Gould v. Davis

• Decision Date: 31 December 1998
• Docket Number: No. 97-1777.,97-1777.
• Citation: 165 F.3d 265
• Parties: Clarence GOULD, Sr., individually and as husband; Lena Gould, as wife, Plaintiffs-Appellees, v. Andrew S. DAVIS; Lee Russo, Corporal; Philip Crumbacher, Police Officer, Defendants-Appellants, and Baltimore County; John Doe, I; John Doe, II; John Doe, III; John Doe, IV; John Doe, V; Lisa Allewalt-Hannon, Police Sergeant; Martin Lippy, Police Officer; Michael Prendergast, Police Officer, Defendants.
• Court: U.S. Court of Appeals — Fourth Circuit

165 F.3d 265

Clarence GOULD, Sr., individually and as husband; Lena Gould, as wife, Plaintiffs-Appellees, v. Andrew S. DAVIS; Lee Russo, Corporal; Philip Crumbacher, Police Officer, Defendants-Appellants, and Baltimore County; John Doe, I; John Doe, II; John Doe, III; John Doe, IV; John Doe, V; Lisa Allewalt-Hannon, Police Sergeant; Martin Lippy, Police Officer; Michael Prendergast, Police Officer, Defendants.

No. 97-1777.

United States Court of Appeals, Fourth Circuit.

Argued January 26, 1998.

Decided December 31, 1998.

COPYRIGHT MATERIAL OMITTED

ARGUED: John Edward Beverungen, Assistant County Attorney, Towson, Maryland, for Appellants. Lauren Ruth Calia, Israelson, Salsbury, Clements & Bekman, L.L.C., Baltimore, Maryland, for Appellees. ON BRIEF: Virginia W. Barnhart, County Attorney, Jeffrey Grant Cook, Assistant County Attorney, Towson, Maryland, for Appellants. Paul D. Bekman, Israelson, Salsbury, Clements & Bekman, L.L.C., Baltimore, Maryland, for Appellees.

Before ERVIN and WILLIAMS, Circuit Judges, and GOODWIN, United States District Judge for the Southern District of West Virginia, sitting by designation.

Affirmed by published opinion, Judge ERVIN wrote the majority opinion, in which Judge GOODWIN joined. Judge WILLIAMS wrote a dissenting opinion.

OPINION

ERVIN, Circuit Judge:

Andrew Davis, Lee Russo, and Philip Crumbacher ("the officers") are police officers in Baltimore County, Maryland who appeal the district court's denial of their motion for summary judgment based on qualified immunity. In this § 1983 action, the officers are accused of violating Clarence Gould's Fourth Amendment right to be free from unreasonable searches when they sought and executed a "no-knock" search warrant. We agree with the district court that the officers are not entitled to qualified immunity because the constitutional right at issue was clearly established at the time of the events in question and was a right of which a reasonable officer would have known. For the reasons below, we affirm the district court's denial of summary judgment.

I.

Clarence Gould, Sr. ("Gould" or "Gould, Sr."), his wife, Lena, and their granddaughter, Brittany, reside in Baltimore County at 3806 Milford Mill Road. On October 16, 1992, Clarence Gould, Jr. ("Gould, Jr."), the Goulds' son, was arrested and detained as a suspect in a series of robberies that had occurred in the area of Liberty Road in Baltimore County. Gould, Jr. was apprehended after robbing at gunpoint the Pizza Hut on Liberty Road. The following day, police brought Daniel McCoy into custody and interviewed him in connection with the robbery of the Pizza Hut. McCoy informed police that he was the driver of Gould, Jr.'s getaway car in the Pizza Hut robbery as well as in several other robberies in the Liberty Road area. McCoy also stated that after some of the robberies he drove Gould, Jr. to his father's house on Milford Mill Road, and that Gould, Jr. frequently stayed at his parents' home. At the time that police were interviewing McCoy, Gould, Jr. was also in police custody, and police had already obtained a warrant and conducted a search of Gould, Jr.'s home.

Based on this information, the officers applied for a search warrant to search Gould, Sr.'s home. In their application for a warrant, the officers averred that they had probable cause to believe that evidence of the Liberty Road robberies could be found at Gould, Sr.'s home: baseball caps, several shirts, a jacket, sunglasses, two handguns, a pair of jeans, and United States currency.

Most importantly for purposes of this appeal, the officers requested that the warrant be issued as a "no-knock" warrant. This would allow the officers to forcibly enter the home without announcing their presence and waiting a reasonable time for the Goulds to answer the door. The officers believed that the seriousness of the crime of which Gould, Jr. was accused, and the fact that the officers sought to recover two handguns, justified a departure from the "knock and announce" requirement in executing a warrant at Gould, Sr.'s home.

