Tarantino v. Baker, 86-2109

• Citation: 825 F.2d 772
• Decision Date: 10 August 1987
• Docket Number: No. 86-2109,86-2109
• Parties: Joseph Mario TARANTINO, Plaintiff-Appellee, v. B.R. BAKER, Jr., Detective, Avery Co. Sheriff's Department, Defendant-Appellant, and State of North Carolina; James T. Rusher, District Attorney for Avery County, North Carolina, individually and in their official capacities, Defendants.
• Court: United States Courts of Appeals. United States Court of Appeals (4th Circuit)

Page 772

825 F.2d 772

Joseph Mario TARANTINO, Plaintiff-Appellee, v. B.R. BAKER, Jr., Detective, Avery Co. Sheriff's Department,

Defendant-Appellant,

and

State of North Carolina; James T. Rusher, District Attorney

for Avery County, North Carolina, individually and

in their official capacities, Defendants.

No. 86-2109.

United States Court of Appeals,

Fourth Circuit.

Argued April 6, 1987.

Decided Aug. 10, 1987.

William Alfred Blancato, Winston-Salem, N.C. (Allan R. Gitter, Womble, Carlyle, Sandridge & Rice, on brief), for defendant-appellant.

Thomas Franklin Loflin, III Durham, N.C. (Dean A. Shangler, Loflin & Loflin, David S. Rudolf, Chapel Hill, N.C., Beskind & Rudolf, on brief), for plaintiff-appellee.

Before WIDENER and PHILLIPS, Circuit Judges, and HAYNSWORTH, Senior Circuit Judge.

JAMES DICKSON PHILLIPS, Circuit Judge.

This is an appeal from a judgment of the United States District Court for the Western District of North Carolina denying a police officer's claim of qualified immunity from suit under 42 U.S.C. Sec. 1983. The district court concluded that the officer's conduct violated clearly settled fourth amendment principles and denied his motion for summary judgment based on qualified immunity, 639 F.Supp. 661. We express no view on the constitutionality of the officer's conduct, an issue considered and decided against the officer's position in an earlier unappealed criminal suppression hearing. We disagree with the district court's conclusion, however, that the fourth amendment principles the officer allegedly violated were clearly settled at the time he acted. Accordingly, we conclude that the officer is entitled to qualified immunity, reverse the decision of the district court and remand for entry of summary judgment in favor of the officer.

I

Appellant B.R. Baker, Jr., is a detective in the Avery County, North Carolina Sheriff's Department. On August 30, 1985, Baker received an anonymous telephone call reporting marijuana plants growing inside a former general store in rural Avery County. The caller reported that the plants were visible through cracks in the back wall of the building.

Baker did not immediately obtain a search warrant because he could not verify the reliability of his anonymous informant. He did, however, proceed to the building to question anyone who might be there, and to determine if anything in plain view could confirm the anonymous tip. When Baker arrived at the building, at approximately 10:00 p.m. that same evening, he found boarded-up windows and a padlocked front door. He walked around to the back porch of the building and knocked. He received no response. He then noticed, as the caller had reported, that a crack ran along the back wall roughly three feet above the level of the porch floor. When Baker shined his flashlight through the crack, he saw what appeared to be marijuana plants inside the building.

Baker did not immediately enter the building. Instead, he went to a magistrate who, relying on Baker's observations, issued a search warrant. When Baker returned to the building and executed the search warrant he seized a number of marijuana plants as well as paraphernalia used to grow marijuana.

Criminal charges were subsequently brought against the building's occupant, appellee Joseph Mario Tarantino, in the United States District Court for the Western District of North Carolina. The district court, however, suppressed the evidence obtained by Baker, concluding that he had invaded Tarantino's "zone of expected privacy" when he looked through the crack hoping to confirm the informant's tip. The government chose not to appeal the district court's suppression ruling and dropped the prosecution.

Tarantino then filed a complaint in United States District Court for the Western District of North Carolina naming various state officials as defendants and seeking, inter alia, a permanent injunction against the use of the items Baker seized in any subsequent state criminal prosecution. After the district court refused to issue a temporary restraining order, Tarantino amended his complaint to seek money damages from Baker for violating his constitutional rights under color of law, 42 U.S.C. Sec. 1983. Tarantino also added a pendent state trespass claim against Baker.

