Sutton v. Metro. Gov't of Nashville & Davidson Cnty.

Citation700 F.3d 865
Decision Date28 November 2012
Docket NumberNo. 11–6449.,11–6449.
PartiesJermaine SUTTON, Plaintiff–Appellee, v. METROPOLITAN GOVERNMENT OF NASHVILLE AND DAVIDSON COUNTY, et al., Defendants, Richard Martin, in his individual and official capacities as a Metro Police Officer, Defendant–Appellant.
CourtUnited States Courts of Appeals. United States Court of Appeals (6th Circuit)

700 F.3d 865

Jermaine SUTTON, Plaintiff–Appellee,
v.
METROPOLITAN GOVERNMENT OF NASHVILLE AND DAVIDSON COUNTY, et al., Defendants,
Richard Martin, in his individual and official capacities as a Metro Police Officer, Defendant–Appellant.

No. 11–6449.

United States Court of Appeals,
Sixth Circuit.

Nov. 28, 2012.


[700 F.3d 868]


ON BRIEF:Keli J. Oliver, Derrick C. Smith, Department of Law of the Metropolitan Government of Nashville and

[700 F.3d 869]

Davidson County, Nashville, Tennessee, for Appellant. Andrew N. Egan, Hermitage, Tennessee, Mary Leech, Nashville, Tennessee, for Appellee.

Before: GILMAN, GIBBONS, and ROGERS, Circuit Judges.


OPINION

RONALD LEE GILMAN, Circuit Judge.

Jermaine Sutton was detained and arrested on a misdemeanor theft charge after Officer Richard Martin was called to a Kroger grocery store following an alleged shoplifting. Officer Martin took possession of a cell phone allegedly dropped by the perpetrator. Based on a conversation with a person listed in the phone's “contacts” list, he went to Summit Medical Center where Sutton worked. The confrontation between the two resulted in Sutton's arrest for shoplifting.

A jury acquitted Sutton at trial. Sutton subsequently sued Officer Martin and the Nashville and Davidson County Metropolitan Government for a host of federal constitutional violations and state common law and statutory violations. Officer Martin filed a motion to dismiss the complaint for failure to state a claim. The district court dismissed Sutton's claims based on the Fifth and Fourteenth Amendments but denied the motion as to Sutton's Fourth Amendment claim regarding an unreasonable seizure, finding that he had adequately stated a cause of action and that Officer Martin was not entitled to qualified immunity. Officer Martin has timely filed an interlocutory appeal.

This case turns on whether Officer Martin had reasonable suspicion to detain Sutton or probable cause to arrest him. For the reasons set forth below, we AFFIRM the district court's order denying Officer Martin's motion to dismiss, but we do so by considerably narrowing the scope of Sutton's Fourth Amendment claim.

I. BACKGROUND
A. Factual background

All of the following facts are based solely on the allegations in Sutton's complaint. No discovery has yet taken place and no affidavits or other documents have been filed.

On April 21, 2009, Officer Martin responded to a reported shoplifting at a Kroger grocery store. He ended up in possession of a cell phone that was found in the pocket of a jacket dropped by the alleged perpetrator. Officer Martin then called a number saved in the cell phone's contacts list. The person who answered the call told him that she knew a person named Jermaine Sutton who worked at “Summit Hospital.” What else she may have told Officer Martin to connect Sutton to the shoplifting incident is not set forth in the complaint. In any event, Officer Martin left the Kroger store and went to Summit Medical Center to find Sutton.

Sutton was working in the kitchen at Summit Medical Center when he was told by a co-worker that someone was in the cafeteria wanting to see him. He went to the cafeteria, where he was quickly surrounded by Officer Martin and three other police officers. Officer Martin pulled out a cell phone from a bag and asked Sutton if it was his phone. Sutton said that it was not. When Officer Martin then asked Sutton where his cell phone was, Sutton showed Officer Martin a different cell phone taken from Sutton's own pocket, which Officer Martin promptly confiscated over Sutton's protest. This prompted Officer Martin to say that Sutton “looked like the kind of man who would have a couple nurses on the side and ... would need two

[700 F.3d 870]

cell phones to talk to them so that [Sutton's] wife would not find out about them.”

After Officer Martin confiscated the cell phone that Sutton had produced from his pocket, Sutton told Officer Martin that he needed the phone to call his wife, and he asked if he could “clock out” from his job. Officer Martin responded that Sutton “could not go anywhere or do anything.” He then explained that someone had stolen meat from a Kroger store, that the police had “found the telephone in [Sutton's] jacket after [he] took off running,” and that if Sutton told the truth, Officer Martin could “just write [Sutton] a citation.” Sutton denied stealing anything.

