Houston v. Clark County Sheriff Deputy John Does 1-5

• Decision Date: 23 April 1999
• Docket Number: No. 97-3911,97-3911
• Citation: 174 F.3d 809
• Parties: Maurice HOUSTON; Jerome Perkins, Plaintiffs-Appellants, v. CLARK COUNTY SHERIFF DEPUTY JOHN DOES 1-5; Gene A. Kelley, Clark County Sheriff; Christopher M. Dickens; Steven M. Click; Kenneth A. Hooper; George R. Schutte, Jr., Defendants-Appellees.
• Court: U.S. Court of Appeals — Sixth Circuit

Page 809

174 F.3d 809

Maurice HOUSTON; Jerome Perkins, Plaintiffs-Appellants, v. CLARK COUNTY SHERIFF DEPUTY JOHN DOES 1-5; Gene A. Kelley, Clark County Sheriff; Christopher M. Dickens;

Steven M. Click; Kenneth A. Hooper;

George R. Schutte, Jr.,

Defendants-Appellees.

No. 97-3911.

United States Court of Appeals, Sixth Circuit.

Argued Oct. 28, 1998.

Decided April 23, 1999.

Charles A. Smiley, Jr. (argued and briefed), Smiley, Suarez & Associates, Dayton, Ohio, for Plaintiffs-Appellants.

Timothy S. Rankin (argued and briefed), Isaac, Brant, Ledman & Teetor, Columbus, Ohio, for Defendant-Appellee Clark County Sheriff Deputy John Does 1-5.

Steven G. LaForge, Timothy S. Rankin, Isaac, Brant, Ledman & Teetor, Columbus, Ohio, for Defendants-Appellees Gene A. Kelley, Kenneth A. Hooper, George R. Schutte, Jr.

Allen P. Adler, Asst. Atty. Gen. (briefed), Office of the Attorney General, Corrections Litigation Section, Columbus, Ohio, for Defendants-Appellees Christopher M. Dickens, Steven M. Click.

Before: NELSON, CLAY, and GIBSON ^*, Circuit Judges.

JOHN R. GIBSON, J., delivered the opinion of the court, in which DAVID A. NELSON, J., joined. CLAY, J. (pp. ---- - ----), delivered a separate dissenting opinion.

OPINION

JOHN R. GIBSON, Circuit Judge.

In this 42 U.S.C. § 1983 action, plaintiffs Maurice Houston and Jerome Perkins appeal the district court's ¹ grant of summary judgment in favor of Clark County Deputy Sheriffs George R. Schutte, Jr., and Kenneth A. Hopper, and Ohio Highway Patrol Troopers Christopher M. Dickens and Steven M. Click. ² Houston and Perkins alleged that the officers violated their Fourth Amendment rights by stopping their car and detaining them without adequate justification. ³ Because we conclude that the officers did not violate Houston's and Perkins's Fourth Amendment rights, we affirm the judgment of the district court.

I.

We view the facts in the light most favorable to Houston and Perkins, the parties against whom summary judgment was granted. See Bush v. Dictaphone Corp., 161 F.3d 363, 368 (6th Cir.1998). At about 2:00 a.m. on May 27, 1995, Deputy Schutte was dispatched to Chuck's Rock-N-Ranch in Springfield, Ohio, on a theft call. Shortly after Deputy Schutte reached Chuck's and started to investigate, Deputy Hopper arrived to assist him. Deputies Schutte and Hopper conducted a brief investigation.

As the deputies started to leave Chuck's, and as the bar was closing for the night, numerous fights broke out in the bar's parking lot. When the deputies tried to break up the fights, the crowd attacked them with rocks and bottles. In the midst of this clamor, Deputies Schutte and Hopper heard a thudding or popping noise which they believed to be gunfire, and both heard a voice exclaim, "He's been shot." Deputy Schutte soon noticed an individual--later found to be a security guard--lying on the ground near him. The security guard was bleeding profusely from the head, and Deputy Schutte believed that he had been shot and was likely dead. Nearby, Deputy Schutte saw someone get into a car that left the scene and sped off on Columbus Road toward Burnett Road. Deputy Schutte suspected that the victim had been shot by the individual who entered the car that sped off from the scene. Meanwhile, Deputy Hopper could not find Deputy Schutte and believed that his partner may have been shot. He radioed this information to the dispatcher and requested further assistance.

Soon thereafter, Deputy Hopper approached his cruiser and heard a radio message from Deputy Schutte that someone had been shot and that a suspect was leaving the scene in a car headed toward Burnett Road. Deputy Hopper entered his car and also headed toward Burnett Road. Deputy Schutte's description of the suspect's car was sketchy at best. Due to the time of night, the frantic situation outside the bar, and dust that blew up from the ground as a result of the general disorder in the parking lot, Deputy Schutte was unable to identify the suspect's car's make, model, color, license plate, or its passengers. Instead, Deputy Schutte could only notice the shape of the car's taillights as the car sped away. As Deputy Hopper passed Deputy Schutte, the latter radioed the number of cars between Deputy Hopper's vehicle and the suspect's.