On defendants' motions the district court dismissed all of the claims except Tarantino's Sec. 1983 claim against Baker in his individual capacity and the pendent state trespass claim. The district court rejected Baker's argument that he was entitled to a dismissal or summary judgment based on qualified immunity because the district court could not "conclude as a matter of law based on the materials [presented] that Baker's actions did not violate 'clearly established law.' " Baker here appeals the district court's denial of his motion for summary judgment. ¹ This appeal focuses exclusively on the district court's rejection of Baker's qualified immunity defense.

II

In Harlow v. Fitzgerald, 457 U.S. 800, 818, 102 S.Ct. 2727, 2738, 73 L.Ed.2d 396 (1982), the Supreme Court held that "government officials performing discretionary functions generally are shielded 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." (Emphasis added.) This principle, as most recently reaffirmed and applied by the Court in Anderson v. Creighton, --- U.S. ----, 107 S.Ct. 3034, 97 L.Ed.2d 523 (1987), reflects the concern that civil damages awards against public officers for every judicially determined violation of constitutional rights would prove too expensive to the public, discourage public service employment and impair governmental decisionmaking. Id. 107 S.Ct. at 3038. It also reflects a recognition that there are other disincentives--including the suppression of evidence in criminal prosecutions--impelling government officials to avoid illegal conduct. The qualified immunity principle seeks to strike the proper balance between the encouragement of respect for legal rights and the discouragement of initiative simultaneously posed for officials by the threat of civil damages. Id. at 3037-40. As the Supreme Court noted in Harlow:

Where an official could be expected to know that certain conduct would violate statutory or constitutional rights, he should be made to hesitate; and a person who suffers injury caused by such conduct may have a cause of action. But where an official's duties legitimately require action in which clearly established rights are not implicated, the public interest may be better served by action taken "with independence and without fear of consequences."

457 U.S. at 819, 102 S.Ct. at 2739 (quoting Pierson v. Ray, 386 U.S. 547, 554, 87 S.Ct. 1213, 1218, 18 L.Ed.2d 288 (1967)). Some limited protection of government officials from the civil liability made possible by Sec. 1983 is therefore essential.

The protection of qualified immunity extends to police officers, Pierson, 386 U.S. at 557, 87 S.Ct. at 1219, providing them with a margin for error when they navigate uncharted areas at the margins of constitutional criminal law. Even when a court concludes after the fact that a police officer violated a constitutional right, the officer remains shielded from civil liability under Sec. 1983 unless the right was "clearly established" at the time he acted and he reasonably should have known that his actions were illegal. See, e.g., Mitchell v. Forsyth, 472 U.S. 511, 105 S.Ct. 2806, 86 L.Ed.2d 411 (1985) (finding a fourth amendment violation for a warrantless search but also finding qualified immunity for the Attorney General in ordering the search). As the Fifth Circuit has noted:

Police officers can be expected to have a modicum of knowledge regarding the fundamental rights of citizens. Lawlessness will not be allowed to pervade our constabularies. However, in holding our law enforcement personnel to an objective standard of behavior, our judgment must be tempered with reason. If we are to measure official action against an objective standard, it must be a standard which speaks to what a reasonable officer should or should not know about the law he is enforcing and the methodology of effecting its enforcement. Certainly we cannot expect police officers to carry surveying equipment and a Decennial Digest on patrol; they cannot be held to a title-searcher's knowledge of metes and bounds or a legal scholar's expertise in constitutional law.

Saldana v. Garza, 684 F.2d 1159, 1165 (5th Cir.1982).

When a police officer asserts qualified immunity, the legal inquiry often focuses not so much on the "clarity" of the right allegedly violated as on whether the officer's actions "clearly" infringed that right. This may be particularly true when, as here, the civil suit is premised on a violation of the fourth amendment. The "meaning" of the fourth amendment, at least when stated in broad philosophical terms, is relatively clear. The precise action or combination of actions, however, which will infringe a particular suspect's fourth amendment rights is often difficult for even the constitutional scholar to discern because the legal doctrine has developed and continues to develop incrementally. Although some actions by a police officer must be held to violate "clearly settled" fourth amendment law even if no other reported case involves identical circumstances, there is often a "legitimate question" whether an officer's particular conduct constituted an improper search or seizure. See Anderson, 107 S.Ct. at 3039; Mitchell, 472 U.S. at 535 n. 12, 105 S.Ct. at 2820 n. 12. When such a "legitimate question" exists, the principle of qualified immunity gives police officers the necessary latitude to pursue their investigations without having to anticipate, on the pain of civil liability, future refinements or clarifications of constitutional law.

III

In rejecting Baker's claim of qualified immunity, the...