Macdonald v. Town of Eastham

• Decision Date: 12 March 2014
• Docket Number: No. 13–1779.,13–1779.
• Citation: Macdonald v. Town of Eastham, 745 F.3d 8 (1st Cir. 2014)
• Parties: Philip MACDONALD, Plaintiff, Appellant, v. TOWN OF EASTHAM et al., Defendants, Appellees.
• Court: U.S. Court of Appeals — First Circuit

745 F.3d 8

Philip MACDONALD, Plaintiff, Appellant,

v.TOWN OF EASTHAM et al., Defendants, Appellees.

No. 13–1779.

United States Court of Appeals, First Circuit.

March 12, 2014.

Bruce T. MacDonald for appellant.

Thomas R. Donahue, with whom Leonard H. Kesten, Deidre Brennan Regan, and Brody, Hardoon, Perkins & Kesten, LLP were on brief, for appellees Town of Eastham, Sylvia, and Mungovan.

Matthew J. Murphy, General Counsel, Barnstable County Sheriff's Office, for appellee Dinan.

Before TORRUELLA, Circuit Judge, SOUTER,^* Associate Justice, and SELYA, Circuit Judge.

SELYA, Circuit Judge.

This appeal poses the question of whether police officers, responding to a call from a citizen concerned that the door to her absent neighbor's home is standing wide open, have a right to enter the home in pursuance of their community caretaking function. While the answer to this question is freighted with uncertainty, that uncertainty points the way to the proper disposition of the case: because there is no clearly established law that would deter reasonable police officers from effecting such an entry, the individual defendants are entitled to qualified immunity. Consequently, we affirm the district court's dismissal of the action.

Inasmuch as this appeal follows the grant of a motion to dismiss, seeFed.R.Civ.P. 12(b)(6), we weed the facts from the plaintiff's complaint. See Butler v. Balolia, 736 F.3d 609, 611 (1st Cir.2013).

On the afternoon of November 7, 2009, plaintiff-appellant Philip MacDonald, accompanied by his dog, left his home in Eastham, Massachusetts, for coffee and clamming. His cat, being “[o]f all God's creatures ... [the] only one that cannot be made the slave of the lash,” Mark Twain, Mark Twain's Notebook 236 (1935), remained out and about. To accommodate the feline's comings and goings, the plaintiff left the door to his home wide open as he embarked on his trip.

That circumstance did not go unnoticed. Forty-five minutes later, a neighbor relayed concerns to the local constabulary about the wide open door at the plaintiff's vacant home. Responding to that call, two Eastham police officers (defendants-appellees Norman Sylvia and Kate Mungovan) interviewed the neighbor. They then approached the plaintiff's house and announced their presence. Receiving no response, they entered the kitchen through the open door.

Finding nothing amiss in the kitchen, the officers proceeded to search the rest of the house. That search revealed the presence of a marijuana-growing operation.

When the plaintiff returned to his abode some 30 minutes later, he was detained. Following some procedural twists and turns not relevant here, he was charged in state court with offenses related to the manufacture and possession of marijuana. But when a state-court judge suppressed the evidence found in his home, the charges were dropped.

The matter did not end there. With the criminal case laid to rest, the plaintiff's thoughts turned to civil liability. He sued the Town of Eastham (the Town), Officers Sylvia and Mungovan, and crime-scene investigator Terry Dinan (who had assisted in the search) in the federal district court, alleging that they had deprived him of his Fourth Amendment rights in violation of 42 U.S.C. § 1983. His complaint also advanced supplemental state-law claims.

The defendants moved to dismiss, and the district court granted the motion. The court held that the officers were entitled to qualified immunity. See Macdonald v. Town of Eastham, 946 F.Supp.2d 235, 243 (D.Mass.2013). ¹ This timely appeal ensued.

Our review of the grant of a Rule 12(b)(6) motion to dismiss is de novo. See Butler, 736 F.3d at 612. We are not bound by the district court's reasoning but, rather, may affirm an order of dismissal on any ground evident from the record. See Haley v. City of Bos., 657 F.3d 39, 46 (1st Cir.2011).

In this venue, the plaintiff challenges the district court's application of the doctrine of qualified immunity. Addressing that challenge requires us to explore the rudiments of the doctrine and thereafter test the soundness of the district court's decision.

“[Q]ualified immunity protects government officials from liability for civil damages insofar as their conduct does not violate clearly established statutory or constitutional rights of which a reasonable person would have known.” Pearson v. Callahan, 555 U.S. 223, 231, 129 S.Ct. 808, 172 L.Ed.2d 565 (2009) (internal quotation marks omitted). The doctrine “gives government officials breathing room to make reasonable but mistaken judgments about open legal questions.” Ashcroft v. al–Kidd, ––– U.S. ––––, 131 S.Ct. 2074, 2085, 179 L.Ed.2d 1149 (2011). Thus, qualified immunity protects “all but the plainly incompetent or those who knowingly violate the law.” Malley v. Briggs, 475 U.S. 335, 341, 106 S.Ct. 1092, 89 L.Ed.2d 271 (1986). However, the doctrine is not without limits. Despite the breadth of its prophylactic sweep, “qualified immunity does not shield public officials who, from an objective standpoint, should have known that their conduct was unlawful.” Haley, 657 F.3d at 47 (internal quotation marks omitted).