Deputy Hopper, however, misunderstood Deputy Schutte's method of identifying the suspect's vehicle. Deputy Hopper thought that Deputy Schutte was talking about the number of vehicles between the suspect's car and the intersection at Columbus and Burnett Road, instead of the number of vehicles between Deputy Hopper and the suspect's vehicle. He stopped the "marked" vehicle after it turned left onto Burnett Road. That vehicle was occupied by the plaintiffs, Houston and Perkins, who had indeed left Chuck's minutes earlier. Deputy Hopper drew his gun and ordered Houston and his passenger, Perkins, to throw the car's keys out the window and to get out of the car.

About this time, Troopers Dickens and Click arrived to assist Deputy Hopper. While en route to Chuck's to help quell the disturbance there, the troopers had heard a message over their radio that a police officer had been shot at the bar. They soon heard a subsequent message that the "suspects" in the shooting had been stopped on Burnett Road. Troopers Dickens and Click saw Deputy Hopper ordering Houston and Perkins out of the car, and they lent their assistance--believing that the men were suspects in the shooting of a police officer. Houston and Perkins at first failed to comply with Deputy Hopper's orders to throw out the keys and get out of the car. When Trooper Dickens arrived at the scene, he alighted from his cruiser, drew his gun, and aimed it at Perkins. Meanwhile, Trooper Click drew his shotgun and aimed it at Perkins. Houston threw the keys out of the car, and both men got out of the car and lay on the ground as they were ordered. They were both handcuffed and placed in the cruisers. Once Houston and Perkins were secured, Trooper Dickens left the scene and headed for Chuck's. Deputy Hopper explained to Houston and Perkins that there had been a shooting at Chuck's, and he asked permission to search Houston's car. When asked, Houston denied that he had a gun. He consented to a search of the car, and the officers did not find any weapons.

Back at Chuck's, meanwhile, Deputy Schutte and others searched the scene for casings and a weapon. They found none, but located a broken bottle near where the security guard had been lying before he was taken to a hospital. The officers at Chuck's therefore inferred that no one had been shot, but that the victim had been hit by a bottle. When Deputy Hopper radioed Deputy Schutte in order to get a description of the suspect who had fled in the car, Deputy Schutte told him that he could not describe the suspect and that a shooting likely never occurred. Nevertheless, Deputy Hopper still suspected that Houston and Perkins were involved in the assault on the security guard. Deputy Hopper continued to question Houston and Perkins, who denied any involvement. No further evidence implicated the two men, and Deputy Hopper released them. Houston and Perkins estimated the length of the detention as about one hour, although the Highway Dispatch logs show that thirty-three minutes elapsed between the time of the "shots fired" call to the time of clearing the scene at Burnett Road.

Houston and Perkins sued the officers under 42 U.S.C. § 1983, alleging that both the stop of their vehicle and their subsequent detention violated the Fourth Amendment. Specifically, they alleged that the initial stop of their car was not supported by any reasonable suspicion that Houston and Perkins had committed a crime. Further, they charged that the officers' detention of them--including the use of weapons and handcuffs--transformed the investigative stop into an arrest that was not supported by probable cause. The district court rejected both of these arguments, holding that the officers had reasonable suspicion to stop Houston's vehicle and that the subsequent investigation did not ripen into an arrest. In the alternative, the district court absolved the defendants of liability on the basis of qualified immunity. This appeal followed.

II.

On appeal, Houston and Perkins essentially reiterate the arguments they made below. They first take issue with the stop of their vehicle. Even if the officers reasonably believed that a crime occurred, it is argued, the officers had no reason to suspect that Houston and Perkins had committed it. Because Deputy Schutte radioed Deputy Hopper before troubling to interview any eyewitnesses in the parking lot, saw another car leave Chuck's at the same time as the suspect's car, was never certain that he had heard gunfire, and used an inherently unreliable method to identify and keep track of the suspect's car, the entire stop was based on mere speculation. We are not persuaded.

Police may briefly stop an individual for investigation if they have a "reasonable suspicion" that the individual has committed a crime. United States v. Palomino, 100 F.3d 446, 449 (6th Cir.1996). The same Fourth Amendment test applies to vehicle stops. See Delaware v. Prouse, 440 U.S. 648, 663, 99 S.Ct. 1391, 59 L.Ed.2d 660 (1979); Palomino, 100 F.3d at 449. "Reasonable suspicion" is more than an ill-defined hunch; it must be based upon "a particularized and objective basis for suspecting the particular person ... of criminal activity." United States v. Cortez, 449 U.S. 411, 417-18, 101 S.Ct. 690, 66 L.Ed.2d 621 (1981). It requires "specific and articulable facts which, taken together with rational inferences from those facts, reasonably warrant" an investigatory stop. Terry v. Ohio, 392 U.S. 1, 21, 88 S.Ct. 1868, 20 L.Ed.2d 889 (1968); United States v. Erwin, 155 F.3d 818, 822 (6th Cir.1998), cert. denied, --- U.S. ----, 119 S.Ct. 906, 142 L.Ed.2d 904 (1999). The standard outlined in Terry and its progeny is not onerous....