“It is clearly established that an officer cannot pull someone over without reasonable suspicion and thereafter concoct a fabricated traffic violation,” the appeals court says.
At roughly 5 p.m. on a Wednesday in June 2022, Mario Rosales was behind the wheel of a red Mustang on Jackson Street in Alexandria, Louisiana, preparing to turn left onto Dorchester Drive, when a police SUV pulled in behind him. After the light turned green and Rosales completed the turn, Officers Samuel Terrell and Jim Lewis activated their lights and stopped him.
The officers later asserted that Rosales had “failed to signal” his turn. Yet dashcam footage contradicted that claim: the Mustang’s left-turn indicator was blinking as Rosales waited at the intersection. And after stopping Rosales and his girlfriend, Gracie Lasyone, who sat in the front passenger seat, Terrell and Lewis detained them for 21 minutes, during which they asked whether there was anything illegal in the car, grilled them about drug use, frisked Rosales, ordered him to empty his pockets, and gave them both the Miranda warning that typically accompanies an arrest.
Rosales and Lasyone sued Terrell and Lewis in federal court that November, contending that the officers violated their Fourth Amendment rights under color of law. The officers argued they were protected by qualified immunity, a doctrine that bars such lawsuits unless plaintiffs plead violations of “clearly established” law. A federal judge disagreed, and last week the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 5th Circuit affirmed that decision, concluding that Rosales and Lasyone’s allegations were enough to defeat qualified immunity at this stage of the case.
That ruling, issued by a unanimous three-judge panel, stands out for two reasons. It highlights the limits of the broad latitude the Supreme Court has accorded police to stop and question motorists. It also underscores the limits of qualified immunity, which, in many instances, has prevented victims of shocking police misconduct from pursuing constitutional claims because they could not point to sufficiently precise precedents.
In the 1968 decision Terry v. Ohio, the Supreme Court held that police may stop a person when they reasonably suspect involvement in criminal activity and may frisk him if they reasonably suspect he is “armed and dangerous.” Three decades later, in Whren v. United States, the Court stated that reasonable suspicion of a traffic violation is enough to justify stopping a car, even if that charge is a pretext for an unrelated criminal investigation. And when a traffic stop is legally justified, the Court has ruled in other cases that police may question the driver about unrelated matters and may order both the driver and any passengers out of the car for officer safety.
The impact of those rulings was evident when Terrell and Lewis pulled over Rosales and Lasyone. The officers ordered both out of the vehicle and questioned them about where they lived, their travel plans, their criminal histories, and their personal habits.
Rosales, whose vehicle was registered in New Mexico, explained that he was born in Roswell, planned to move to Louisiana, worked for Atlas Home Service in Alexandria, and stayed with Lasyone’s sister in Dry Prong while in Louisiana but hoped to buy a home there. He said he and Lasyone had just finished work, had stopped by a bank, and were en route to purchase a car part advertised on Facebook. Lasyone offered the same account.
When asked about carrying a firearm, Rosales said he had a Taurus pistol in a bag in the backseat but refused to let Terrell retrieve it, saying, “I don’t want anybody searching my vehicle.” Terrell frisked Rosales and found no weapons. Despite that search, Lewis asked Rosales to empty his pockets and place the contents—a wallet and keys—on the hood of the police SUV. When Rosales said that was all he carried, Lewis asked, “Do you mind if I check?” After Rosales noted that Terrell had already frisked him, Terrell explained that “I just patted you down” but did not “search you.”
Lewis then inquired about drugs. Was there marijuana in the car? Meth? Heroin? Fentanyl? Pills prescribed for someone else? Cocaine? Crack? Rosales answered no to each question, asserting he did not use illegal drugs. He also said he had never been arrested and had “a clean record.”
Lasyone answered similar questions, stating she had never been arrested and did not use illegal drugs. No marijuana. No meth. No heroin. No cocaine. No crack. No other people’s prescription pills.
When Lasyone asked why the officers were asking so many questions, Terrell replied they were “just curious.” Not satisfied with that explanation, Lasyone asked, “You just pull people over because you’re curious?” Well, not exactly, Terrell replied: “He failed to signal, so that’s why I pulled you over, and then once we started talking, I got curious.”
