Whitt v. City of Rockford, Ill.

• Decision Date: 21 October 1988
• Docket Number: No. 84 C 20116.,84 C 20116.
• Parties: Simmie WHITT, Plaintiff, v. CITY OF ROCKFORD, ILL., et al., Defendants.
• Court: U.S. District Court — Northern District of Illinois

700 F. Supp. 391

Simmie WHITT, Plaintiff, v. CITY OF ROCKFORD, ILL., et al., Defendants.

No. 84 C 20116.

United States District Court, N.D. Illinois, W.D.

October 21, 1988.

Peter T. Sullivan, III, Daniel J. Cain, Sreenen & Cain, P.C., Rockford, Ill., for plaintiff.

Franklin C. Cook, Charles E. Box, Kathleen Elliott, City of Rockford Dept. of Law, Rockford, Ill., for defendants.

ORDER

ROSZKOWSKI, District Judge.

Before the court is defendants' motion for summary judgment. Plaintiff is suing the City of Rockford, its police chief and a number of its police officers for an alleged deprivation of his constitutional rights. Plaintiff filed this action pursuant to 42 U.S.C. § 1983 in connection with an incident which occurred on January 25, 1984 in Rockford, Illinois. The incident involved a warrantless entry by the police into an apartment where plaintiff resided. Plaintiff was shot by a Rockford police officer shortly after the entry.

FACTS¹

Five days before the entry into plaintiff's apartment, a woman was assaulted while shopping at O'Donnell's Foods on Rockford's west side. She had been struck in the face with a gun by a black woman accompanied by a black man. Witnesses observed the pair leaving in an older model green Chevrolet Impala with a shotgun being pointed out the window of the car by the driver.

A license check was run on the car. It indicated that the car was registered in the name of John Moore whose address was shown as 210½ Ogden, Rockford, Illinois. Defendant Officer Scheffels, who was investigating the incident, contacted Mr. Moore. Moore denied any participation in the incident at O'Donnell's saying that he had loaned his car to an acquaintance named Jeff. The victim of the crime disappeared and officers did not pursue the matter.

Late in the evening of January 25, 1984, a call came in for police assistance at 236 North Independence Avenue. Charles Blissit had notified the police that three black men had just been at that address. The three men were described as all being armed with one carrying a rifle. Blisset had been with the woman who was assaulted at O'Donnell's earlier in the week. He identified one of the armed men as the black male involved in the incident at O'Donnell's.

While the police were responding to the incident on Independence Avenue, there was a report of a shooting at 1827 Green Street, which is about five blocks from the Independence Avenue occurrence.² The victim, Roger Purifoy, was shot in the bathroom of his girlfriend's apartment. He told the police that the assailants were three black men, all of whom were armed, one of whom was carrying a rifle or shotgun type of gun.

Officer Scheffels was on duty the night of these two occurrences. He went to the vicinity of the Green Street incident although he did not talk to the victim or any witnesses. He did not go to the Independence Avenue incident. When he heard the information broadcast from the Independence Avenue incident, he responded by broadcasting the information he had acquired through his investigation of the O'Donnell's incident. The police gathered at John Moore's address. Moore's car was parked in front of the residence and there were lights on in his apartment.

Defendant Sergeant Roger Smith came to Moore's residence from the Green Street shooting. He decided they should attempt to gain entry to Moore's apartment consensually if possible but by force if necessary. Two of the officers were assigned to the front of the building while the other five converged on the rear entrance located at the top of some exterior stairs.

When the defendants got to the top of the stairs outside of the apartment, they heard loud and excited conversation from within the apartment. The individuals inside the apartment were discussing guns and were talking about a shooting. The defendants also heard the sounds of a shotgun being "jacked" and guns being played with.

Defendant Officer McDonald then knocked on the door and announced himself as the police. He repeated his knock and announcement, in response to which the door was opened from within. The individual who opened the door attempted to shut the door whereupon the officers forced the door open and moved inside the apartment into the kitchen area.

Immediately after entering the apartment, Officer McDonald noticed an adult male coming into the kitchen carrying a shotgun. Officer McDonald shot his handgun at the person carrying the shotgun wounding him in the arm. The person shot is plaintiff, Simmie Whitt.

Plaintiff alleges that defendants violated plaintiff's constitutional rights when defendants entered the apartment without a warrant and allegedly without probable cause or exigent circumstances. Defendants move for summary judgment arguing that probable cause and exigent circumstances were present when they entered the apartment. Defendants argue further that even if probable cause and exigent circumstances were not present, they are entitled to qualified immunity for their actions.

