Wilson v. City of Boston

• Decision Date: 31 August 2005
• Docket Number: No. 04-1310.,04-1310.
• Citation: 421 F.3d 45
• Parties: Niquicia WILSON, Plaintiff, Appellant, v. CITY OF BOSTON; Captain Robert Dunford, Defendants, Appellees, Officer Janine Mitchell; Paul Evans, in his capacity as Commissioner of the Boston Police Department; Unknown Sergeant Badge Number 958; John Doe; John Poe, Defendants.
• Court: U.S. Court of Appeals — First Circuit

421 F.3d 45

Niquicia WILSON, Plaintiff, Appellant, v. CITY OF BOSTON; Captain Robert Dunford, Defendants, Appellees Officer Janine Mitchell; Paul Evans, in his capacity as Commissioner of the Boston Police Department; Unknown Sergeant Badge Number 958; John Doe; John Poe, Defendants.

No. 04-1310.

United States Court of Appeals, First Circuit.

Heard February 9, 2005.

Decided August 31, 2005.

COPYRIGHT MATERIAL OMITTED

Andrew M. Fischer, with whom Jason & Fischer was on brief, for appellant.

Amy E. Ambarik, Assistant Corporation Counsel, with whom Stephen G. Cox, Assistant Corporation Counsel, and Merita A. Hopkins, Corporation Counsel, were on brief, for appellees.

Before LIPEZ, Circuit Judge, STAHL, Senior Circuit Judge, and OBERDORFER, Senior District Judge.^*

LIPEZ, Circuit Judge.

This appeal stems from a mass arrest sting designed to capture a large number of persons with outstanding arrest warrants. Plaintiff-appellant Niquicia Wilson, who had no criminal record and was never subject to an arrest warrant, was mistakenly swept up in the arrest. As a result of this experience, she sued various arresting officers and the City of Boston under 42 U.S.C. § 1983 and state law. The district court granted summary judgment to the City, but the rest of the case went to trial. Wilson prevailed at trial against Captain Robert Dunford, who planned and commanded the operation and was the arresting officer. However, the court granted judgment notwithstanding the verdict for Dunford on the basis of qualified immunity. That ruling is the principal subject of this appeal.

We hold that the jury was entitled to conclude that Wilson's arrest was an unreasonable seizure prohibited by the Fourth Amendment. Nevertheless, we find that Dunford was entitled to qualified immunity because an objectively reasonable officer in his position could have believed that his conduct would not violate the Fourth Amendment. We also agree with the district court's resolution of other issues presented on appeal. Consequently, we affirm.

I.

Because the case was tried to a jury, we recite the facts in the light most favorable to the verdict. United States v. Castellini, 392 F.3d 35, 39 (1st Cir.2004).

A.

In the spring of 1999, plaintiff-appellant Niquicia Wilson, an eighteen-year-old student with no criminal history, and her boyfriend, Jean Cassamajor, received a letter in the mail. The letter, addressed to Cassamajor, came from John Goodwin, who supposedly represented a company called Madrid International that was planning to act as a job broker to hire a large number of people for work on Boston's "Big Dig" construction project. The letter invited Cassamajor to attend a job fair on Sunday, June 27, 1999 at the Bayside Expo Center in Dorchester, Massachusetts. Wilson was excited by the prospect of stable, long-term employment for Cassamajor, and encouraged him to attend.

On the day of the job fair, Wilson drove Cassamajor to the Bayside Expo Center, parked the car, and accompanied him into the lobby of the exhibition hall. Cassamajor went to check in at a staffed registration table, and Wilson went to a nearby vending machine to buy a soda.

Suddenly she heard a commotion, and saw that two or more men had tackled Cassamajor and thrown him to the floor. One of the men yelled to Cassamajor that he was under arrest, and Wilson inferred (correctly) that the men were plain-clothed police officers. The officers pushed Cassamajor through a set of double doors into the exhibition hall.

Wilson approached the officers and asked what was happening. They instructed her to go into the exhibition hall, and "nudged" or encouraged her in the direction of the doors. Not wanting to receive the same treatment as Cassamajor, Wilson complied and entered the hall. There were approximately 105 people seated in the hall, and a larger number of police officers. Wilson saw that Cassamajor (now handcuffed) was sitting near the front, and she sat down behind him.

