Andy H. Williams, Jr. v. City of Aurora

United States Court of Appeals
For the Seventh Circuit
Chicago, Illinois 60604
Submitted July 9, 2025*
Decided July 24, 2025
Before
THOMAS L. KIRSCH II, Circuit Judge
JOHN Z. LEE, Circuit Judge
JOSHUA P. KOLAR, Circuit Judge
No. 24-1635
ANDY H. WILLIAMS, JR.,
Plaintiff-Appellant,
v.
CITY OF AURORA, et al.,
Defendants-Appellees.
Appeal from the United States District
Court for the Northern District of
Illinois, Eastern Division.
No. 20 CV 2549
John J. Tharp, Jr.,
Judge.
O R D E R
Andy Williams appeals the dismissal of his complaint against the City of Aurora
and various municipal officials for allegedly violating his rights under the Constitution
and Illinois law. See 42 U.S.C. § 1983; 740 ILCS 23/5. The lawsuit concerns a traffic stop
* We have agreed to decide the case without oral argument because the briefs and
record adequately present the facts and legal arguments, and oral argument would not
significantly aid the court. F ED. R. A PP . P. 34(a)(2)(C).
NONPRECEDENTIAL DISPOSITION
To be cited only in accordance with F ED. R. APP . P. 32.1

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and the ensuing state trial in which Williams was found guilty of a turn-signal
violation. We affirm.
We accept the facts recounted in Williams’s complaint as true and draw all
reasonable inferences in his favor. See Hess v. Garcia, 72 F.4th 753, 756–57 (7th Cir. 2023).
Williams was on his way home from a meeting when four undercover police officers in
an unmarked vehicle pulled him over. One officer approached the driver’s-side door of
Williams’s car and the other three approached the passenger’s side. The officer on the
driver’s side told Williams that the officers pulled him over for signaling a turn too late
and for rolling a stop sign. The officer also explained that Williams appeared to be
coming from a house that was involved in recent shootings and robberies. Williams
denied coming from that house as well as the alleged traffic violations. The parties
dispute how long the stop lasted, but Williams alleges that it lasted over an hour.
During the stop, the officers told Williams that he was “lawfully detained” and “did not
have the right to travel.” A dashboard camera captured at least part of the incident.
The officers gave Williams two traffic citations, one for failing to signal at least
100 feet before turning, 625 ILCS 5/11-804(b), and one for disobeying a stop sign,
625 ILCS 5/11-1204(b). Following extensive discovery, Williams filed various pretrial
motions in the state court, which accused city officials of using pretextual traffic stops to
investigate gang-related crimes and fabricating evidence at his trial by editing a video
of the incident. The case proceeded to a bench trial. Williams was found guilty of the
signal violation but acquitted of the stop-sign violation. As a result, the court issued a
fine of $287.50. He did not appeal the verdict or fine.
While the state-court proceedings were ongoing, Williams sued the City of
Aurora, the mayor, the police department, the chief of police, a police sergeant, and the
four responding officers in federal court. He alleged an unreasonable seizure under the
Fourth Amendment, racial discrimination under the Fourteenth Amendment, and
citywide policies condoning those types of constitutional violations. He then filed a
separate lawsuit against the City of Aurora, the chief of police, and a police sergeant
claiming unspecified constitutional violations for maintaining an “arbitrary” and
“error-ridden” database of suspected gang members and a violation of the Illinois
Freedom of Information Act for failing to provide records from and relating to the
database. Because the two cases arose out of the same events, the district court granted
Williams leave to file an amended complaint consolidating the two actions.
Williams’s amended complaint included 22 “counts” against 25 defendants. The
district court screened the complaint under 28 U.S.C. § 1915(e)(2) and reorganized it

