substantive and procedural components of the Due Process Clause of the Fourteenth
Amendment of the United States Constitution.2 Velleff moved for class certification on
July 23, 2021, seeking to form a class of plaintiffs who had been sent from the Cook
County Jail to IDOC without their government-issued identifications on or after
November 9, 2015. On March 14, 2022, the district court denied class certification for
lack of numerosity. See F ED. R. C IV. P. 23(a)(1). The court observed that over 90% of the
42 potential class members offered by Velleff had been transferred to IDOC before the
proposed class period, meaning they could not be part of the proposed class. The court
also observed that the Sheriff had located and returned to Velleff the property the
Sheriff had seized following Velleff’s September 2013 arrest. The court questioned
whether Velleff could adequately represent the proposed class after the return of some
of his property, but ultimately denied class certification for lack of numerosity.
The Sheriff moved for summary judgment on Velleff’s procedural and
substantive due process claims on November 15, 2022. The district court granted that
motion on August 21, 2023. The court held that our decision in Conyers v. City of Chicago
controlled the procedural due process analysis. 10 F.4th 704 (7th Cir. 2021). In that case,
we denied a procedural due process challenge to the Chicago Police Department’s
policy of destroying personal property that the city deemed abandoned. Id. at 712–15.
Next, the district court held that our decision in Kelley-Lomax v. City of Chicago
controlled the substantive due process analysis. 49 F.4th 1124 (7th Cir. 2022). In that
case, we upheld the same Chicago police policy challenged in Conyers against a
substantive due process challenge because the plaintiff was unable to show that the
policy burdened a fundamental right or liberty interest. Id. at 1125.
Velleff proceeds solo on appeal. He abandons his procedural due process claim
along with his co-plaintiffs, leaving us to resolve only one constitutional claim:
2 In cases involving the government’s interference with property rights, procedural due
process claims focus on whether the government offered both adequate notice and an
opportunity to respond before taking the property. Conyers v. City of Chicago, 10 F.4th
704, 712 (7th Cir. 2021). Substantive due process claims are far more limited and focus
on whether the government has infringed on a deeply rooted liberty interest or right.
Kelley-Lomax v. City of Chicago, 49 F.4th 1124, 1125 (7th Cir. 2022).

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No. 23-2785 Page 4
substantive due process. Velleff also requests that we reverse the district court’s denial
of class certification, but we do not reach that issue.
III. DISCUSSION
We review a grant of summary judgment de novo, construing the undisputed
material facts in the light most favorable to Velleff, the nonmoving party. Palmer v.
Franz, 928 F.3d 560, 563 (7th Cir. 2019).
We note at the outset that Velleff does not challenge the initial seizure of his
property upon arrival at the Cook County Jail. Nor can he. It is “well-settled” that law
enforcement has the right to seize and inventory property upon arrest and manage it
thereafter. Conyers, 10 F.4th at 706 (citing Illinois v. Lafayette, 462 U.S. 640, 646 (1983)).
Instead, Velleff argues that the Sheriff’s implementation of the designate-or-destroy
policy, as opposed to simply shipping his government-issued identification card to
IDOC along with him, was an unconstitutional interference with Velleff’s property
rights in violation of the substantive due process protections enshrined in the
Fourteenth Amendment.
The Due Process Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment has both a procedural
and a substantive component. Lukaszczyk v. Cook County, 47 F.4th 587, 599 (7th Cir.
2022). The success of a substantive due process claim depends in large part on whether
the challenged governmental policy infringes upon a “fundamental right or liberty.” Id.
at 599–600. An asserted fundamental right not explicitly mentioned in the Constitution
must have “deep roots in our history and traditions,” Kelley-Lomax, 49 F.4th at 1125, so
deep that the asserted right must be “implicit in the concept of ordered liberty,” Dobbs
v. Jackson Women’s Health Org., 597 U.S. 215, 231 (2022) (quoting Washington v.
Glucksberg, 521 U.S. 702, 721 (1997)). Plaintiffs asserting such a fundamental right must
provide a “careful description” of the right, with our country’s “history, legal traditions,
and practices” serving as critical guideposts. Glucksberg, 521 U.S. at 721.
A government policy that does not implicate a fundamental right is subject to
highly deferential rational-basis review, under which a policy need only be “rationally
related to a legitimate government interest.” Lee v. City of Chicago, 330 F.3d 456, 467 (7th
Cir. 2003). This test places a “heavy burden” on plaintiffs: they must “negate ‘every
conceivable basis which might support’” the challenged policy. Goodpaster v. City of
Indianapolis, 736 F.3d 1060, 1071 (7th Cir. 2013) (quoting FCC v. Beach Comms., Inc., 508
U.S. 307, 315 (1993)). If “some rational basis exists” upon which the challenged policy
could be based, the policy survives rational-basis review regardless of what reasons
actually motivated the policy. Id.

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We have cautioned that substantive due process cannot be invoked as “a blanket
protection against unjustifiable interferences with property.” Gen. Auto Serv. Station v.
City of Chicago, 526 F.3d 991, 1000 (7th Cir. 2008) (additional citation omitted); see Kelley-
Lomax, 49 F.4th at 1125 (explaining that plaintiff could not succeed on substantive due
process claim simply “by pointing to the fundamental status of ‘property’ in the
abstract”). Instead, when a plaintiff alleges “only the deprivation of a property interest,”
rather than interference with a fundamental right, we will not even engage in rational-
basis review of the challenged policy unless the plaintiff first demonstrates “either the
inadequacy of state law remedies or an independent constitutional violation.” Lee, 330
F.3d at 467 (quoting Doherty v. City of Chicago, 75 F.3d 318, 323–26 (7th Cir. 1996)); GEFT
Outdoors, LLC v. City of Westfield, 922 F.3d 357, 368–69 (7th Cir. 2019).
With these principles in mind, we turn now to Velleff’s substantive due process
claim, and our analysis can be brief. By arguing that the Sheriff’s designate-or-destroy
policy is not “rationally related to a legitimate government interest,” Velleff invokes the
language of the rational-basis test, thereby conceding that, because no fundamental
right is in play, rational-basis review applies. See Kelley-Lomax, 49 F.4th at 1125
(concluding that destruction of inmate property after passage of a property retrieval
window did not implicate a fundamental right for substantive due process purposes).
But Velleff has not met the threshold requirements for rational-basis review that we set
out in Lee and described above. Velleff pursues only his substantive due process claim
on appeal, but he has not shown “an independent constitutional violation.” See Lee, 330
F.3d at 467. Nor does he attempt to demonstrate “the inadequacy of state law
remedies,” such as the property retrieval procedure established by the Sheriff. Id. These
deficiencies are fatal to Velleff’s substantive due process claim. Accordingly, we affirm
the district court’s grant of summary judgment without engaging in rational-basis
review. See id. Moreover, because Velleff’s only surviving claim fails, he has no claim
around which to organize a class. We therefore need not consider whether the district
court abused its discretion in denying class certification.
AFFIRMED.

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