Muhammad v. Del Pearson

• Decision Date: 17 August 2018
• Docket Number: No. 15-3044,15-3044
• Citation: 900 F.3d 898
• Parties: Marcus MUHAMMAD, et al., Plaintiffs-Appellants, v. Del PEARSON, Police Officer #16462, Defendant-Appellee.
• Court: U.S. Court of Appeals — Seventh Circuit

900 F.3d 898

Marcus MUHAMMAD, et al., Plaintiffs-Appellants,

v.Del PEARSON, Police Officer #16462, Defendant-Appellee.

No. 15-3044

United States Court of Appeals, Seventh Circuit.

Argued November 8, 2017

Decided August 17, 2018

Kara Amouyal, Attorney, Blake W. Horwitz, Attorney, Blake Horwitz Law Firm, Chicago, IL, for Plaintiffs-Appellants.

Julian Nunes Henriques, Jr., Attorney, City of Chicago Law Department, Chicago, IL, for Defendant-Appellee.

Before Wood, Chief Judge, and Flaum and Hamilton, Circuit Judges.

Hamilton, Circuit Judge.

When Officer Del Pearson and other Chicago police officers executed a search warrant for "apartment 1" at a Chicago address, there was a problem with the warrant. Apartment 1 did not exist. The building contained an apartment 1A and an apartment 1B. Pearson and the other officers actually searched apartment 1A. They did not find the drugs and related items they were seeking.

The occupants of apartment 1A then filed this suit against Officer Pearson under 42 U.S.C. § 1983 for violating their Fourth Amendment rights through unlawful entry and false arrest. Both sides moved for summary judgment. The district court denied plaintiffs’ motion and granted Pearson’s. We affirm the judgment but on narrow grounds. Law enforcement officers who discover that a search warrant does not clearly specify the premises to be searched must ordinarily stop and clear up the ambiguity before they conduct or continue the search. See Maryland v. Garrison , 480 U.S. 79, 86, 107 S.Ct. 1013, 94 L.Ed.2d 72 (1987) ; United States v. Kelly , 772 F.3d 1072, 1083 (7th Cir. 2014). If they do not, they may lose the legal protection the warrant provides for an invasion of privacy and accompanying restraints on liberty.

As we explain below, however, we conclude that summary judgment for the officer was appropriate here. Defendant Pearson testified that he did not know there were two apartments, including an apartment 1B, and he has offered undisputed, reliable, and contemporaneous documents confirming his after-the-fact testimony that the address searched was in fact the correct target of the search authorized by the ambiguous warrant. Summary judgment on the unlawful entry claims was correct. Also, Officer Pearson had arguable probable cause to arrest plaintiff Muhammad for suspected drug trafficking, though Pearson quickly confirmed that Muhammad was not the right suspect and released him within fifteen minutes. Summary judgment based on qualified immunity was also correct on that unlawful arrest claim.

I. Factual and Procedural Background

Our account of the facts applies the summary judgment standard, relying on facts that are not genuinely disputed but giving plaintiffs, as the non-moving parties, the benefit of conflicts in the evidence and reasonable inferences from the evidence. Zimmerman v. Doran , 807 F.3d 178, 182 (7th Cir. 2015), citing Hardaway v. Meyerhoff , 734 F.3d 740, 743 (7th Cir. 2013).

Pearson applied for the warrant based on a tip from a known and previously reliable informant. The affidavit for the warrant included the following information. In the three months leading up to the tip, Pearson’s source had provided information leading to three felony arrests and seizures of illegal drugs. The source told Pearson that she bought drugs from a man named "Moe Moe" at "3236 E. 92nd St Apt#1." She described Moe Moe as a black male who was 25 to 30 years old, approximately 5'8? tall and medium build. Pearson checked Chicago Police Department databases and discovered that a man named Jamison Carr "used the address of 3236 E. 92nd St. on a previous arrest." The affidavit did not indicate which apartment number was associated with that arrest record. The source identified a photograph of Carr as "Moe Moe."

The affidavit also provided details about the transaction. It said that the source met with Carr in apartment 1. He led her into a back bedroom where she saw a "large frame semi-auto blue steel handgun" on the table and purchased "four small knotted baggies of crack cocaine." The affidavit also stated that Officer Pearson and the source "personally drove by the 3200 block of E. 92nd St" and that the source "pointed to the apartment at 3236 E 92nd St. and identified it as the apartment where [she] met the individual Jamison Carr a/k/a ‘Moe Moe’ and purchased the crack cocaine and observed the above handgun."

