Bledsoe v. Carreno
| Court | United States Courts of Appeals. United States Court of Appeals (10th Circuit) |
| Parties | FLOYD S. BLEDSOE, Plaintiff - Appellee, v. RANDY CARRENO; TROY FROST; JEFFREY HERRIG; ROBERT POPPA, Defendants - Appellants, BOARD OF COUNTY COMMISSIONERS FOR THE COUNTY OF JEFFERSON, KANSAS; GEORGE JOHNSON; JIM WOODS; TERRY MORGAN; MICHAEL HAYES; UNKNOWN OFFICERS OF THE JEFFERSON COUNTY SHERIFF'S DEPARTMENT; UNKNOWN OFFICERS OF THE KANSAS BUREAU OF INVESTIGATION; JIM VANDERBILT, Defendants. |
| Docket Number | 20-3252 |
| Decision Date | 15 November 2022 |
FLOYD S. BLEDSOE, Plaintiff - Appellee,
v.
RANDY CARRENO; TROY FROST; JEFFREY HERRIG; ROBERT POPPA, Defendants - Appellants,
BOARD OF COUNTY COMMISSIONERS FOR THE COUNTY OF JEFFERSON, KANSAS; GEORGE JOHNSON; JIM WOODS; TERRY MORGAN; MICHAEL HAYES; UNKNOWN OFFICERS OF THE JEFFERSON COUNTY SHERIFF'S DEPARTMENT; UNKNOWN OFFICERS OF THE KANSAS BUREAU OF INVESTIGATION; JIM VANDERBILT, Defendants.
No. 20-3252
United States Court of Appeals, Tenth Circuit
November 15, 2022
Appeal from the United States District Court for the District of Kansas (D.C. No. 2:16-CV-02296-DDC-GLR).
Eric Turner, Foulston Siefkin LLP, Overland Park, Kansas (Michael J. Norton, Foulston Siefkin LLP, Wichita, Kansas, with him on the briefs), for Defendants-Appellants.
Ruth Brown (Theresa Kleinhaus and Russell Ainsworth with her on the brief), Loevy &Loevy, Chicago, Illinois, for Plaintiff-Appellee.
Before HOLMES, Chief Judge, EBEL and EID, Circuit Judges.
EBEL, Circuit Judge
Plaintiff-Appellee Floyd Bledsoe spent sixteen years in prison for the November 1999 murder of his fourteen-year-old sister-in-law Camille in Jefferson County, Kansas-a crime he did not commit. In 2015, new DNA testing and a suicide note from Bledsoe's brother Tom supported Bledsoe's longstanding claim that Tom was the killer and Bledsoe was innocent. A state court subsequently vacated Bledsoe's convictions and prosecutors dismissed all charges against him.
In 2016, Bledsoe filed this 42 U.S.C. § 1983 action against ten named defendants, most of whom were Kansas law enforcement officers. Bledsoe alleged that Defendants conspired to fabricate evidence implicating him in the murder and intentionally suppressed evidence that would have proved his innocence, thereby causing him to be charged, tried, and convicted without even probable cause to believe he was guilty. At issue in this appeal is the district court's denial of a motion to dismiss filed pursuant to Federal Rule of Civil Procedure 12(b)(6) by Defendant-Appellants Randy Carreno, Troy Frost, Jeffrey Herrig, and Robert Poppa, all of whom were law enforcement officers employed by the Jefferson County Sheriff's
Office.[1] In their Rule 12(b)(6) motion, Appellants asserted that they were entitled to qualified immunity because Bledsoe 1) failed to state claims adequately alleging that Appellants deprived Bledsoe of his constitutional rights, and/or 2) any constitutional violations Bledsoe did adequately allege against Appellants were not clearly established in 1999, when the events at issue occurred. The district court denied Appellants qualified immunity on most of Bledsoe's claims. Having jurisdiction under 28 U.S.C. § 1291 to consider this interlocutory appeal from the denial of qualified immunity, see Mitchell v. Forsyth, 472 U.S. 511, 530 (1985), we AFFIRM in part the district court's judgment denying Appellants qualified immunity, and REVERSE in part.
In doing so, we first conclude that the Supreme Court's decision in Parratt[2]does not preclude Bledsoe's substantive due process claims. We further conclude that Bledsoe adequately alleged substantive due process and Fourth Amendment claims against each Appellant for evidence fabrication and for suppressing exculpatory evidence (Counts I and III), a malicious prosecution claim (Count IV), conspiracy claims (Count II and V), and a failure-to-intervene claim (Count VI). Lastly, we conclude that all the constitutional violations Bledsoe has alleged except
his failure-to-intervene claim were clearly established in 1999. The district court, therefore, correctly denied Appellants qualified immunity on all but the failure-to-intervene claim.
I. BACKGROUND
A. Factual Overview
For the purposes of this appeal, we accept Bledsoe's well-pled factual allegations as true and draw all reasonable inferences in his favor. Ullery v. Bradley, 949 F.3d 1282, 1287 (10th Cir. 2020).[3] Those facts paint a dark picture of law enforcement's plot to convict Bledsoe falsely.
