Source: s3://data.kl3m.ai/documents/govinfo/USCOURTS/USCOURTS-ca7-14-03619/USCOURTS-ca7-14-03619-0/pdf.json

Nature of Suit Code: 440
Nature of Suit: Other Civil Rights
Cause of Action: 

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In the

United States Court of Appeals

For the Seventh Circuit ____________________

No. 14-3619

JASON R. MUCHA,

Plaintiff-Appellee,

v.

JUTIKI JACKSON, et al.,

Defendants-Appellants.

____________________

Appeal from the United States District Court for the

Eastern District of Wisconsin.

No. 2:14-cv-00303-LA — Lynn Adelman, Judge.

____________________

ARGUED APRIL 22, 2015 — DECIDED MAY 27, 2015

____________________

Before POSNER and KANNE, Circuit Judges, and DARRAH,

District Judge.*

POSNER, Circuit Judge. The plaintiff charged two Milwaukee police officers (a captain and a lieutenant) with having 

detained him without a warrant or other justification, in violation of the Fourth Amendment as made applicable to state 

* Hon. John W. Darrah of the Northern District of Illinois, sitting by designation.

 

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2 No. 14-3619

action by interpretation of the Fourteenth Amendment and 

in turn to acts of individual state officers by 42 U.S.C. § 1983. 

There are other defendants and other charges, but the only 

issue presented by this appeal is whether the officers are entitled to qualified immunity.

The plaintiff was a Milwaukee police sergeant. In October 2012, having not reported to duty for seven months as a 

result of stress related to his police work, he was examined 

by a psychiatrist at the behest of the Milwaukee Employees’ 

Retirement System. The psychiatrist submitted his report of 

the examination to the Director of the Retirement System on 

November 5. On November 20 the Director forwarded a redacted version of the report to the Milwaukee Police Department (the reason for the delay is unexplained). The redacted version quoted the plaintiff as saying “I have had 

thoughts of suicide. I have had thoughts of suicide by cop. I 

don’t want to kill myself. ... I think of going to a command 

staff meeting with a rifle, shooting them until they shoot me.

... I am not intending to do that. ... I just can’t go back [to 

work]. I can’t take a chance of them trying to get me. It could 

have a real bad ending. ... [I would] kill myself or them.” He 

added that he had “over ten guns,” including “twenty two 

rifles” (presumably he meant several .22 caliber rifles, not 22 

rifles) as well as several pistols. The psychiatrist stated that 

“Jason Mucha is, in a not very veiled manner, threatening to 

shoot people in police command. He has a considerable 

stash of firearms. Hearing this, I cannot send him back to

work. This is a public safety issue.”

The police department received the report shortly before 

5 p.m. on the 20th, and that evening the two defendant officers, accompanied by members of the police department’s 

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No. 14-3619 3

Tactical Enforcement Unit (another name for a SWAT team), 

drove to Mucha’s home and interviewed him. He told them 

that he had “dreams” or “thoughts of suicide and hurting 

other people” but did not have “any intent on [sic] hurting 

himself or anyone else.” The officers decided to detain him 

(we don’t know whether it was their own independent decision or they were acting under orders). They handcuffed 

him and drove him to the Milwaukee County Mental Health 

Facility, arriving at 8:40 p.m. They signed a form which stated that Mucha “evidences behavior which constitutes a substantial probability of physical harm to self or to others,” the 

evidence consisting of “specific and recent dangerous acts, 

attempts, threats or omissions by the subject as observed by 

me or reliably reported to me.” The treatment director at the 

facility stated that Mucha was being detained because he 

suffers from a mental illness called “Adjustment disorder 

with disturbance of conduct and mood” and that this diagnosis had led the director “to conclude [that Mucha] ... poses a threat of danger to self or others” and to recommend 

“that involuntary commitment be initiated to secure treatment for the subject.”

Mucha was released from the facility three days later—

with what conditions, medications, and consequences we 

have not been told. Adjustment disorder—a reaction to 

stress—often is transient, although Mucha had been experiencing it for months. See generally Mayo Clinic, “Adjustment Disorders,” www.mayoclinic.org/diseases-conditions/

adjustment-disorders/basics/symptoms/con-20031704 (visited May 26, 2015). It is not argued that the defendant officers 

knew anything about adjustment disorder or were told 

about it when dispatched to Mucha’s house on the strength 

of the psychiatrist’s report.

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4 No. 14-3619

The officers had not obtained an arrest warrant when 

they handcuffed Mucha and took him to the mental health 

facility, and we’ll assume that they can be deemed to be responsible or at least partly responsible for his three-day detention in the facility. They rely for their defense of qualified 

immunity on Wisconsin’s emergency detention statute, Wis. 

