This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Wednesday, April 13, 2022.

I'm Caleb Brown.

If you've been maliciously prosecuted, what is the minimum showing in order to proceed

with your case?

The Supreme Court recently took up that question. Their

conclusion is that dismissed charges should be enough and not going as far as

requiring a not guilty verdict. But of course that's not the only hurdle to successfully fighting prosecutors

who've used criminal charges as a weapon against innocent people. Kato's J Schweikert explains.

In many cases we have people who have been charged with a crime.

The case does not proceed forward,

or somebody could be acquitted.

And nonetheless, you have this person who maybe there was clearly very little evidence that this person

committed the crime that they had been accused of, and yet they cannot further go ahead and assert that their prosecution was malicious.

First of all, do we have any sense or is there any way to get at

the number of occurrences of malicious prosecution in the US.

It's difficult to say. I mean, the only sort of data we would even come close to having is data on cases brought,

which is obviously a much smaller universe than the total number of

malicious prosecutions that occur. There is, there are a lot of these cases because there is a very

deep and well-developed circuit split on what the elements for malicious prosecution claim are, which is what the court, which is the reason why the court took up the issue in Thompson versus Clark. So it's definitely something that occurs with quite commonly.

All right, so the circuit split, the issue goes to the US Supreme Court and what is the question before the court as to what is,

what are the elements that can be required before somebody who believes they've been victimized by a malicious prosecution, what they have to have.

Sure, so by way of just a little background, what we're talking about here are claims for

...