Mississippi  |  Criminal Law

Generally the Police are "protected" with a doctrine known as "soverign immunity" and unless you can show "bad faith" or "a complete lack of probable cause to believe a crime was committed and that the people arrested had something to do with the crime" then the City and the Police Department will be immune from a lawsuit. On the other hand, if you can show that they were arrested for some ulterior purpose, such as to force them to provide evidence against someone else, or to try to make them suffer some penalty for another incident for which no arrests could be made, then perhaps a good lawsuit could be pursued. You will probably have a very difficult time finding competent counsel to represent them with this claim for the reason that even if the lawsuit is deemed "valid" the verdicts in these cases are generally very small due in part to the fact that the taxpayers who have to foot the bill for the verdict are on the jury in many cases.