Hayter v. City of Mount Vernon

• Decision Date: 21 September 1998
• Docket Number: No. 98-40071,98-40071
• Citation: 154 F.3d 269
• Court: U.S. Court of Appeals — Fifth Circuit
• Parties: Robert Jack HAYTER, Plaintiff-Appellee, v. CITY OF MOUNT VERNON, et al., Defendants, Harold Sullivan, Jr., Franklin County Reserve Deputy, Defendant-Appellant, Tyler Bannister, Mount Vernon Police Officer, Defendant-Appellant. Summary Calendar.

Page 269

154 F.3d 269

Robert Jack HAYTER, Plaintiff-Appellee, v. CITY OF MOUNT VERNON, et al., Defendants Harold Sullivan, Jr., Franklin County Reserve Deputy Defendant-Appellant Tyler Bannister, Mount Vernon Police Officer, Defendant-Appellant.

No. 98-40071

Summary Calendar.

United States Court of Appeals, Fifth Circuit.

Sept. 21, 1998.

Curtis B. Stuckey, Stuckey & Garrigan, Nacogdoches, TX, for Plaintiff-Appellee.

Robert Scott Davis, Louis Charles Van Cleef, Cooper, Flowers, Davis, Fraser & Dennyberry, Tyler, TX, for Sullivan.

Thomas Edward Gibson, Potter, Minton, Roberts, Davis & Jones, Tyler, TX, for Bannister.

Appeals from the United States District Court for the Eastern District of Texas.

Before REYNALDO G. GARZA, WIENER and STEWART, Circuit Judges.

REYNALDO G. GARZA, Circuit Judge:

Factual and Procedural Background

At approximately 1:45 a.m. on Sunday, June 2, 1996, Defendant Tyler Bannister, a police officer for the city of Mount Vernon, and Defendant Harold Sullivan, a reserve deputy for Franklin County, stopped Plaintiff Robert Jack Hayter's vehicle because they claim he had swerved in the road twice. Hayter and his friend, Joshua Scott Mahaffey, had been watching movies at Mahaffey's grandmother's house when they decided to drive to a nearby Texaco station to buy cigarettes. They were on their way back to the house when the defendants pulled them over. Hayter claims that he did not swerve in the road. The defendants did not charge Hayter with swerving in the road.

Sullivan asserts that, as he approached Hayter's car, he smelled a strong odor of alcohol coming from inside the car and observed a pipe on the floorboard of the passenger's side of the car. Hayter and Mahaffey had been drinking earlier in the night, but Hayter claims that he was not drunk or impaired when the defendants pulled him over. In his testimony, Bannister confirmed this claim by admitting that Hayter did not exhibit any signs of intoxication and appeared to be sober at the time.

Bannister and Sullivan asked if they could search Hayter's car, and Hayter consented. Bannister found a small plastic bag containing a green leafy herbal substance. Upon his initial visual inspection, Bannister suspected that the substance might be marijuana. Sniffing the bag, however, revealed to Bannister that the substance did not smell anything like marijuana. Hayter attempted to explain to the defendants that the substance was actually a legal herb known as "Inda-Kind," which he had ordered out of a magazine as a smoking alternative to help him quit smoking cigarettes.

Bannister and Sullivan then read Hayter his rights and placed him in handcuffs. The defendants placed Hayter in jail at approximately 2:30 a.m. that Sunday morning. About two hours later, they brought Hayter out of his cell and up to the front office. The defendants offered Hayter a cigarette and repeatedly asked him who was selling drugs around Mount Vernon. Hayter claims that both defendants kept asking him the same questions over and over again. Each time, Hayter told the defendants that he did not know who might be selling drugs in Mount Vernon. Later, the defendants returned Hayter to his cell.

Later that day, Hayter's wife brought the original bag of Inda-Kind that Hayter had purchased to the jail. She showed it to Sullivan, who testified that at that point he had very little doubt that the substance they had found in Hayter's car was not marijuana and that Hayter was innocent. Nevertheless, Sullivan did not instruct anyone at the jail to release Hayter.

Hayter was not allowed to use a telephone until approximately 5:30 or 6:00 p.m. Sunday evening. The police finally released Hayter at 5:00 p.m. Monday evening, after lab tests indicated that the substance the defendants found in Hayter's car was not marijuana. The charges against Hayter were dismissed. Hayter spent a total of approximately 39 hours in jail, and claims that his employer fired him because he had been arrested and did not show up to work while he was in jail.

On March 17, 1997, Hayter filed suit under 42 U.S.C. § 1983 in the United States District Court for the Eastern District of Texas, Texarkana Division, alleging that Bannister and Sullivan made an unlawful and warrantless arrest, thereby depriving him of his Fourth Amendment rights. Hayter further alleged that the City of Mount Vernon and Franklin County empowered their officers with unfettered discretion to make warrantless arrests based upon less than probable cause, inadequately trained Bannister, and did not provide adequate supervision of Bannister. Hayter also asserted a pendent state law claim against Bannister for malicious prosecution.