Despite Sutton's denial of having any connection to the cell phone or to the alleged shoplifting, Officer Martin took Sutton tightly by the arm and, along with the other officers, escorted him out of the hospital. A Kroger security guard from the grocery store in question, John Szcerbiak, who was waiting nearby in his car, identified Sutton as the perpetrator. Officer Martin then told Sutton that he was under arrest, handcuffed him, gave him the Miranda warnings, put him in the back seat of a police car, and drove to the scene of the theft. Sutton remained in the car for 45 minutes while Officer Martin went inside the Kroger store to view a security video of the shoplifting. Officer Martin returned to the car, said that he was unsure whether Sutton was the person depicted in the video, and went back to look at the video again. Despite his own uncertainty, Officer Martin took Sutton “downtown” at Szcerbiak's urging, where the latter swore out a warrant charging Sutton with misdemeanor theft. Sutton was held in jail for several hours until his wife posted bond.

B. Procedural background

After Sutton was tried and acquitted in June 2009, he pursued federal and state claims against Officer Martin, the Metropolitan Government, Szcerbiak, and Kroger. The district court sustained Officer Martin's motion to dismiss most of the claims but denied the motion as to Sutton's claim of an unreasonable seizure under the Fourth Amendment.

Officer Martin argued that reasonable suspicion supported his initial detention of Sutton at the hospital and that Szcerbiak's identification of Sutton provided probable cause for the latter's subsequent arrest. He thus contended that Sutton failed to state a claim under the standard articulated in Bell Atlantic Corp. v. Twombly, 550 U.S. 544, 127 S.Ct. 1955, 167 L.Ed.2d 929 (2007). And even if Sutton had stated a claim, Officer Martin argued that he is entitled to qualified immunity.

The district court rejected both arguments. Because the first step in a qualified-immunity analysis is to determine whether the officer's alleged conduct violated a constitutional right, the court analyzed Officer Martin's Twombly argument within the qualified-immunity framework. It found that the facts did not support Officer Martin's position that he had reasonable suspicion to detain Sutton because the informant (the person in the perpetrator's cell-phone contacts list) was not necessarily “reliable both in [her] assertion of illegality and in [her] tendency to identify a determinate person.” The court also noted that it could not tell from the record “whether the degree of intrusion was warranted” or how long the hospital encounter lasted.

A similar “lack of facts” defeated Officer Martin's argument on probable cause. The court held that Szcerbiak's identification “[did] not necessarily establish probable cause” because the court could not yet determine whether there might have been

[700 F.3d 871]

an apparent reason for Officer Martin to disbelieve Szcerbiak.

Having found that Sutton adequately stated a Fourth Amendment claim, the district court turned to the second step of the qualified-immunity analysis and concluded that detaining a person for an investigatory stop without reasonable suspicion and arresting a person without probable cause violated clearly established Fourth Amendment law. The court therefore denied Officer Martin's motion on the Fourth Amendment claim. This interlocutory appeal followed.

II. ANALYSIS
A. Standard of review

A district court's denial of a motion to dismiss that raises a qualified-immunity defense is reviewed de novo. Hardy v. Jefferson Cmty. Coll., 260 F.3d 671, 677 (6th Cir.2001). But the rejection of a qualified-immunity claim is reviewable on interlocutory appeal only to the extent that it raises a question of law and does not concern a factual dispute. Floyd v. City of Detroit, 518 F.3d 398, 404 (6th Cir.2008); see also Mitchell v. Forsyth, 472 U.S. 511, 530, 105 S.Ct. 2806, 86 L.Ed.2d 411 (1985) (holding that a district court's denial of qualified immunity is a “final decision” under 28 U.S.C. § 1291 “to the extent that it turns on an issue of law”). We will therefore limit our review to the purely legal question of whether the facts as alleged by Sutton would allow a jury to find a violation of a clearly established constitutional right. See Sample v. Bailey, 409 F.3d 689, 695–96 (6th Cir.2005).

To survive a motion to dismiss for failure to state a claim, a complaint must allege sufficient facts that, accepted as true, “state a claim to relief that is plausible on its face.” Twombly, 550 U.S. at 570, 127 S.Ct. 1955. “A claim has facial plausibility when the plaintiff pleads factual content that allows the court to draw the reasonable inference that the defendant is liable for the misconduct alleged.” Ashcroft v. Iqbal, 556 U.S. 662, 678, 129 S.Ct. 1937, 173 L.Ed.2d 868 (2009). The plaintiff at this stage of the case is entitled to have the complaint construed in the light most favorable to him. Lambert v. Hartman, 517 F.3d 433, 439 (6th Cir.2008).

When a government official is sued in a § 1983 action, the official may raise the defense of qualified immunity. Once raised, the burden is on the plaintiff to demonstrate that the qualified-immunity defense is unwarranted. Roth v. Guzman, 650 F.3d 603, 609 (6th Cir.2011). The facts as alleged must show that the defendant violated a constitutional right and that the right was clearly established, Saucier v. Katz, 533 U.S. 194, 201, 121 S.Ct. 2151, 150 L.Ed.2d 272 (2001), but the analysis need not proceed in that order. ...

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