Page 3
Ninth Circuit:
Liability for High-Risk Stop Is ‘Clearly Established’
Opinion Says Qualified Immunity Does Not Shield Officers Who Pulled Mother From Car at Gunpoint Due to Unconfirmed Stolen Vehicle Suspicions
By a MetNews Staff Writer
It is clearly established that reasonable suspicion by police officers that a vehicle is stolen does not justify a high-risk, 24-minute traffic stop during which the plaintiff was asked to exit the car at gunpoint in front of her passenger and teenage daughter and asked to lay flat on her stomach on the ground, the Ninth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals held yesterday.
The car, it turned out, belonged to the detained driver Hasmik Chinaryan. The mistaken suspicions of the officers were due to the car—a black Suburban limousine—matching the description of a vehicle reported as stolen from the area the previous day and bearing the wrong license plates because of an error by the Department of Motor Vehicles.
The ruling forecloses qualified immunity for the individual officers in a civil action asserting claims against them under 42 U.S.C. §1983 by Chinaryan, on behalf of herself and her minor daughter, and the passenger Mariana Manukyan.
The complaint, filed in October 2019, asserts causes of action relating to alleged violations of the plaintiffs’ Fourth Amendment rights against the City of Los Angeles, the Los Angeles Police Department, then-Chief of Police Michel Moore (now retired), and individual officers Romero Gonzalez, Fred Cueto, Rodrigo Soria, Airam Potter, Brittany Oke, Daniel Martinez, Daniel Gayton, Eduardo Piche, Mario Menses, and Brittany Primo.
District Court Judge Mark C. Scarsi of the Central District of California granted a motion for summary judgment in favor of the individual officers, finding that they were protected by qualified immunity. A jury trial was held on the remaining claims against the city and police department based on liability established in the 1977 U.S. Supreme Court case in Monell v. Department of Social Services.
Claims Against City
Monell claims require a finding that the officers violated the constitutional rights of a plaintiff while acting on an official government policy. Scarsi instructed the jury that the court had “determined that [the city and the LAPD] have an official policy of allowing officers to conduct a high-risk stop on a suspected stolen vehicle after considering the totality of the circumstances” and that “the officers acted pursuant to that official policy.”
The only issue for the jury to decide was whether the officers violated plaintiffs’ Fourth Amendment rights in following the policy. After a jury found in favor of the city and department, Scarsi entered a judgment in favor of all defendants on Oct. 21, 2021.
Circuit Judge Jacqueline H. Nguyen authored the opinion reversing the judgment as to the individual officers. Senior Circuit Judge Sidney R. Thomas joined in the opinion.
Circuit Judge Danielle J. Forrest dissented, arguing that the jury’s verdict against the plaintiffs on the Monell claims against the city and police department established that the jurors did not find any Fourth Amendment violations, rendering harmless any error in granting summary judgment to the individual officers.
Qualified Immunity
Qualified immunity shields police officers from §1983 claims unless they violated a constitutional right and the unlawfulness of their conduct was clearly established at the time.
Quoting the 1996 Ninth Circuit decision in Washington v. Lambert, authored by Circuit Judge Stephen Reinhardt (now deceased), Nguyen said that “[t]he Fourth Amendment protects persons ‘from the terrifying and humiliating experience of being pulled from their cars at gunpoint, handcuffed, or made to lie face down on the pavement when insufficient reason for such intrusive police conduct exists.’ ”
She noted that a court must balance the nature of the intrusion against the countervailing governmental interests at stake to determine if the tactics were unreasonable and in violation of the Fourth Amendment.
Looking to the detention at issue, the jurist wrote:
“Although vehicle theft is an ‘arguably severe’…the officers had no articulable basis to suspect that plaintiffs posed a threat to anyone beyond the generic threat that a suspected vehicle thief poses….Chinaryan obeyed all traffic laws and did not drive evasively. Chinaryan pulled over at the same time as the officers flashed their lights to initiate the stop. Once stopped, she and her passengers complied with all officer commands.”