On November 6, 1997, a magistrate judge recommended that the district court grant the City's and County's summary judgment motions. The magistrate found that Hayter had failed to show that the City or County had adopted and practiced a custom or official policy which deprived Hayter of his constitutional rights, as required for municipal liability under § 1983. Furthermore, the magistrate found that Hayter had failed to show that the City and/or the County improperly trained Bannister and Sullivan or provided inadequate supervision.

In contrast, the magistrate recommended that the district court deny Bannister's and Sullivan's summary judgment motions, finding that genuine issues of material fact existed as to the issue of qualified immunity, upon which the defendants had based their motions. The magistrate found that Hayter had presented sufficient evidence, primarily in the form of an expert's affidavit, that (1) no reasonable police officer would subject a citizen to a warrantless arrest based on a visual inspection of Inda-Kind; (2) no reasonable officer could believe that he or she had probable cause to believe that the Inda-Kind was marijuana; and (3) under Hayter's version of events, the defendants did not possess sufficient facts to give rise to a reasonable suspicion that Hayter had violated any law to justify the initial stop. As such, the magistrate found that Hayter had met his burden of proof, so that the issue of whether Bannister's and Sullivan's conduct was reasonable would have to be decided by a jury. Similarly, the magistrate recommended that the district court deny Bannister's summary judgment motion as to the malicious prosecution claim because fact issues remained as whether Bannister acted with malice and/or without probable cause.

The district court adopted the magistrate's Report and Recommendation on January 5, 1998. Sullivan had previously filed objections to the Report and Recommendation, but Bannister did not. Sullivan and Bannister both filed notices of their interlocutory appeal on January 14, 1998.

Discussion

Sullivan and Bannister argue on appeal that the magistrate erred in overruling their objections to the affidavit of Hayter's expert, and that the district court erred in denying their motions for summary judgment. In addition, Bannister argues that the district court erred in denying his motion for summary judgment on Hayter's state law malicious prosecution claim. Quite predictably, Hayter responds that the district court did not err in these regards, but also raises a preliminary question as to whether this Court has jurisdiction to hear this interlocutory appeal.

A. Jurisdiction

This Court has jurisdiction to hear this interlocutory appeal. Section 1291 of Title 28 of the United Stated Code gives courts of appeals jurisdiction over "all final decisions" of district courts, except those designated for appeal to the Supreme Court. 28 U.S.C. § 1291. In Cohen v. Beneficial Indust. Loan Corp., the Supreme Court described a "small class" of district court decisions that, though short of final judgment, are immediately appealable because they "finally determine claims of right separable from, and collateral to, rights asserted in the action, too important to be denied review and too independent of the cause itself to require that appellate consideration be deferred until the whole cause is adjudicated." 337 U.S. 541, 546, 69 S.Ct. 1221, 93 L.Ed. 1528 (1949).

In a later case, the Supreme Court held that denial of a claim of qualified immunity, to the extent that it turns on an issue of law, falls within the class of cases appealable within the meaning of § 1291 notwithstanding the absence of a final judgment. See Mitchell v. Forsyth, 472 U.S. 511, 530, 105 S.Ct. 2806, 86 L.Ed.2d 411 (1985); see also Johnson v. Jones, 515 U.S. 304, 311-12, 115 S.Ct. 2151, 132 L.Ed.2d 238 (1995). The rationale behind this holding is that this kind of summary judgment order is effectively unreviewable, in a sense, because review after trial would come too late to vindicate one important purpose of qualified immunity, i.e., protecting public officials, not simply from liability, but also from standing trial or facing the other burdens of litigation, which can distract officials from performing governmental duties, inhibit discretionary action, and deter able people from public service. Id. at 312, 115 S.Ct. 2151; Mitchell, 472 U.S. at 525-27, 105 S.Ct. 2806.

Recently, in Behrens v. Pelletier, 516 U.S. 299, 116 S.Ct. 834, 133 L.Ed.2d 773 (1996), the Supreme Court settled the issue as far as this case is concerned. In Behrens, the Court explained its prior holding in Johnson:

Denial of summary judgment often includes a determination that there are controverted issues of material fact, and Johnson surely does not mean that every such denial of summary judgment is nonappealable. Johnson held, simply, that determinations of evidentiary sufficiency at summary judgment are not immediately appealable merely because they happen to arise in a qualified-immunity case; if what is at issue in the sufficiency determination is nothing more than whether the evidence could support a finding that particular conduct occurred, the question decided is not truly "separable" from the plaintiff's...