Based on that affidavit, a state court judge issued a search warrant—which Pearson also drafted—for "Jamison Carr, a/k/a ‘Moe Moe’, a male black, 28 yoa, 5'08? tall, 140 lbs, medium build, black hair,IR#1300675" and for premises described as "a multi-unit building located at 3236 E. 92nd St. Apt#1, Chicago, Illinois Cook County." The search warrant authorized the seizure of weapons, cocaine, drug paraphernalia, money and drug transaction records, and proof of residency as evidence of the crimes of unlawful use of a weapon by a felon and drug possession.

In his deposition, Officer Pearson provided more detail about his investigation leading up to the warrant. He compiled an array of photographs from police databases of people associated with the 92nd Street address and showed them to the source. (The photo array is not in the record. Pearson testified he kept the file at his home and "probably" threw it away.) The source identified Jamison Carr as "Moe Moe." She also identified Tracy Jones from a photograph and said Jones lived in the target apartment with her pregnant daughter and her daughter’s boyfriend, who sold crack cocaine from their bedroom, where there was a gun.

Turning to the contemporaneous documents indicating that apartment 1A was the correct, intended target of the search authorized by the warrant, Officer Pearson testified that before he drafted the warrant affidavit, he ran the license plate on Tracy Jones’s car through the LEADS database. He learned that the car was registered to Tracy Jones in apartment 1A. The report linking Jones’s car to apartment 1A is dated March 21, 2011—the day before the warrant was issued and executed and, according to the affidavit, the same day as Pearson’s meeting with the source. Pearson also filled out a "deconfliction submission." (Chicago police officers use this document and procedure before executing search warrants to ensure that other local or federal law-enforcement agencies are not investigating the same address.) The deconfliction submission is dated March 22, 2011, the date the warrant was executed. It lists apartment 1A as the residential address of Jamison Carr as the "target." When Pearson executed the warrant, he had both the LEADS report for Jones’s car and the deconfliction submission with him.

A team of fourteen Chicago police officers executed the search warrant late in the evening of March 22, 2011. They pounded on the rear door of apartment 1A, said they were the police, but received no response. Pearson was with a group of officers who used a battering ram to try to break down the rear door of apartment 1A. Another group of officers was stationed at the front door.

Inside apartment 1A, the officers found plaintiff Marcus Muhammad in the bedroom with plaintiff Micheala Jones, who was pregnant. The officers did not find a gun and did not find any drugs. The officers reported that they found ammunition in the bedroom, but plaintiffs submitted affidavits stating that they did not own, possess, or have any knowledge of the ammunition. Plaintiffs claim the officers planted it.

Officer Pearson noticed that Muhammad did not look like the picture of Jamison Carr but testified that he "wasn’t sure." Muhammad denied that his nickname was Moe Moe, but he did not have any identification showing his correct name or address (and that he was not Carr). Muhammad was seven years younger and three inches shorter than Carr. Pearson arrested Muhammad and took him to the station but released him after about 15 minutes, once he confirmed that Muhammad was not Carr. That arrest is the basis of Muhammad’s false arrest claim.

The district court granted summary judgment for Officer Pearson on all claims. It held that Pearson was entitled to qualified immunity on the unlawful entry claims because plaintiffs failed to show a violation of clearly established law. The court granted summary judgment for Pearson on Muhammad’s false arrest claim, finding that Pearson had probable cause to arrest him for possessing ammunition without a firearm owner’s identification card. The district court dismissed the other plaintiffs’ false arrest claims because they had failed to show that officers detained them beyond what was permissible in executing the warrant.

II. Analysis

For civil damages claims under 42 U.S.C. § 1983 for violations of constitutional rights, the doctrine of qualified immunity "shields officials from civil liability so long as their conduct ‘does not violate clearly established statutory or constitutional rights of which a reasonable person would have known.’ " Mullenix v. Luna , ––– U.S. ––––, 136 S.Ct. 305, 308, 193 L.Ed.2d 255 (2015) (per curiam), quoting Pearson v. Callahan , 555 U.S. 223, 231, 129 S.Ct. 808, 172 L.Ed.2d 565 (2009). "Put simply, qualified immunity protects ‘all but the plainly incompetent or those who knowingly violate the law.’ " Id. , quoting Malley v. Briggs , 475 U.S. 335, 341, 106 S.Ct. 1092, 89 L.Ed.2d 271 (1986).

"To overcome a defendant’s invocation of qualified immunity, a plaintiff must show: ‘(1) that the official violated a statutory or constitutional right, and (2) that the right was ‘clearly established’ at the time of the challenged conduct.’ " Green v. Newport , 868 F.3d 629, 633 (7th Cir. 2017), quoting Ashcroft v. al-Kidd , 563 U.S. 731, 735, 131 S.Ct. 2074, 179 L.Ed.2d 1149 (2011). We have discretion to decide which element of the qualified immunity defense to address first. Pearson , 555 U.S. at 236, 129 S.Ct. 808. If the answer to either question is no, ‘the defendant official is entitled‘ to qualified immunity. Gibbs v. Lomas , ...