The suspect was acquitted because the evidence did not prove beyond a reasonable doubt that the contraband seized was his. A federal appeals court upheld summary judgment in favor of the defendants. Wheeler v. Hronopoulos, , U. Lexis 7th Cir. Officers interrupted what they reasonably believed to be a residential burglary and detained two suspects just outside of the house. A federal appeals court held that this gave them a basis to lawfully enter the house without a warrant, and without further suspicion of wrongdoing, to briefly search for additional perpetrators and potential victims.
The suspected burglary presented an exigent circumstance that justified a warrantless entry and search. Montanez v. Carvajal, , U. Lexis 11th Cir. Supreme Court precedent See Michigan v. Fisher, , U. It held that police officers seeking to justify their warrantless entry into homes need only demonstrate an objectively reasonable basis for believing that a person within the house is in need of immediate aid. The court thereby modified its previous rulings in United States v.
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Martins, , F. In this case, the trial court entered judgment for the defendant police officers and city, concluding that the officers did not commit a Fourth Amendment violation because their conduct fell within the emergency aid exception to the warrant requirement. The appeals court then affirmed on the basis that the officers were entitled to qualified immunity and no claim was stated against the city.
Hill v. Walsh, , U. Lexis 1st Cir. Arriving at a home at 4 a. The officers did not knock or announce their presence. The parents and their daughters were ordered to their knees at gunpoint, and the officers handcuffed a nephew who was present. The couple repeatedly asked to see the search warrant, but the officers refused to show it and did not allow the mother to sit with her seven-year-old daughter.
Officers found neither the suspect nor any contraband. The warrant described the home and listed controlled substances and items connected to narcotics trafficking as items to be seized. Greer v. City of Highland Park, , U. Lexis , Fed. A jeweler and a coin dealer brought Fourth Amendment challenges to the warrantless search provisions. The record keeping requirements, however, were upheld. Liberty Coins, LLC v. Goodman, , U. He failed to plead a plausible Fifth Amendment claim that fabricated evidence in the search warrant affidavit deprived him of property without due process because the warrant would have issued on a corrected affidavit and thus any deprivation of the seized property was not the result of the fabricated evidence.
The plaintiff also failed to plead any clearly established right to have federal officials state in a search warrant affidavit whether each mentioned person is or is not then a target of investigation, nor a right to have federal officials so state after the fact if the search becomes public knowledge; and he failed to plead sufficient facts as to the supervisor defendants' personal involvement in the submission of any misstatements to the magistrate judge. Ganek v. Leibowitz, , F. A federal appeals court upheld the rejection of qualified immunity for the officers, finding that the officers had not shown the existence of exigent circumstances justifying a warrantless entry.
When the husband closed the interior door to his home, telling the officers to return with a warrant, the situation was such that a reasonable officer, in the absence of exigent circumstances should have realized that breaking into the house with no warrant, as well as making an arrest inside, violated clearly established law.
Morse v. Cloutier, , F. Officers entered into a vacant apartment without a warrant and used deadly force on a man trespassing inside who aggressively attacked them, growling and waving a broken hockey stick. A federal appeals court ruled that the officers were entitled to qualified immunity on both warrantless entry and seizure of the apartment, as the man had no reasonable expectation of privacy there. They were also entitled to qualified immunity on excessive force claims, as their actions did not violate clearly established Fourth Amendment law.
Woodward v. City of Tucson, , U. The staffer claimed that she was targeted because of her work on the union bill and her affiliation with the governor, in violation of her First Amendment rights.
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She sued prosecutors and members of the investigative team. A federal appeals court upheld dismissal of the lawsuit on grounds of qualified immunity. The warrant was valid and the plaintiff stated no claim about the execution of the search. Officers may detain the occupants of a location to be searched when they execute a valid warrant if they have a valid reason for doing so.