Defendant-appellee Captain Robert Dunford of the Boston Police Department ("BPD") was standing at a podium in the front of the room.¹ He told the assembled group that they were all under arrest and that everyone should sit calmly. Not everyone complied — some of those present yelled at the officers — but Wilson sat calmly. At some point Dunford and other police officers explained that everyone in the room was under arrest for outstanding warrants, and Wilson realized that the "job fair" was in fact a sting operation. Someone shouted a question regarding what would happen to arrestees who did not actually have a warrant outstanding. Captain Dunford responded that if the person did not have a warrant, the police "would square that away later."

Wilson informed a nearby officer that she was only at the hall to drop her boyfriend off, and that if he checked he would see that there was no warrant for her arrest. The officer told her to sit down. Another arrestee had also told officers that he was in the hall by mistake, and a Detective Arnstein summoned Captain Dunford to talk to that person and Wilson. After Wilson explained her situation to Dunford, he replied "fine, we are just going to check you to make sure that the story you are telling us is the truth and if that is determined, you are free to leave."

At police instructions, Wilson remained seated for "a very long time."² She did not speak up at this point because, she later explained, "I didn't want to get roughed up. Some people were being roughed up. I didn't want that to happen to me."

The police took arrestees in groups to a table at the back of the hall for processing. When Wilson's section was finally called — it was the last section — she was handcuffed and moved towards the processing table. All along the way, she repeatedly insisted that she had no warrants.

At the processing table, Detective Janine Mitchell (a defendant below, but not before us on appeal) was matching arrestees to folders compiled in advance. Upon realizing that there was no folder for Wilson, Mitchell inquired if she had any aliases, such as "Nicky," "Tonya," or "Nicole." Wilson stated that she did not. Eventually, after about fifteen minutes, Mitchell led Wilson outside the building to stand near a van with a computerized warrant checking system. Wilson asked to be taken inside due to the heat, but Mitchell said words to the effect of, "We know you're lying and until you tell us the truth, you'll sit out here."

The officer inside the van asked Wilson for identification, and she produced a valid Massachusetts driver's license. The officer continued to check for outstanding warrants under names such as "Nicky Wilson" or "Tonya Wilson." After about half an hour, having concluded that there was in fact no warrant for Wilson's arrest, the officers sent for Captain Dunford.

When Dunford arrived, he asked Wilson for identification, and she again produced her driver's license. Finally, realizing the error, he explained that she would be released as soon as the police could fill out an "incident report." In the meantime, she was moved back into the auditorium. It took the officers another ten minutes to write the incident report, which was noted as completed at 11:30 AM and which stated in relevant part: "Suspect above was placed under arrest as a result of Operation Madrid.... Subsequent warrant check revealed suspect to have no outstanding warrants."³ It took another twenty minutes to await a "cuff cutter" who could cut off her plastic handcuffs.

After her handcuffs were cut, Wilson was free to leave. The entire incident had taken a little under two hours. She went to the parking lot and found her boyfriend Cassamajor, who, it turned out, did not have an outstanding warrant either.⁴

B.

The "job fair" had been about three months in the making. The BPD had a longstanding problem with outstanding arrest warrants (due in part to erroneous names, addresses, and so forth), and by early 1999 there were some 14,000 warrants outstanding. Captain Dunford conceived a plan, code named "Operation Goodwin," to help solve the problem by luring suspects to a fictitious job fair and then arresting them en masse.

The BPD mailed a letter with a job application to the targets of the 14,000 outstanding warrants. About 6,500 of those letters were returned for having bad addresses. In other cases, the BPD learned that the suspect had died or left the jurisdiction.

The BPD took other measures to whittle the list. In some cases, the suspect was arrested on another matter and therefore no longer needed to be part of Operation Goodwin. In other cases, the BPD determined that the warrant had been cleared in court (e.g., a fine had been paid) and the department's computerized warrant system was simply not up to date. After all the fine-tuning, the list was narrowed to some 300 persons. The BPD sent them a second letter with an invitation to a June 27, 1999 job fair at the Bayside Expo Center and requested an RSVP. Of those 300, 192 responded. One of the 192 was Wilson's boyfriend Cassamajor, who had once been the subject of an arrest warrant which, apparently unbeknownst to the BPD, had already been cleared.

The plan for the event called for civilian BPD employees to staff registration tables at the hall entrance. These employees would verify that each arriving person was on the list of the 200 persons who had indicated that they planned to attend the event. Captain Dunford anticipated that some of the recipients might bring family members or friends, or that random passers-by might wander in. If an uninvited person presented himself at the registration table, he would be told that the event was invitation-only and a similar event would be held in a few weeks. The registration table was the only point at which entrants were checked to ensure that they were actually invited.

Once a "job fair" attendee was verified at the registration table, he would be directed to alphabetically organized...