David Rudovsky

The Paper Trail of Police Power

A stop form, an interview report, a training policy, a letter withheld from the defense. David Rudovsky has spent five decades testing the government’s own records against the constitutional power they claimed to justify.

Every 75-48A

A Philadelphia officer who stopped a pedestrian recorded the encounter on a form known as the 75-48A. Location, time, race, reasons for the stop and any frisk, contraband recovered: each box preserved what the officer said justified the seizure. In 2010, eight Black and Latino men challenged a citywide practice they alleged had subjected thousands of people to stops and searches without reasonable suspicion and, in their own encounters, on account of race or ethnicity.

The parties resolved Bailey v. City of Philadelphia in 2011 through a court-approved settlement and consent decree. The police department agreed to collect stop data electronically, train and supervise officers, and submit the results to review by counsel and an independent monitor. The decree converted individual forms into a record for testing Fourth Amendment compliance across districts, shifts, supervisors and years.

In 2013, plaintiffs’ counsel reported that forty-five to fifty percent of the sampled stops still lacked legal cause. Their analysis rested on the officers’ own words, not interviews with the people stopped. Entries such as “loitering,” “high crime area” or “acting suspiciously” did not identify the particular facts reasonable suspicion requires. Rudovsky said the department had normalized stops untethered to a sufficient reason; changing that practice required training, supervision and discipline.

Thirteen Years in the Columns

The reports showed an uneven trajectory. Early audits placed unlawful stops above forty percent, while data from the second half of 2016 showed improvement: officers documented reasonable suspicion for seventy-five percent of stops and fifty-nine percent of frisks. By 2019, the figures were eighty-four percent and sixty-two percent. The city’s statistical expert agreed that persistent racial disparities reflected bias, and the court approved additional remedies.

The Eleventh Report, filed in November 2023, reviewed 3,245 stops from the third quarter of 2022 and the first half of 2023. Officers documented reasonable suspicion for 87.2 percent of stops and 76.7 percent of frisks. Minority residents accounted for 82.4 percent of stops and 87.6 percent of frisks. The report therefore recorded both improvement and a continuing defect: nearly one in four frisks remained unsupported or followed an unlawful stop.

PedStat supplied supervisors with officer- and district-level data in real time. A separate program directed officers confronting specified low-level offenses to begin with a verbal warning rather than a forcible stop; it reached all twenty-three police districts in May 2023. The ACLU of Pennsylvania reported in 2024 that judicial monitoring continued, even as the number of stops fell and the share supported by recorded facts rose.

Halsey and Fabricated Evidence

Byron Halsey was twenty-four, had a sixth-grade education and was visibly limited when investigators questioned him about the 1985 murders of two children in Plainfield, New Jersey. He spent more than twelve hours at the station before an examiner found him too sleep-deprived for a polygraph. The test administered the next morning was reported as deceptive, although a later expert analysis scored it as strongly truthful. More questioning followed.

The statement attributed to Halsey contained nonpublic details, but it also repeated what investigators believed before later testing corrected them. It described four nails driven into one child’s head; a later x-ray found five. It omitted another assault revealed only by later testing. A prosecutor testified that the statement was critical: without it, no physical evidence or eyewitness tied Halsey to the crimes. He was convicted and received two life terms plus twenty years.

DNA testing in 2006 excluded Halsey and connected the crime-scene evidence to another man. Prosecutors moved to vacate the convictions and dismiss the indictment, and Halsey left prison after more than two decades. His civil action then focused on the question the criminal record had obscured: whether officers manufactured the confession that supplied the direct evidence needed to prosecute him.

Fabricated Evidence and Due Process

In 2014, the United States Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit reversed summary judgment for the two investigators. Applying the record in Halsey’s favor, as the summary-judgment posture required, the court reinstated his fabricated-evidence and malicious-prosecution claims. It held that an officer who fabricates evidence to obtain a conviction violates due process, and that a prosecutor’s charging decision does not necessarily break the causal chain when officers supplied the false material.

Halsey’s claims later settled for $12.5 million. The published Third Circuit ruling remains precedent and is cited in the court’s March 2026 model civil-rights instructions. Those instructions recognize a stand-alone Fourteenth Amendment claim when fabricated evidence causes a prosecution or conviction, but require knowing, willful, or reckless falsification rather than a mere dispute or mistake.

Suppressed Letters in William Johnson’s Case

William Johnson walked out of prison on June 8, 2023, after a federal court vacated his Philadelphia murder conviction and prosecutors dismissed the charges. A civil complaint filed the following January alleges that detectives coerced witnesses and that prosecutors suppressed letters bearing on their credibility. Those assertions remain allegations unless established through admission, adjudication or settlement. Rudovsky joined Jonathan Feinberg, Grace Harris and Emma Freudenberger as counsel for Johnson.

The complaint alleges that Johnson’s prosecution reflected broader city failures: inadequate training and supervision of detectives, tolerated coercion, and a district attorney’s practice of withholding favorable evidence prosecutors considered unreliable. For the municipal claim, City of Canton sets the demanding proof. Policy must be connected to injury; the withheld letters and witness accounts must be tested as evidence, not treated as conclusions.

Rudovsky and David Kairys founded their public-interest practice in 1971 after working as public defenders. Rudovsky has taught constitutional criminal procedure, criminal law, and evidence at Penn since 1987 while litigating police-misconduct, wrongful-conviction, stop-and-frisk, and municipal-liability cases.

How Records Become Rules

Rudovsky’s cases show constitutional doctrine being made from ordinary records. A stop form becomes evidence of citywide seizure practice. A fabricated interview report becomes the direct link between an innocent man and a prosecution. A training policy becomes the basis—or the limit—of municipal liability. A withheld letter can reopen the history of a conviction.

He has argued at the Supreme Court over the standards governing those records and spent years in district courts assembling them. The two forms of work are inseparable. Appellate doctrine determines what must be proved; trial practice determines whether the evidence exists in a form the doctrine can recognize.

Fifty Years of Institutional Memory

Rudovsky’s teaching at Penn and his practice with Kairys, Rudovsky, Messing, Feinberg & Lin give that case history a second life. The rules in City of Canton, Mitchell, and Halsey are now used by courts, lawyers, and model instructions far beyond the clients who first brought them.

The paper trail remains the through line. Police power is exercised in a street stop, an interrogation room, or a station cell, then translated into forms, reports, policies, and testimony. Rudovsky’s work tests that translation against the Constitution, one record and one institution at a time.