Stat. § 51.15, which authorizes police officers to take a person 

to an appropriate mental health facility—without the formality of a warrant, and without having to have observed the 

person engaged in criminal conduct—if they have “cause to 

believe” that the person is “mentally ill” and has demonstrated “a substantial probability of physical harm to himself 

or herself as manifested by evidence of recent threats of or 

attempts at suicide or serious bodily harm,” or that he’s 

demonstrated “a substantial probability of physical harm to 

other persons as manifested by evidence of recent homicidal 

or other violent behavior on his or her part, or by evidence 

that others are placed in reasonable fear of violent behavior 

and serious physical harm to them, as evidenced by a recent 

overt act, attempt or threat to do serious physical harm on 

his or her part.”

A state law cannot preempt the Fourth Amendment, but 

it can establish a standard of conduct that is consistent with 

the amendment but particularized to a specific situation; for 

the amendment itself is extremely terse (only 54 words in 

length).

Mucha argues that the defendant officers didn’t have 

probable cause to believe that he was mentally ill and posed 

a danger to himself and to other police officers. The district 

judge agreed, but we are not persuaded by his reasoning.

Mucha was a police officer, so obviously knew how to kill 

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No. 14-3619 5

people with guns, which he owned in abundance. He had 

told a psychiatrist that he was thinking of killing himself 

and/or a number of fellow police officers. True, that was on 

October 17 (or, as far as the officers knew, November 5, the 

date on the report), and the police department was not notified of his frightening interview with the psychiatrist until 

November 20 and he hadn’t killed himself or anyone else in 

the interim. But the psychiatrist had understood Mucha to 

have “threaten[ed] to shoot people in police command,” and 

the fact that a month had passed without the threatened 

mayhem occurring did not prove that he had recovered from 

the mental illness that had precipitated his threatening

statements to the psychiatrist. The treatment director of the 

mental health facility to which the police took Mucha

thought he should be committed. It would have been beyond irresponsible for the police to respond to Mucha’s remarks to them at his home by saying: “So you’ve dropped 

the idea of killing yourself and other police? Great, you’re 

fine, goodbye.”

A police officer is not liable for damages caused by his official acts unless the unlawfulness of the acts is clearly established in law. The district judge thought this test for liability 

satisfied by a variety of facts, or supposed facts. One true 

fact on which he relied was that the police department had

received the redacted copy of the psychiatrist’s report 15 

days after the report had been written. The judge thought 

that this was not “recent” within the meaning of the statute, 

which requires that the police act on the basis of recent 

threats, attempts, and so forth. The statute does not define 

“recent,” however, and if one thinks for a moment about

how the word is used it becomes obvious that it is situation 

specific. If you say you had a headache recently you’re probCase: 14-3619 Document: 23 Filed: 05/27/2015 Pages: 7
6 No. 14-3619

ably referring to something that happened hours or at most 

days ago, but if you say that Senator Cruz recently announced that he is seeking the Republican nomination for 

President in 2016 you may be referring to an event that took 

place weeks or months earlier. We can assume that had

Mucha told the psychiatrist that as a teenager he had 

dreamed of shooting people the dream would not have been

recent enough to justify invoking the Wisconsin emergency 

detention statute. But the fact that he had told the psychiatrist a month before the police acted that he was currently

thinking about suicide and homicide (and indeed about both 

conjoined) made the dangerous thoughts still “recent” on 

November 20—or at least it cannot be said that their not being recent was “clearly established.”

We also don’t understand the judge’s further determination that Mucha’s acting “rationally” when the police interviewed him showed that all his bad thoughts had passed into history. As he did not want to be carted off to a mental 

health facility, he would not have wanted to tell the police 

what he had told the psychiatrist in what he may have believed to be confidence. Most people planning murder do 

not prate about it to the police.

The judge also thought that Mucha had never made 

“threats.” A person to whom you say “I am thinking of killing you but I haven’t made up my mind yet” will feel threatened. Remember that the psychiatrist who examined him 

said that Mucha had been “threatening to shoot people” (our 

emphasis).

Of suicide by cop (as by pointing a gun at a police officer

to provoke him into shooting you in self-defense) we have 

had many examples in this violence-prone, gun-ridden 

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No. 14-3619 7

country, and likewise many examples of mass murders culminating in the murderer’s suicide. A physician at the medical facility to which Mucha was taken decided he wasn’t going to kill himself or others. But this happy outcome, if it is 

happy, can’t be projected back to November 20. All that the 

police knew then was that the psychiatrist who had examined Mucha in October had understood him to have been 

making a threat, that someone from the Employees’ Retirement System had reported the threat to the police department, and what Mucha had told them when they interviewed him. These danger signals triggered the emergency 

detention statute, and so the defendant officers when they 

seized Mucha and took him to the mental health facility 

were complying with a statute the validity of which is not 

contested. They were not violating any clearly established 

law, whether constitutional or statutory, federal or state.

We need not decide whether, in the absence of the state 

statute, the police would still have been deemed “reasonable” in their treatment of Mucha, which is the key term in 

the Fourth Amendment itself. But we imagine that they 

would have been.

The judgment is reversed with instructions to dismiss the 

two officer defendants from the case.

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