Opinion ID: 2972797
Heading Depth: 3
Heading Rank: 2

Heading: Invalidity of Warrant Clearly Established

Text: Under the doctrine of qualified immunity, “‘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.’” Sample v. Bailey, 409 F.3d 689, 695 (6th Cir. 2005) (quoting Harlow v. Fitzgerald, 457 U.S. 800, 818 (1982)). Thus, although we have concluded that the warrant supporting the search of Knott’s 1988 Plymouth Horizon was invalid, the Defendants are still entitled to qualified immunity if the constitutional invalidity of the warrant was not clearly established at the time the Defendants searched Knott’s vehicle. “‘If the law at that time was not clearly established, an official could not . . . fairly be said to “know” that the law forbade conduct not previously identified as unlawful.’” Id. at 698 (quoting Harlow, 457 U.S. at 818) (alteration in Sample). “The relevant, dispositive inquiry in determining whether a right is clearly established is whether it would be clear to a reasonable officer that his conduct was unlawful in the situation he confronted.” Id. (quoting Saucier v. Katz, 533 U.S. 194, 202 (2001)). In light of the extensiveness of the search warrant defects at issue in this case, we conclude that the constitutional infirmity of the search warrant executed by the Defendants was clearly established at the time they searched Knott’s 1988 Plymouth Horizon. It is true that, in certain cases, we have ruled that a search pursuant to a warrant that contains some ambiguity or minor, typographical errors may survive Fourth Amendment scrutiny because the affiant officer’s participation in the execution of the search provides sufficient assurance that the wrong location will not be searched. Such cases, however, are the exception, not the rule, and do not change the fundamental Fourth Amendment requirement that a warrant “particularly describ[e] the place to be searched . . . .” U.S. CONST. amend. IV; see Gahagan, 865 F.2d at 1496 (“[T]he Fourth Amendment safeguard is designed to require a description which particularly points to a definitely No. 04-3045 Knott v. Sullivan et al. Page 7 ascertainable place so as to exclude all others.”) (internal quotation marks and citations omitted). Here, the search warrant obtained by the Defendants describes a vehicle completely different than the one that was ultimately searched. The only aspect of the warrant that was accurate was its statement that the vehicle to be searched was located in the Athens County Sheriff’s garage; however, any number of vehicles may be stored at a police garage at any one time, so such a statement provides little in the way of a particularized vehicle description that would be sufficient to satisfy the strictures of the Fourth Amendment. Given that all of the specific vehicle characteristics (including the make, model, year, license plate number, and vehicle identification number) listed in the warrant described Brett Knott’s 1984 Dodge Hatchback, in effect no search warrant was ever issued for Knott’s 1988 Plymouth Horizon. The Fourth Amendment obviously forbids relying on a warrant to search one vehicle when all of the vehicle-specific descriptors refer to another vehicle, and thus we conclude that the constitutional invalidity of the search warrant at issue in this case was clearly established at the time Knott’s vehicle was searched. See Sample, 409 F.3d at 699 (concluding that general standards of the Fourth Amendment clearly established the impermissibility of shooting a suspect who does not pose a serious threat to police officers and that the case at bar did “not present a novel factual circumstance such that a police officer would be unaware of the constitutional parameters of his actions”).