OPINION

"The doctrine of qualified immunity shields government officials performing discretionary functions from liability for civil damages." Klein v. Ryan, 847 F.2d 368, 371 (7th Cir.1988). "Under the purely objective qualified immunity standard adopted in Harlow v. Fitzgerald, 457 U.S. 800 102 S.Ct. 2727, 73 L.Ed.2d 396 (1982), government officials may violate an individual's constitutional rights and still be shielded from liability if they could not reasonably be expected to know that the Constitution forbade their conduct. If their conduct did not `violate clearly established ... constitutional rights of which a reasonable person would have known,' they are entitled to qualified immunity." Bradshaw v. Zebella, 1987 U.S. Dist. LEXIS 10166, 3 (N.D.Ill.1987) 1987 WL 19545, 1 (quoting Harlow, 457 U.S. at 818, 102 S.Ct. at 2738).

In the Bradshaw case cited above, Judge Alesia discussed the purposes of qualified immunity and more particularly, its purposes in the context of lawsuits against law enforcement officials. As Judge Alesia stated:

qualified immunity for public officials is intended to accommodate two conflicting concerns. On the one hand is the desire to allow citizens to resort to damage suits to vindicate violations of constitutional rights. See Harlow, 457 U.S. at 814 102 S.Ct. at 2736. But the right to sue public officials for abusive conduct may be counterproductive if the "fear of personal monetary liability and harrassing litigation will unduly inhibit officials in the discharge of their duties." Creighton, 107 S.Ct. at 3038. By focusing on the objective reasonableness of an official's conduct in light of existing case law at the time the action is taken, the qualified immunity doctrine is designed to weed out insubstantial suits before trial without limiting a citizen's right to seek relief for violations of clearly established rights. Harlow, 457 U.S. at 819 102 S.Ct. at 2738.

The need to balance protection of officials from groundless suits against a citizen's right to seek damages for constitutionally protected rights is particularly acute when the right at issue involves matters of law enforcement. Frequently faced with situations requiring quick and decisive action, police officers do not always have time to consider whether a particular course of action might violate the delicate intricacies of some constitutionally protected right. Recognizing the danger of subjecting an officer to potential liability every time his on-the-scene assessment of probable cause later is found wanting in the deliberative calm of a pretrial suppression hearing, the Court has interpreted the qualified immunity defense to "provide ample protection to all but the plainly incompetent or those who knowingly violate the law." Malley v. Briggs, 475 U.S. 335, 106 S.Ct. 1092, 1096 89 L.Ed.2d 271 (1986). Thus, the standard of qualified immunity, as applied to cases of alleged police misconduct, is whether "on an objective basis, it is obvious that no reasonably competent officer" would have taken the disputed action. Id.

Bradshaw, 1987 U.S. Dist. LEXIS 10166 at 4, 5 1987 WL 19545 at 2.

"To overcome the defense of qualified immunity, the plaintiff must show that the officials violated `clearly established statutory or constitutional rights of which a reasonable person would have known.' Klein, 847 F.2d at 371 (quoting Harlow, 457 U.S. at 818, 102 S.Ct. at 2738). In order for a right to be clearly established,

the contours of the right must be sufficiently clear that a reasonable official would understand that what he is doing violates that right. This is not to say that an official action is protected by qualified immunity unless the very action in question has previously been held unlawful, but it is to say that in the light of preexisting law the unlawfulness must be apparent.

Anderson v. Creighton, 483 U.S. 635, 107 S.Ct. 3034, 3039, 97 L.Ed.2d 523 (1987). Therefore, to resolve the qualified immunity question this court must determine whether on January 25, 1984 the law governing probable cause and exigent circumstances in the context of warrantless home entries was established with sufficient clarity such that "officers of reasonable competence could disagree" whether the law required a warrant to enter the apartment. Malley v. Briggs, 475 U.S. 335, 106 S.Ct. 1092, 1096, 89 L.Ed.2d 271 (1986).

The Supreme Court in Payton v. New York, 445 U.S. 573, 100 S.Ct. 1371, 63 L.Ed.2d 639 (1980), stated "it is a basic principle of Fourth Amendment law that searches and seizures inside a home without a warrant are presumptively unreasonable." Payton, 100 S.Ct. at 1380. The Payton Court further held that the presumption could be rebutted if probable cause and exigent circumstances were present at the time of the warrantless entry. Payton, 100 S.Ct. at 1380-82.

In analyzing whether probable cause exists, it is important to consider that the "determination of probable cause does not rest...