Lewis offered Rosales a similar account. “You know a traffic stop is a legal detainment, right?” he said. “You were detained on a traffic stop.” He claimed he was “just letting you know” because “you seem like a constitutionalist to me.” He even added, “I’m a lot of a constitutionalist.”
When background checks found no criminal histories or outstanding warrants, Lewis expressed disappointment. “Aaaw,” he said. “What are the chances of that?!…Aw, man!”
Terrell and Lewis had a drug-sniffing dog but decided not to deploy it. “I really didn’t see a whole lot of indicators of him [Rosales] not being completely truthful,” Lewis explained.
In addition to charging Rosales with “failure to signal,” the officers claimed he had failed to register his car, which was not true: His car was registered in New Mexico, and that registration did not expire until October 2022. The charges were ultimately dismissed.
If Rosales had indeed “failed to signal,” the stop would have been justified under Whren, which allows even “pretextual” stops when officers reasonably believe a driver has violated any of the numerous state rules governing operation and maintenance of motor vehicles. But as the 5th Circuit observed, dashcam footage showed that Rosales had activated his turn signal, though the record did not clearly establish whether he had done so at least 100 feet before the intersection, as Louisiana law requires.
According to the complaint, the appeals court notes, Rosales “legally turned left,” implying the cops “fabricated a traffic violation.” And “it is clearly established that an officer cannot pull someone over without reasonable suspicion and thereafter concoct a fabricated traffic violation.”
Even on its own, that assertion would support a Fourth Amendment claim under Terry. But Rosales and Lasyone argued that even if the stop were justified, the officers impermissibly extended their detention without reasonable suspicion of criminal activity and unlawfully searched Rosales without reasonable suspicion that he was “armed and dangerous.”
Terrell contended the frisk was warranted because Rosales wore “baggy clothing,” did not mention his pistol until questioned about weapons, and described himself as “agitated.” But “an officer cannot search or seize a person simply because he is carrying a firearm,” the 5th Circuit notes, quoting its 2025 decision in United States v. Wilson. Rosales’ self-description “at best suggests ‘nervousness,'” which does not suffice to establish reasonable suspicion, the appeals court says. “Nor does ‘baggy’ clothing alone justify a pat-down.”
Since “these facts do not support a reasonable suspicion—either in isolation or in light of the totality of the circumstances—that Rosales was armed and dangerous, he has plausibly alleged that Officer Terrell frisked him unlawfully,” the 5th Circuit states. It adds that “Officer Lewis searched Rosales’s pockets after he observed Officer Terrell conduct a pat-down that revealed no weapons,” which likewise was not justified given the circumstances described by the plaintiffs. In short, Rosales “plausibly alleged those searches were unlawful under the Fourth Amendment.”
Even if those searches violated the Fourth Amendment, Terrell and Lewis argued, they did not have fair notice to that effect. But as the 5th Circuit notes, “the law that prohibited Officers from searching Rosales has long been clearly established.”
The 5th Circuit gave less weight to the claim that Terrell and Lewis violated the First Amendment by repeatedly denying Rosales or Lasyone the opportunity to record the encounter on their mobile phones. In the 2017 case Turner v. Lieutenant Driver, the appeals court recognized that the First Amendment protects a “right to record the police,” subject to “reasonable time, place, and manner restrictions.” But Turner “does not clearly establish the First Amendment right” that Rosales and Lasyone “assert in this case,” the 5th Circuit says, because it did not involve “persons detained during a traffic stop.”
This ruling does not guarantee that Rosales and Lasyone will ultimately prevail, but it at least allows them a path to advance their case. “This is the third ruling denying the officers qualified immunity,” notes Marie Miller, an attorney at the Institute for Justice, which represents the plaintiffs. “The magistrate judge and district court had already determined the officers were not entitled to qualified immunity. The years Mario and Gracie have spent pursuing their rightful remedies are a testament to their willpower and strength. They are fighting not just for their own rights, but to protect the rights of all motorists moving forward.”
