Shreve v. Jessamine County Fiscal Court

• Citation: 453 F.3d 681
• Decision Date: 07 July 2006
• Docket Number: No. 05-6271.,05-6271.
• Parties: Lori SHREVE, Plaintiff-Appellant, v. JESSAMINE COUNTY FISCAL COURT; David Mudd and Sean Franklin, in Their Individual and Official Capacities as Jessamine County Deputy Sheriffs, Defendants-Appellees.
• Court: United States Courts of Appeals. United States Court of Appeals (6th Circuit)

453 F.3d 681

Lori SHREVE, Plaintiff-Appellant, v. JESSAMINE COUNTY FISCAL COURT; David Mudd and Sean Franklin, in Their Individual and Official Capacities as Jessamine County Deputy Sheriffs, Defendants-Appellees.

No. 05-6271.

United States Court of Appeals, Sixth Circuit.

Argued: May 12, 2006.

Decided and Filed: July 7, 2006.

ARGUED:

Edward E. Dove, Dovelaw Office, Lexington, Kentucky, for Appellant. Stephen G. Amato, McBrayer, McGinnis, Leslie & Kirkland, Lexington, Kentucky, for Appellees.

ON BRIEF:

Edward E. Dove, Dove Law Office, Lexington, Kentucky, for Appellant. Stephen G. Amato, Jaron P. Blandford, McBrayer, McGinnis, Leslie & Kirkland, Lexington, Kentucky, for Appellees.

Before: SILER and ROGERS, Circuit Judges; JORDAN, District Judge.^*

ROGERS, Circuit Judge.

This appeal seeks reversal of the district court's grant of summary judgment in favor of the defendant sheriff's deputies, who allegedly used excessive force in violation of 42 U.S.C. §§ 1983, 1985, and state law when they arrested plaintiff Lori Shreve. Shreve further alleges that the deputies unlawfully entered and searched her home to arrest her in violation of the Fourth and Fourteenth Amendments. The defendants include the Jessamine County Fiscal Court, and the deputies in their official capacity.

The district court granted summary judgment in favor of all the defendants, holding that no constitutional violation occurred. The district court also held that the deputies lawfully searched Shreve's home to find and arrest her pursuant to a valid misdemeanor arrest warrant.

Summary judgment was not warranted on Shreve's excessive force claim because she has provided sufficient, if spare, evidence of a violation of her clearly established right to be free from excessive police force in the course of arrest. Summary judgment was however warranted with respect to Shreve's claims for unlawful entry and search of her home to arrest her. Like our sister circuits we read Payton v. New York, 445 U.S. 573, 100 S.Ct. 1371, 63 L.Ed.2d 639 (1980), to permit forcible entry into the home to search for and arrest a suspect pursuant to a valid arrest warrant, regardless of whether the arrest is for a misdemeanor or a felony. We therefore affirm in part and reverse in part.

I.

Around August 21, 2003, the Fayette District Court issued an arrest warrant for Lori Shreve for second degree bail-jumping, a misdemeanor. Ky.Rev.Stat. § 520.080(3). Around midnight on September 12, 2003, David Mudd, a deputy sheriff for Jessamine County, drove to Shreve's house to arrest her. Deputy Sean Franklin joined Deputy Mudd at the Shreve residence. These two tried to make contact with Shreve at her house at about 12:50 a.m.

The police rang the doorbell, knocked on the door, and shined bright lights into the house. Shreve and her boyfriend, George Bitting, were inside the residence together. Neither of them answered the door. According to Deputy Mudd, he saw Shreve peer out of an upstairs window. He recognized Shreve from a picture of her that he had obtained from the Fayette County Detention Center website.

Shreve knew that the people knocking at the door were deputies. She did not open the front door because, in her words, "I didn't want to go to jail." Shreve and Bitting heard the phone ring but did not answer it. They also heard the police attempt to pick the locks. As Deputy Mudd successfully picked the deadbolt lock on one of the doors, the knob lock on the door's handle "suddenly became locked," suggesting to Deputy Mudd that someone inside the house had locked the door just as he finished picking it. Shreve and Bitting gave no response to the deputies' attempts at making contact. "We were just waiting to see if they were going to break in," Shreve recalled at her deposition. She hoped that the police would go away.

After receiving no response for about an hour, the police forcibly entered Shreve's house around 2:00 a.m. Upon entering the home, the deputies restrained Bitting and began searching for Shreve. At some point, Shreve hid in the bedroom closet and put a blanket over her head. Shreve remained there for an unknown period of time until the deputies came up the steps to her room in search of her. Shreve heard the deputies call out to her, "Ms. Shreve, you need to come out." She gave no response. Shreve was trying to remain undiscovered, and in her deposition she described her behavior as "hiding." The deputies threatened to pepper spray Shreve, which alerted her to their presence in her bedroom. Shreve still gave no response.