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into ten claims. The ten claims involved (I) the traffic stop; (II) the maintenance of a
gang database; (III) two state “gang statutes”; (IV) the fabrication of evidence at trial;
(V) selective prosecution; (VI) lack of standing to bring traffic charges; (VII) judicial
bias; (VIII) burden on Williams’s religious exercise; (IX) Illinois’s driver licensing law;
and (X) the denial of Williams’s Illinois FOIA request. The court dismissed most of
Williams’s claims without prejudice for lack of subject matter jurisdiction, based on the
Rooker-Feldman doctrine’s jurisdictional bar on disturbing state-court judgments; it
dismissed Claims I, VIII, and IX with prejudice to the extent that they were frivolous;
and it declined to exercise supplemental jurisdiction over Claim X.
On appeal, Williams raises multiple arguments that rely on the incorrect premise
that state courts lack subject matter jurisdiction over traffic violations arising under
state law. He argues that the state court’s lack of jurisdiction means that he was
improperly prosecuted for the traffic violations. But Williams has identified no
colorable support for the proposition that Illinois courts lack jurisdiction over criminal
violations of Illinois law. See Puerto Rico v. Sanchez Valle, 579 U.S. 59, 69 (2016) (“The
States’ ‘powers to undertake criminal prosecutions’ … do not ‘derive[] … from the
Federal Government.’ Instead, the States rely on ‘authority originally belonging to them
before admission to the Union and preserved to them by the Tenth Amendment.’”)
(quoting Heath v. Alabama, 474 U.S. 82, 89 (1985)) (internal citation omitted).
Williams also challenges the dismissal of his claim that the City of Aurora, its
mayor, and one of its police sergeants used pretextual traffic stops to target drivers
based on their race. The district court concluded that this claim was substantially
similar to claims previously dismissed after Williams failed to respond to the
defendants’ motion to dismiss one of his pre-consolidated complaints. The court
dismissed this claim in the amended complaint under the law-of-the-case doctrine.
“As most commonly defined, the doctrine posits that when a court decides upon
a rule of law, that decision should continue to govern the same issues in subsequent
stages in the same case.” Arizona v. California, 460 U.S. 605, 618 (1983), decision
supplemented, 466 U.S. 144 (1984). But the court’s conclusion in ruling upon the
defendants’ motion to dismiss that Williams had procedurally defaulted his claim is not
a decision “upon a rule of law,” Arizona, 460 U.S. at 618, because it did not address the
adequacy of Williams’s pleading. Without a ruling on the merits of whether Williams’s
allegations stated a claim upon which relief could be granted, there was no law of the
case to apply. Cf. Creek v. Vill. of Westhaven, 144 F.3d 441, 445 (7th Cir. 1998) (“[I]t is
essential to determine what issues were actually decided in order to define what is the

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‘law of the case.’”). In any event, the doctrine does not apply here because the district
court vacated its own decision dismissing the claim. The doctrine allows courts “to
refuse to reopen what has been decided,” Musacchio v. United States, 577 U.S. 237, 245
(2016) (quoting Messenger v. Anderson, 225 U.S. 436, 444 (1912)), but here, the court had
already reopened the issue by vacating its earlier decision. We therefore address the
adequacy of Williams’s allegations de novo.
Williams argues that these three defendants, along with the responding officers,
unreasonably seized him under § 1983 and the Illinois Civil Rights Act (a claim over
which the district court had supplemental jurisdiction, see 28 U.S.C. § 1367(a)). The Act
provides a state-law remedy against state and local governments, including the city of
Aurora, for violations of federal civil rights. See 740 ILCS 23/5(a); Ill. Native Am. Bar
Ass’n v. Univ. of Ill., 856 N.E.2d 460, 467 (Ill. App. Ct. 2006). And § 1983 allows Williams
to proceed against the individually named defendants. Under both theories, we analyze
Williams’s claim under the Fourth Amendment.
Even liberally construing Williams’s allegations, see Haines v. Kerner, 404 U.S. 519,
520 (1972), he did not plausibly allege an unreasonable seizure under the Fourth
Amendment. A traffic stop is a “seizure” and “is thus subject to the constitutional
imperative that it not be ‘unreasonable’ under the circumstances.” Whren v. United
States, 517 U.S. 806, 809–10 (1996). We agree with the district court that the officers had a
reasonable suspicion to believe that Williams violated a traffic law (evinced by his
eventual conviction) and that therefore the stop itself was not unreasonable under the
Fourth Amendment. See United States v. Cole, 21 F.4th 421, 427 (7th Cir. 2021). The stop
could have become unreasonable, however, if the duration was measurably extended
beyond the original objective without further justification. See id. at 427–28. Williams
alleged that the stop lasted over an hour, but he did not allege any activity by the
officers—other than asking him a few questions unrelated to the traffic violations—that
prolonged the stop beyond the time reasonably required to issue him a ticket. “An
officer’s inquiries into matters unrelated to the justification for the traffic stop … do not
convert the encounter into something other than a lawful seizure, so long as those
inquiries do not measurably extend the duration of the stop.” Arizona v. Johnson,
555 U.S. 323, 333 (2009); see also Cole, 21 F.4th at 429. Here, Williams did not allege any
specific activity by the officers that plausibly prolonged the stop by an unreasonable
margin.
Williams next challenges the court’s decision that he lacked standing to sue
various defendants for the maintenance of a gang database and the existence of two