A Baltimore County Circuit Court judge issued the search warrant for Gould, Sr.'s home very early in the morning on October 18, 1992. Later that morning, between 5:00 and 6:00 a.m., the officers smashed the front door of Gould's home by means of a battering ram and forcibly entered with their weapons drawn without first knocking or otherwise announcing their presence. Gould was asleep at the time and did not hear the police as they entered the home, nor did he hear the officers yelling, "Police, everybody get down," while they ran upstairs toward his bedroom. Gould's first recollections were the sound of footsteps running up the stairs and a loud noise when the banister gave way. Gould feared that intruders had broken into his home and he made his way to the bedroom closet where he kept a handgun. Officer Davis was the first to arrive in the bedroom. When he saw Gould with a weapon in his hand, he fired his weapon, missing Gould but hitting the wall beside him. Fragments from the bullet struck Gould in the arm, chest, and abdomen. Gould was hospitalized and treated for his wounds.

Gould filed an action in federal district court against the police officers and Baltimore County alleging that the defendants violated various federal and state laws in their request for and execution of the search warrant. Lena Gould joined her husband's action seeking damages for loss of consortium. The district court bifurcated the proceedings so that the claim against Baltimore County is no longer part of this action and therefore not before us. The district court also granted the officers' motion for summary judgment on several federal law counts, as well as on the state law causes of action, and that decision is also not before us. The district court, however, denied the officers' motion for summary judgment based on qualified immunity on one claim—Gould's § 1983 claim that the officers violated his constitutional right to be free from unreasonable searches in the application for and execution of the no-knock warrant. On appeal, the officers argue that the district court erred in denying their claim of qualified immunity from liability.

II.

The district court's denial of a claim of qualified immunity, to the extent it turns on an issue of law, is an appealable "final decision" within the meaning of 28 U.S.C. § 1291 under the collateral order doctrine. Mitchell v. Forsyth, 472 U.S. 511, 530, 105 S.Ct. 2806, 86 L.Ed.2d 411 (1985); see Cohen v. Beneficial Indus. Loan Corp., 337 U.S. 541, 69 S.Ct. 1221, 93 L.Ed. 1528 (1949). However, we lack jurisdiction to review the district court's order "insofar as that order determines whether or not the pretrial record sets forth a `genuine' issue of fact for trial." Johnson v. Jones, 515 U.S. 304, 320, 115 S.Ct. 2151, 132 L.Ed.2d 238 (1995).

Gould argues that there are disputed questions of material fact that deprive this court of jurisdiction to hear this interlocutory appeal. Indeed, the district court's order denied summary judgment, in part, because it believed there are "disputed questions of fact" as to whether reasonable officers would have believed they acted lawfully in securing and executing the no-knock warrant. J.A. at 303. The district court noted that the officers claimed that they "reasonably believed that the averments contained in their application and affidavit for the warrant constituted probable cause." J.A. at 303. The district court then pointed to "countervailing evidence which would support plaintiffs' contention that it was not reasonable for the officers to believe that probable cause existed for issuance of this `no knock' warrant." J.A. at 304.

While the district court is correct that different facts in evidence could be used to support different conclusions as to whether the officers deserve qualified immunity, this does not indicate a factual dispute, but rather, a question of law. The district court's order does not point to disputed questions of fact, but rather, disputed legal inferences that could be drawn from what is an undisputed factual record. For example, the conflict between the officers' assertion that they were reasonable in their belief that their actions were lawful and Gould's assertion that such a belief was unreasonable is not a factual conflict. The actual, subjective beliefs of the officers are irrelevant in resolving the immunity question. See Anderson v. Creighton, 483 U.S. 635, 641, 107 S.Ct. 3034, 97 L.Ed.2d 523 (1987) ("The relevant question . . . is the objective (albeit fact-specific) question whether a reasonable officer could have believed the search to be lawful in light of clearly established law and the information the searching officers possessed. The officer's subjective beliefs about the search are irrelevant."). For this reason, the "reasonableness" of the officers' decision in applying for and executing the warrant is a legal question that must be determined from the perspective of what a reasonable officer would have known about clearly established law, given the facts available to the officers at the time they acted. Here, there is no dispute about what information the officers had before them when they applied for and executed the no-knock warrant; the only question is whether the hypothetical "reasonable officer" would have known, given those undisputed facts, that his conduct was in violation of clearly established constitutional law. For this reason, we have jurisdiction to review the district court's order.

III.

Qualified immunity protects government officials from suits for civil damages arising out of the exercise of their discretionary functions. Harlow v. Fitzgerald, 457 U.S. 800, 818, 102 S.Ct. 2727, 73 L.Ed.2d 396 (1982). This immunity is available when the conduct of a government employee "does not violate clearly established statutory or constitutional rights of which a reasonable person...