She continued:
“Even if plaintiffs’ vehicle had been the stolen one, as the officers suspected, the passage of time gave rise to the possibility that the occupants were unconnected to the crime. Further, any safety-based justification…weakened considerably once the DMV error became apparent and the officers ascertained that plaintiffs were cooperative and unarmed. Yet plaintiffs were inexplicably restrained for several additional minutes.”
Based on these facts, she declared that “the officers’ reasonable suspicion that plaintiffs had stolen the Suburban, standing alone” did not justify the high intrusion.
Clearly Established
Nguyen said that a right is “clearly established” if existing case law places the question beyond debate such that every reasonable officer would have understood that he was violating an individual’s constitutional protections.
She cited the 2014 case of Green v. City of San Francisco, in which the Ninth Circuit held that a Fourth Amendment violation occurred when a woman was pulled from her car at gunpoint, ordered to her knees, and handcuffed after the officers’ automated license plate reader misread her plate as belonging to a stolen vehicle.
Unpersuaded by the attempts to distinguish Green, Nguyen wrote:
“Even assuming defendants here were more certain than the officers in Green that they had the right suspects, their certainty was relevant only to whether they had reasonable suspicion to investigate. It did not increase the likelihood that the suspected vehicle thieves were armed or dangerous or that any other special circumstances called for the use of high-risk tactics.”
She added:
“Defendants are correct that Washington and Green ‘did not establish bright-line rules on the reasonableness of high risk stops.’ Nonetheless, these cases established that for summary judgment purposes, reasonable suspicion of vehicle theft alone is not enough to justify the intrusive tactics used here absent some case-specific need for them….Because a jury could find that the totality of the circumstances here did not justify the officers’ tactics, the district court erred in ruling that the officer defendants are entitled to qualified immunity.”
Procedural Distinction
The defendants also argue that the case is procedurally distinct from Green based on the fact that a jury has already ruled that there was no Fourth Amendment violation. Rejecting the argument, Nguyen said:
“But defendants do not explain how the jury verdict in favor of the City and the LAPD bears on whether the district court earlier erred in granting summary judgment to the individual officers. Because it was clearly established under Washington and Green that the officers’ conduct, viewed in the light most favorable to plaintiffs, constituted excessive force, we reverse the grant of summary judgment in favor of the individual officers on plaintiffs’ § 1983 claims.”
She noted that the defendants failed to raise the argument advanced by Forrest in her dissent that any summary judgment error was harmless as “nowhere in their brief do defendants discuss harmless error or prejudice.” wrote that “[a]lthough the dissent does an admirable job making defendants’ argument for them…that is not our role” and “[e]ven were we to consider the question, we disagree with the dissent that the jury’s failure to consider plaintiffs’ claims against the individual officers was harmless.”
Nguyen opined:
“[T]he jury was instructed that the officers were following the law. As the court explained, determining whether a Fourth Amendment violation occurred required the jury to ‘consider all the circumstances.’ But the district court had already instructed the jury that the officers were adhering to a policy of ‘considering the totality of the circumstances’ before acting.”
She added that “the instructions prevented the jury from considering the entirety of each officer’s conduct as the basis of a Fourth Amendment violation.”
Forrest’s Dissent
Forrest said:
“Procedurally, this is an unusual case. After the district court granted summary judgment to the individual officers, Plaintiffs’ municipal liability claims asserted under Monell…went to trial with only one issue for the jury to resolve: Did the individual officers violate Plaintiffs’ Fourth Amendment rights? As should be obvious, this issue is critical not only to the Monell claims, but also to the claims against the individual officers—if the officers did not violate Plaintiffs’ constitutional rights, they are not liable under either § 1983….After hearing the evidence, the jury found that the individual officers did not violate Plaintiffs’ Fourth Amendment rights. Thus, I would affirm the district court in full.”
The case is Chinaryan v. City of Los Angeles, 21-56237 and 22-55168.
Copyright 2024, Metropolitan News Company