Qualified immunity is designed to confer protection from the travails of suit as well as from the imposition of damages. Hence, courts should evaluate claims of qualified immunity at the earliest practicable stage of litigation. See Hunter v. Bryant, 502 U.S. 224, 227, 112 S.Ct. 534, 116 L.Ed.2d 589 (1991) (per curiam).

This evaluation entails a two-part inquiry. See Haley, 657 F.3d at 47. For one thing, the court must ask “whether the facts that a plaintiff has alleged ... make out a violation of a constitutional right.” Pearson, 555 U.S. at 232, 129 S.Ct. 808. For another thing, the court must ask “whether the right at issue was ‘clearly established’ at the time of defendant's alleged misconduct.” Id. (quoting Saucier v. Katz, 533 U.S. 194, 201, 121 S.Ct. 2151, 150 L.Ed.2d 272 (2001)). The court need not address these two questions in any particular sequence. See id. at 242, 129 S.Ct. 808.

Here, the answer to the second question is sufficient to resolve the plaintiff's appeal. Consequently, we train the lens of our inquiry on whether, at the time of the intrusion, Fourth Amendment jurisprudence plainly signaled to the individual defendants in this case that their conduct overstepped constitutional boundaries.

The requisite analysis presents a purely legal question. See Walden v. City of Prov., 596 F.3d 38, 53 (1st Cir.2010). It has two elements. The first element “focuses on the clarity of the law at the time of the alleged civil rights violation”; this element turns on whether the contours of the relevant right were clear enough to signal to a reasonable official that his conduct would infringe that right. Maldonado v. Fontanes, 568 F.3d 263, 269 (1st Cir.2009). The second element is more particularized; it turns on “whether a reasonable defendant would have understood that his conduct violated the plaintiff['s] constitutional rights.” Id.

Moving to the specifics of this case, we start with first principles. As a general matter, the Fourth Amendment requires police officers to secure a warrant prior to effecting a non-consensual entry into a person's residence. See Georgia v. Randolph, 547 U.S. 103, 109, 126 S.Ct. 1515, 164 L.Ed.2d 208 (2006). Where, as here, officers enter without a warrant and without consent, their actions must fall within some recognized exception to the warrant requirement. See United States v. Romain, 393 F.3d 63, 68 (1st Cir.2004).

In this instance, the defendant officers seek shelter in the community caretaking exception. That exception traces its roots to the Supreme Court's decision in Cady v. Dombrowski, 413 U.S. 433, 93 S.Ct. 2523, 37 L.Ed.2d 706 (1973). The Cady Court, while upholding a warrantless vehicle search, explained that police officers sometimes may “engage in what ... may be described as community caretaking functions, totally divorced from the detection, investigation, or acquisition of evidence relating to the violation of a criminal statute.” Id. at 441, 93 S.Ct. 2523.

As the law has developed, the community caretaking rubric has become “a catchall for the wide range of responsibilities that police officers must discharge aside from their criminal enforcement activities.” United States v. Rodriguez–Morales, 929 F.2d 780, 785 (1st Cir.1991). In line with this evolving principle, we have recognized (in the motor vehicle context) a community caretaking exception to the warrant requirement. In delineating this exception, we held that “[t]he imperatives of the fourth amendment are satisfied in connection with the performance of ... community caretaker tasks [by police officers] so long as the procedure employed (and its implementation) is reasonable.” Id.

To be sure, the case at hand is not a motor vehicle case, and the reach of the community caretaking doctrine is poorly defined outside that milieu. This court has not decided whether the community caretaking exception applies to police activities involving a person's home. See United States v. Tibolt, 72 F.3d 965, 969 n. 2 (1st Cir.1995) (leaving question open). The courts of appeals elsewhere are divided on that question. See Ray v. Twp. of Warren, 626 F.3d 170, 175–76 (3d Cir.2010) (collecting cases and concluding that “[t]here is some confusion among the circuits as to whether the community caretaking exception ... applies to warrantless searches of the home”). State appellate courts are also split. Compare, e.g., State v. Vargas, 213 N.J. 301, 63 A.3d 175, 186 (2013) (repudiating “language suggesting that the community-caretaking doctrine permits the warrantless entry into or search of a home in the absence of some form of exigent circumstances”), with, e.g., State v. Deneui, 775 N.W.2d 221, 239 (S.D.2009) (holding that “homes cannot be arbitrarily isolated from the community caretaking equation”); see also Commonwealth v. Entwistle, 463 Mass. 205, 973...