Displeased by how the children resisted a custody ruling, a Missouri judge confined the youngsters to jail cells until they agreed to cooperate, a federal appeals court determined this violated their Fourth Amendment rights. The U.S. Court of Appeals for the 8th Circuit rejected Judge Eric Eighmy’s assertion of qualified immunity—a shield that blocks federal civil rights claims unless the plaintiff can show a “clearly established” rule was violated.
“A reasonable judge should have known better,” wrote Judge David Stras in the opinion, joined by the other two members of the 8th Circuit panel. “The law was ‘clearly established’ enough” to render the issue “beyond debate.”
Institute for Justice attorney Dylan Moore, who drafted an 8th Circuit brief opposing immunity for Eighmy and participated in oral argument, welcomed the ruling. “Every reasonable person knows that a judge can’t throw children in jail for no good reason,” he said. “Yet Judge Eighmy contended that qualified immunity shielded him from accountability because no prior case told him imprisoning innocent kids is unconstitutional. That defense is ridiculous, and we are thrilled that the court saw through it. When government officials commit such obvious constitutional violations, qualified immunity should never come into play.”
The incident at the heart of the case followed an October 2019 custody hearing involving Kadan Rockett, then 14, and his 12-year-old sister Brooklyn, who had gained some attention as magicians on America’s Got Talent. Their divorced parents, Bart Rockett and Kami Ballard, had agreed that Ballard, who by then lived in Missouri, would obtain primary custody, while Rockett, residing in California, would be “responsible for them at the beginning of each month and ‘during TV pilot season.'” But Kadan and Brooklyn refused to go home with their mother, which sparked an argument in the courthouse lobby.
Eighmy intervened, directing the children to accompany him to a conference room and informing them they would have to leave with Ballard. “The children would not move, even after the judge mentioned that the other option was foster care,” Stras notes. “Frustrated, Judge Eighmy had the children follow him again, this time to a waiting area in the courthouse’s juvenile division.” A few minutes later, Eighmy “led them down a hallway to two holding cells.”
Outside the cells, Eighmy again warned Kadan and Brooklyn about foster care, but they remained unmoved. “Lock them up,” the judge told an officer, who “patted them down and ordered them to remove their socks and shoes” before placing them in separate holding cells.
How long the children stayed behind bars is not precisely documented. The Institute for Justice says “about an hour,” while Stras notes the time spent in the holding-area ranged from twenty to forty minutes. Either way, the children’s respect for Eighmy’s authority had increased by the time he returned. He asked them one more time whether they would leave with their mother; this time both nodded yes, and he released them.
In June 2021, Bart Rockett sued Eighmy on behalf of Kadan and Brooklyn under 42 U.S.C. 1983, which authorizes civil-rights claims against state or local officials acting under color of law. In a motion to dismiss, Eighmy argued that he was shielded by judicial immunity, which is absolute with respect to a judge’s official duties. U.S. District Judge Douglas Harpool disagreed, and the 8th Circuit affirmed that ruling in 2023, noting that Kadan and Brooklyn were beyond Eighmy’s contempt power because they were not parties to the custody case and that “judges do not do double duty as jailers.”
Eighmy reiterated his judicial-immunity claim in a motion for summary judgment, and Harpool again rejected it. After the trial began, Eighmy claimed qualified immunity twice—first after all the evidence had been presented and again after the jury’s verdict in favor of Kadan and Brooklyn. Harpool denied him both times.
The jury ultimately awarded $5,000 in damages to each child, and Harpool added roughly $327,000 in attorney fees. Eighmy appealed again, repeating his judicial-immunity argument. But the appeals court ruled that he had abandoned that line of defense by not raising it during the trial or after the verdict, leaving him with a qualified-immunity claim the court found undeserved.
Eighmy’s actions clearly violated the Fourth Amendment’s ban on unreasonable seizures, Stras states, because he did not have probable cause to believe the children had committed an offense, much less one warranting confinement in a holding cell. The only alleged misdeed was resisting authority—a common parental concern—but even in the context of a custody dispute, such resistance is not a crime punishable by jail, nor were there any exigent circumstances threatening anyone’s safety.
Was there any extra leeway afforded by his role as a judge? Not at all. “Criminal contempt was off the table because the children were not parties to the custody case and were not present in the courtroom,” Stras notes. “Nor could the power to punish a party for violating an injunction have justified it, since no injunction had been issued.”
The motive behind Eighmy’s decision to detain the children does not change the legal analysis. “We have no doubt that Judge Eighmy believed he was acting in ‘good faith,’ and perhaps even in the children’s best interests, by detaining them,” Stras writes. “But good faith in the Fourth Amendment context hinges on reasonable reliance on binding appellate precedent or on a warrant issued by a ‘neutral magistrate.'”
What about the argument that he could not have known his actions were unconstitutional? “The law in this area,” Stras says, was “clearly established.” “‘[I]t would have been sufficiently clear [to] every reasonable official,’ including Judge Eighmy, that locking two children up for refusing to follow directions violated the Fourth Amendment. As we observed more than a decade and a half ago, long before these events, ‘[i]t is clearly established that a warrantless arrest, unsupported by probable cause, violates the Fourth Amendment.'”
That principle was so well established that Kadan and Brooklyn, neither of whom had attended law school, took it for granted. “I don’t know how you have a right to lock us up,” Kadan told Eighmy when he threatened to jail them, according to Rockett’s amended complaint. “We have done nothing wrong.” The complaint says Brooklyn echoed the same point: “How can you just lock up kids? This isn’t legal. We’ve done nothing wrong.”
Given Eighmy’s apparent disregard for Kadan and Brooklyn’s Fourth Amendment rights, “we are not troubled by the absence of a prior case with fundamentally similar facts,” Stras writes. “Indeed, given how clear the law is, it would be surprising to find one.” He quotes Supreme Court Justice Neil Gorsuch, then a 10th Circuit judge: “Sometimes the most obviously unlawful things happen so rarely that a case on point is itself an unusual thing.”
