⚖ Oral Arguments, with Context

The United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit hears McGuffin versus Karcher, an interlocutory appeal in a civil rights case arising from a conviction that was later thrown out. Nicholas McGuffin spent nine years in prison in connection with the death of Leah Freeman, a fifteen year old Oregon girl who disappeared in the year two thousand. A jury acquitted him of murder and convicted him of first degree manslaughter. In two thousand nineteen, an Oregon post conviction court vacated that conviction after finding that the state crime lab had failed to turn over exculpatory DNA evidence, and the district attorney then moved to dismiss all charges. Six years later, in a separate proceeding, an Oregon judge issued the state's first certificate of innocence, finding McGuffin innocent of the crime for which he had been convicted. Suing on his own behalf and on behalf of his young daughter, McGuffin brought a civil rights case against more than a dozen defendants: the individual investigators, and the city, county and state agencies they worked for. In September of two thousand twenty five, the Oregon State Police and the city of Coquille agreed to pay a total of fourteen million dollars to settle the claims against them, and a private forensics society settled for an undisclosed amount. None of them admitted wrongdoing. Four individual defendants did not settle, and they are the appellants here: three law enforcement officers and a county deputy medical examiner, whose conduct is alleged to have spanned both the original investigation and the cold case reinvestigation that began in two thousand eight and led to McGuffin's indictment two years later. The district court denied those defendants' motion for summary judgment based on qualified immunity, finding genuine disputes of material fact on claims including fabrication of evidence, destruction of exculpatory evidence, and violation of familial association rights. The core legal issue on appeal is whether the district court properly denied qualified immunity at this interlocutory stage—whether the defendants were on notice that their specific conduct violated clearly established constitutional rights, and whether the court's factual findings are themselves appealable. A wrinkle in the case is that one plaintiff is McGuffin's daughter, who was born years after the original investigation, but before her father was arrested, tried, and imprisoned.

McGuffin v. Karcher (No. 25-2548) — U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit, argued August 6, 2026.