There is no clearly established rule of law, the court stated, under which an official pursuing a lawful investigation, based on probable cause, has been found liable under the First Amendment. Archer v. Chisholm, , F. A man visited a garden store with his two children in tow, and bought a small bag of supplies to grow tomatoes and other vegetables in the basement of the family home as an educational project with his year-old son. A SWAT team descended on the family home complete with battering ram, bulletproof vests, and assault rifles , keeping the entire family under armed guard for two and a half hours.
A federal appeals court upheld summary judgment on all claims against the defendant sergeant, as well as excessive force and Monell municipal liability claims. Delaware, , U. Harte v. Board of Commissioners County of Johnson, , F. A corporal in the Arkansas Game and Fish Commission sued challenging the search of his residence pursuant to a search warrant. A federal appeals court found that the officer who obtained the search warrant did not act entirely unreasonably in believing that his affidavit established sufficient indicia of probable cause for the search and seizure of the items listed in the warrant, including to seize a deer, based on both an anonymous tip and a recorded jailhouse call.
Additionally, the items described in the warrant were relevant to the criminal offense under investigation, as they directly related to the existence, capture, and maintaining of an illegal pet deer. Kiesling v. Spurlock, , F. Officers attempted to pull over a female motorist who ran a stop sign, but she drove on, speeding, until she stopped at an apartment complex.
She ran from her truck towards an apartment.
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A deputy fired his Taser in the dart mode at her, with one of the darts hitting her. Allegedly, no warning was given. As she pounded on a door, the deputy began hitting and kicking her, and activated the Taser again. The woman's mother opened the apartment door. The deputy pushed the motorist inside and the struggle continued, as she refused to passively submit.
The mother pled with the deputy to leave her daughter alone. The deputy then used his Taser on the mother's leg and threatened to arrest her. Additional officers arrived in respose to the deputy's dispatch call. He handcuffed the motorist and escorted her out to his car. During the encounter, he activated the Taser on the motorist nine or ten times.
Search and Seizure: Home/Business
The Taser dart was surgically removed from her back later that night. Her injuries included two fractured ribs. A federal appeals court rejected excessive force, unlawful entry, and unlawful seizure claims, finding that the plaintiffs failed to meet their burden of presenting a legal argument as to why the deputy's actions violated their clearly established rights, as required to defeat his qualified immunity defense.
They failed, on the unlawful entry claim, to demonstrate that it was "beyond debate" in that the Constitution prohibited a warrantless entry based on hot pursuit in the circumstances presented here. Gutierrez v. Luna County Sheriff Cobos, , U. Lexis 10th Cir. After police conducted two warrantless searches of his home, a man sued the District of Columbia and individual officers for violations of his Fourth Amendment rights.
The first search occurred after the man called a suicide hotline, and in the course of the conversation mentioned having weapons in his home. Overturning summary judgment for the defendants, a federal appeals court reasoned that, even assuming, without deciding, that the initial sweep of the plaintiff's home by the Emergency Response Team ERT was justified under the exigent circumstances and emergency exceptions to the warrant requirement, the second top-to-bottom search by the Explosive Ordinance Disposal Unit EOD after the police had been on the scene for several hours was not.
In this case, the police had already secured the area and determined that no one else was inside the home and that there were no dangerous or illegal items in plain sight; the plaintiff had previously surrendered peacefully to custody; and the information the police had about the plaintiff failed to provide an objectively reasonable basis for believing there was an exigent need to break in plaintiff's home a second time to search for hazardous materials.
And assuming, without deciding, that the community caretaking exception to the warrant requirement applies to a home, the court concluded that the scope of the second search far exceeded what that exception would allow. Because the law was clearly established at the time that the law enforcement officers must have an objectively reasonable basis for believing an exigency justifies a warrantless search of a home, and because no reasonable officer could have concluded such a basis existed for the second more intrusive search, the court concluded that the officers were not entitled to qualified immunity across the board.
Corrigan v. District of Columbia, , U. Lexis D. There was an injunction prohibiting a man from possessing a firearm.