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gang-related state statutes. See 720 ILCS 5/33G; 740 ILCS 147/5. The risk of a chilling
effect on Williams’s right to associate with people who appear in the database could be
sufficient to state a claim under the First Amendment. See Americans for Prosperity Found.
v. Bonta, 594 U.S. 595, 618–19 (2021). But Williams has not alleged that either statute
actually had a chilling effect on him. Instead, he alleged that the statutes would allow
police officers to harass him, stop him without probable cause, and arrest him based on
who he associates with. But nowhere in the amended complaint did Williams plausibly
allege that law enforcement ever stopped him or threatened to stop him based upon the
information in the database. Nor did he allege that he ever refrained from associating
with someone because of either statute.
Williams also challenges the dismissal of his claim that the defendants conspired
to convict him by using a deceptively edited video of the traffic stop. The district court
dismissed this claim under the Rooker-Feldman doctrine, which imposes a jurisdictional
bar preventing district courts from granting relief inconsistent with final state-court
judgments. Hadzi-Tanovic v. Johnson, 62 F.4th 394, 399 (7th Cir. 2023). But “awarding
damages usually does not affect a state court judgment not sounding in monetary
terms.” Gilbank v. Wood Cnty. Dep’t of Hum. Servs., 111 F.4th 754, 792 (7th Cir. 2024)
(en banc) (holding on claims for damages set forth in Part I of opinion by Kirsch, J.), cert.
denied, 145 S. Ct. 1167 (2025).1 Williams argues that Rooker-Feldman does not apply to
allegations that a state-court judgment was procured by fraud, but no such fraud
exception exists. Id. at 780–85 (holding on fraud exception set forth in Part VI of opinion
by Hamilton, J.). But because Williams’s claim for damages “does not seek to reverse a
state court judgment,” it avoids the jurisdictional bar. Id. at 793 (Kirsch, J.).
Still, Williams’s allegation—that the defendants used fabricated evidence to
maliciously prosecute him—fails. There is no constitutional right to be free from
prosecution without probable cause, only a right not to be held in custody without
probable cause. Manuel v. City of Joliet, 903 F.3d 667, 670 (7th Cir. 2018). And Williams
was never held in custody, either pretrial or as part of a sentence. Further, to prevail on
a Fourth Amendment claim under § 1983 for malicious prosecution, Williams would
eventually need to show that his prosecution ended without a conviction, Thompson v.
1 The district court filed its order in March 2024 and therefore did not have the
benefit of Gilbank, which we decided in August 2024. But appellate courts generally
must “apply changes in the law,” and the defendants offer no reason for us not to apply
Gilbank on appeal. See Ortiz-Santiago v. Barr, 924 F.3d 956, 964 (7th Cir. 2019).

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Clark, 596 U.S. 36, 39 (2022), but the state court ultimately found him guilty of the turn-
signal violation.2
Finally, Williams argues that several state judges in Kane County showed bias in
his case and that he is therefore entitled to damages and injunctive relief. Williams
asserts that the judges had conflicts of interest based on their backgrounds (including
some former state’s attorneys), political affiliations (most being members of the
Democratic party), and rulings against him. Due process protects litigants from
situations in which “the probability of actual bias on the part of the judge or
decisionmaker is too high to be constitutionally tolerable.” Withrow v. Larkin, 421 U.S.
35, 47 (1975); see also Del Vecchio v. Illinois Dep’t of Corr., 31 F.3d 1363, 1372 (7th Cir.
1994). We presume that judges serve with honesty and integrity, Withrow, 421 U.S. at 47;
Del Vecchio, 31 F.3d at 1372, and past employment, political affiliation, and adverse
rulings do not, by themselves, overcome that presumption.
AFFIRMED
2 Failing to signal is a petty offense under Illinois law, see 625 ILCS 5/11-202,
804(b), meaning a sentence of imprisonment is not authorized, see 730 ILCS 5/5-1-17. But
police can still arrest individuals for such offenses. See Atwater v. City of Lago Vista,
532 U.S. 318, 354 (2001); United States v. Norville, 43 F.4th 680, 682 (7th Cir. 2022) (noting
that a traffic violation is an arrestable offense).

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