It is undisputed that the police then sprayed pepper spray into the closet. Shreve says the pepper spray caused her to feel "out of it." The police then, according to Shreve, ripped the blanket off of her head, grabbed her by the hair and wrist, and threw her outside of the closet onto the ground. One of the deputies then began, in Shreve's words, "jumping on my back with his knee ... and then I was incoherent." Shreve says that she later "came to" and "kept feeling this hitting on my face and my back and I said, quit hitting me."

But when the police's attorney asked follow-up questions during her deposition, Shreve contradicted her claim of having spoken to the deputies, saying, "I couldn't say anything," and, "I couldn't speak" because of the pepper spray's effects. Later in her deposition, however, Shreve reasserted that she had said, "quit hitting my face." Likewise, Shreve changed her account of having her hair pulled: she did not actually recollect having her hair pulled; rather, she inferred that her hair was pulled because "handfuls of hair" fell out after she reached the jail.

In any event, Shreve stated that she landed on her belly when the police "dragged" (or, in her earlier and later tellings, "threw") her to the ground out of the closet. Shreve said that she could not use any word other than "crouch" to describe her body positioning on the ground, but then later said she was "laying [sic]... sprawled out." A deputy then "jump[ed]" on Shreve's back with his knee. Shreve said she could not see the deputy but then stated that he was on one side of her or behind her.

Deputy Mudd in his deposition said that he placed his knee "on top of" Shreve until she was handcuffed. The deputies pulled Shreve's wrists behind her back and handcuffed her through the use of pressure point submission techniques. In Shreve's telling, one of the deputies then beat her back and her face with a "billy club." Shreve said that she did not actually see anyone hit her with a stick. But she also maintains that one, not both, of the deputies struck her. Shreve also said in her deposition that she saw the deputy holding a stick at one point. She maintains that the deputy struck her with a stick ten to twelve times "in the eye" and an unknown number of times in the back. Shreve claims that the deputy "jumped" on her back with a knee and beat her with a stick more or less constantly for fifteen or twenty minutes. Shreve says that her "whole face was black and blue when [the deputy] got done" beating her. In her answers to interrogatories as well, Shreve claimed that she suffered "[b]lack eyes and face from being hit by Franklin; Back injury and bruises on wrist and back from M[u]dd jumping on Plaintiff's back with knee ...." Deputy Mudd said that neither he nor Deputy Franklin struck Shreve, and that Shreve had no bruises on her face at the time of the arrest.

Shreve says that she "did not resist at all" when the deputies first attempted to handcuff her. Shreve explained that "resist," as she uses the word, means biting or scratching, or otherwise putting up a fight. Consistent with Shreve's account, Deputy Mudd in his deposition nowhere stated that Shreve bit, scratched, or otherwise put up a fight. Instead, according to Deputy Mudd, Shreve resisted passively when she refused to "release her arms" voluntarily for handcuffing even after the deputies had applied force to several pressure points and thereby caused Shreve to moan in pain. Deputy Franklin succeeded in catching hold of Shreve's hands by bringing the "flat" of his own hand across the bridge of Shreve's nose, in an effort to make her eyes water. Shreve reacted by throwing up her hands to try and protect her eyes, which reaction enabled Deputy Mudd to handcuff her.

After handcuffing her, the deputies marched Shreve down the stairs and into a police car. They charged Shreve with resisting arrest. Shreve was taken to the Jessamine County Detention Center and booked. She was later moved to the Lexington Detention Center.

According to Shreve's deposition, she seeks ongoing chiropractic "manipulations" from Bitting for her neck, back, and shoulder injuries. She does not receive treatment for any facial injuries. In fact, Shreve never sought any medical treatment for her alleged facial injuries. Although Shreve asked to see a doctor while in the Jessamine County jail, no doctor was available to see her. She was later transferred to the Lexington Detention Center, but she did not request medical treatment there.

The record contains two pictures of Shreve that show the extent of her facial injuries several days after her arrest. The pictures were taken, according to Shreve, "[a]bout the fourth or fifth day I was there [in jail.]" One of the photographs shows a close-up image of Shreve's right eye. The picture shows some discoloration below the right eye suggestive of a black eye. Likewise, a second picture in the record shows the same discoloration, but from a far enough distance that the picture captures Shreve from the shoulders up. Neither of these photos shows any significant swelling, cuts, or other visible sign of severe injury or past bleeding (that a lay observer would recognize as such). The pictures show some discoloration of the right eye.

Shreve originally brought this suit in state court, but the suit was removed to the federal district court below. The district court granted ...