Opinion
March 7, 1988
Appeal from the Supreme Court, Nassau County (Oppido, J.).
Ordered that the judgment is reversed insofar as appealed from, on the law, without costs or disbursements, and the complaint is dismissed as against these defendants.
A prerequisite to the plaintiffs recovering on their causes of action for false imprisonment and malicious prosecution is the absence of probable cause to make the arrest and maintain the subsequent criminal proceeding. The appellants contend that probable cause to arrest existed as a matter of law and that both theories of liability of these defendants which were submitted to the jury should have been dismissed. We agree. For the purposes of maintaining a cause of action for malicious prosecution, probable cause has been defined as "the knowledge of facts, actual or apparent, strong enough to justify a reasonable man in the belief that he has lawful grounds for prosecuting the defendant in the manner complained of" (Burt v. Smith, 181 N.Y. 1, 5, writ dismissed 203 U.S. 129; Burroughs v. City of New York, 112 A.D.2d 186).
On this record, viewing the evidence most favorably to the plaintiffs, who prevailed at trial, as a matter of law there can be no dispute that there was probable cause to believe that the plaintiff William Weingarten had committed the crime with which he was charged. Weingarten's own trial testimony confirmed the truth of the admissions he made to the polygraph examiner that he had stolen cash from his employer over the course of the year. Where the facts leading up to the arrest are undisputed, the existence of probable cause to make the arrest is for the court to determine as a matter of law (Rawson v. Leggett, 184 N.Y. 504, 508; Veras v. Truth Verification Corp., 87 A.D.2d 381, affd 57 N.Y.2d 947). Accordingly, the trial court should have dismissed the claims premised on false imprisonment and malicious prosecution as a matter of law. Mangano, J.P., Lawrence, Spatt and Balletta, JJ., concur.