The Legal Aid Society joined a coalitional amicus brief with other leading civil rights advocacy groups, criminal defense offices, and police accountability organizations to ask the Second Circuit to reverse lower court holdings that required civil rights plaintiffs to show, as a prerequisite to bringing constitutional tort claims against police officers who fabricated evidence against them, that their underlying criminal case terminated in a manner affirmatively indicative of factual innocence. The rule was unfair and unworkable and would have created a perverse incentive for prosecutors to aggressively pursue cases where there is an allegation of police misconduct.

In 2021, the Second Circuit held that 1983 fabrication of evidence claims, which are based in the due process clauses of the Fifth and Fourteenth Amendments, do not require a demonstration of innocence.