In November 1999, Bledsoe was twenty-three years old and working as a farmhand. He lived in Jefferson County with his wife Heidi and their two young sons. Heidi's fourteen-year-old sister Camille was living with the family at that time as well. Bledsoe's older brother Tom, then twenty-five years old, lived nearby with his parents. Tom was "partially deaf," "had a limited social life, certain intellectual
limitations, and a history of troubling sexual behavior that included pursuing young girls." (2d Am. Compl. (Aplt. App. 26-53) at ¶ 28.)
On November 5, 1999, Camille arrived home from school at 4:20 p.m., but was not there when her friend stopped by at 5:00 p.m. Bledsoe and Heidi reported the girl's disappearance to the Jefferson County Sheriff's Office and searched for Camille for the next forty-eight hours. On November 7, Tom separately told his Sunday school teacher and his parents that he had killed Camille. Tom's parents immediately hired attorney Michael Hayes to represent Tom.[4] Hayes and Tom met with Sheriff's Office personnel that same evening, November 7. They told officers that Camille had been shot several times, including once in the back of the head, and that her body was hidden in the trash dump on the property where Tom lived. Tom and Hayes then took officers to that trash dump, where they found Camille's body, along with three bullet casings, an X-rated movie, and a T-shirt that read "Countryside Baptist Church," of which Tom was a member. (Id. at ¶¶ 28, 38.) Camille's wounds matched Tom's description. Hayes turned over the murder weapon-Tom's recently purchased nine-millimeter pistol. The coroner found sperm in the victim's vagina, but could not say who it belonged to or whether Camille had been forcibly sexually abused. Tom was arrested and charged with Camille's murder.
Despite this substantial evidence against Tom, Defendants allegedly conspired to frame Bledsoe instead for the murder.[5] Defendants did so despite the fact that Bledsoe's whereabouts were accounted for from the time Camille went missing on November 5 to the time of Tom's confession on November 7. Bledsoe's alibi was corroborated by numerous witnesses, a time-stamped receipt, phone records, and even testimony of Appellant Carreno-the lead investigator on the case-who had searched for Camille alongside Bledsoe on November 6.
Bledsoe alleges that Defendants' general plan to frame him was to have Tom recant his confession and to coach Tom to explain that he knew the details of the murder because Bledsoe had told him those details. Specifically, Tom would state falsely that he met Bledsoe at a roadway intersection on Saturday, November 6, at which time Bledsoe confessed to Tom that he had killed Camille, told Tom the details of the murder, and "persuaded Tom to take the blame by threatening to expose Tom's history of viewing X-rated movies, masturbating, and attempting to have sex with a dog." (Id. at ¶ 52.) Bledsoe claims that this meeting never happened.
"Shortly before Tom's staged recantation," Tom's defense attorney "Hayes sought [Bledsoe] out and told him that Hayes was taking Tom off the 'hot seat' and putting [Bledsoe] on, or words to that effect." (Id. at ¶ 55.) On November 12, a
Kansas Bureau of Investigation ("KBI") officer, Defendant Johnson, administered lie detector tests to both Tom and Bledsoe.[6] During his exam, Tom recanted his confession and incriminated Bledsoe. But Tom "failed the question" of whether he shot Camille, and was so overcome with guilt immediately after the lie detector test that he confessed again to killing Camille. (Id. at ¶ ¶ 58-59.) Nonetheless, the KBI officer told Tom that he should continue lying to implicate Bledsoe.
Bledsoe passed his lie detector test by "truthfully disavowing any involvement in the crime." (Id. at ¶ 60.) Defendant Johnson falsified the results, however, inaccurately reporting that Tom had been truthful in denying his involvement in the murder, while Bledsoe had been deceptive in denying that he was involved. Based on those false polygraph results, the prosecutor dropped the charges against Tom, "pursuant to an agreement that was never disclosed to" Bledsoe or his defense counsel, and arrested and charged Bledsoe. (Id. at ¶¶ 61-62, 88.)
Tom's fabricated story was "the central piece" of the prosecution's evidence against Bledsoe at trial. (Id. at ¶ 67.) Carreno and others at the Sheriff's Office "knowingly and purposefully falsified" Tom's story to fit his fictitious roadside
meeting with Bledsoe "into the brief period of time in which they believed (wrongfully) that [Bledsoe] lacked an alibi." (Id. at ¶ 64.)
Defendants also "withheld evidence of Tom's guilt from [Bledsoe's] defense and the prosecution and generated additional false evidence against [Bledsoe] to secure his prosecution and conviction." (Id. at ¶ 68.) For example, in addition to fabricating Tom's story implicating Bledsoe in the murder and falsifying the polygraph results, Defendants fabricated an incriminating statement from Bledsoe indicating that he had returned home at the same time that Camille disappeared from their house. In fact, Bledsoe had denied returning home that afternoon.
Defendants also failed to disclose to Bledsoe and his defense attorney "Tom's many inculpatory statements" confessing to the murder and his giving specific details of the crime, as well as "evidence that Tom had a history of pursuing young girls roughly Camille's age and had made sexual advances on Camille just a few weeks before her disappearance." (Id. at ¶ 69, 74.)
In addition, police skewed the investigation towards Bledsoe and away from Tom. For example, while officers thoroughly searched Bledsoe's home and vehicle and also gathered clothing from a third suspect, they "purposefully declined to subject Tom's home-or even his room or clothing-to any rigorous forensic examination," and "declined to collect any...
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