Federal appellate courts deny qualified immunity for officers and a judge who violated enduring constitutional standards.
Since 1871, a federal statute has allowed Americans to sue state and local officials when their constitutional rights are violated. Yet since 1982, through a doctrine invented by the courts—qualified immunity—such claims have generally been permitted only when the conduct in question violated “clearly established” law.
Because judges often require plaintiffs to demonstrate such a standard by pointing to precedents with markedly similar facts, qualified immunity can stand as an almost insurmountable hurdle even for those who suffer flagrant abuses. Yet as two recent rulings show, there are bounds to this protection, and officials may still be held to account when they disregard entrenched constitutional principles, even if they do so in novel ways.
In 2022, Mario Rosales and Gracie Lasyone filed suit against two Alexandria, Louisiana police officers, Samuel Terrell and Jim Lewis, alleging that they pulled Rosales over without legitimate justification. The officers forced Rosales and his girlfriend Lasyone from the vehicle and detained them for 21 minutes, during which they grilled them about illegal drugs, frisked Rosales, and instructed him to empty his pockets.
Terrell and Lewis sought shelter under qualified immunity. But last month, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 5th Circuit concluded that Rosales and Lasyone had plausibly asserted several Fourth Amendment violations, including a stop based on a “fabricated traffic violation,” an unnecessarily extended detention, and unjustified searches.
In reaching that determination, the 5th Circuit primarily invoked a 1968 Supreme Court ruling stating that police may detain someone only if there is reasonable suspicion of involvement in criminal activity and may frisk only if there is reasonable suspicion that they are “armed and dangerous.” Assuming the facts alleged in the complaint are true, the three-judge panel unanimously held that Terrell and Lewis had failed both standards.
When the officers halted Rosales, the legal principles the 5th Circuit applied had been settled law for more than half a century. Yet Terrell and Lewis contended that “any constitutional violation arising from the traffic stop was not clearly established,” a statement that underscores the audacity such immunity can foster.
In a separate matter, the 8th Circuit this month reviewed a case where law enforcement’s routine practice of pulling over drivers to insinuate drug crimes was upended by a judge’s conduct. The dispute centered on a Missouri situation from 2019 in Taney County, where a divorced couple had agreed that the mother would retain primary custody of their two children, aged 12 and 14.
However, the children did not want to return with their mother, and an argument erupted in the courthouse lobby. Judge Eric Eighmy stepped in, informing the youngsters that they must go with their mother and warned repeatedly that refusing could result in removal into foster care. When persuasion failed, he detained them in a holding area until they became more cooperative.
“The time spent in the holding-cell area was between twenty and forty minutes,” the 8th Circuit observed. Since Eighmy lacked probable cause to believe the children had committed any offense — let alone one that would justify confinement in a holding cell — the court ruled that their detention violated the Fourth Amendment.
In response, Eighmy argued that he could not have known that. The 8th Circuit panel, however, unanimously disagreed: “As we stated over a decade and a half ago, long before the events in this case, ‘it is clearly established that a warrantless arrest, unsupported by probable cause, violates the Fourth Amendment.'”
Notably, the court did not rely on the peculiar details of the case to tilt the outcome in Eighmy’s favor. “We are not concerned with the lack of a prior case” that shares “fundamentally similar” facts, the opinion stated. “Indeed, given how clear the law is, it would have been surprising to find one.”
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