Opinion ID: 2829949
Heading Depth: 1
Heading Rank: 2

Heading: cherry’s appeal

Text: In May 2011, Randall Palmer pleaded guilty in Seminole County District Court in two cases on felony charges of selling methamphetamine. He requested admission into the county’s drug-court program and agreed to abide by the terms of a performance contract, one of which was the requirement that he attend all court sessions. He apparently failed to do so, and on September 9, 2011, a bench warrant issued, citing as the crime “Failure to Appear/Non-Compliance with Performance Contract.” Aplt. App. (Smith), Vol. 3 at 1227 (full capitalization omitted). The warrant stated no address. Randall had lived at 1931 Killingsworth Avenue in Seminole through 2008, but thereafter the only residents were his son Aaron, Plaintiff, their three-year-old daughter, and their foster son. Although he no longer lived there, Randall would come to the house when Plaintiff was not there. Cherry testified that on August 25, 2012 (almost a year after issuance of the warrant) he saw a person he presumed to be Randall in Aaron’s garage. He did not attempt to take Randall into custody at that time. Instead, he contacted the Seminole Police Department to enlist their assistance and then met with several police officers at a convenience store in Seminole to plan Randall’s arrest. They arranged that Cherry would lead the other officers to Aaron’s house, where some officers would follow Cherry as he 7 went to the front of the house and others would cover the back to prevent Randall’s escape. Cherry testified that when he returned to the neighborhood of Aaron’s house, he saw somebody who appeared to be Randall running through the garage into the house. He immediately ran to the front door with gun drawn yelling “police,” pushed the door open, and “[w]ithin two seconds” shot Aaron, who was standing a few feet from the door, allegedly holding a knife. Aplt. App. (Cherry), Vol. II at 510, 513.2 Randall was not found on the premises.
In arguing for qualified immunity on Plaintiff’s claim of unlawful entry into Aaron’s home, Cherry’s brief on appeal relies on only one legal theory—hot pursuit of a fleeing felon. Although it mentions the bench warrant in one sentence, it cites no law concerning the authority the warrant gave him.3 Cherry’s hot-pursuit argument cannot withstand scrutiny. It is founded on two legal errors. 2 A knife was found in the foyer of the home after the shooting. Cherry’s statements about whether he saw a knife before shooting are somewhat inconsistent. It is not disputed that Aaron had just been preparing a hamburger when Cherry barged in. 3 This is probably wise. Even if the warrant authorized a search of Aaron’s home for Randall—a doubtful proposition itself under our case law, see Valdez v. McPheters, 172 F.3d 1220, 1225–26 (10th Cir. 1999) (entry of residence is permissible under arrest warrant only if officer reasonably believes suspect resides there)—it would not overcome the requirement that the officer must knock and wait a reasonable time before entering, see, e.g., Hudson v. Michigan, 547 U.S. 586, 589 (2006). 8 First, Cherry claims that he thought he saw Randall running into Aaron’s house from the garage just before he barged into the house himself, and that his belief is all that matters. But the law is clear that Cherry’s belief must be reasonable. See Heien v. North Carolina, 135 S. Ct. 530, 539 (2014) (“The Fourth Amendment tolerates only reasonable mistakes, and those mistakes—whether of fact or of law—must be objectively reasonable. We do not examine the subjective understanding of the particular officer involved.”); Armijo ex rel. Armijo Sanchez v. Peterson, 601 F.3d 1065, 1071 (10th Cir. 2010) (Fourth Amendment analysis focuses on the objective reasonableness of the challenged conduct in the totality of the circumstances). And Cherry does not confront the possibility that a jury might reasonably refuse to credit his belief as reasonable. It could well find that Cherry is not telling the truth about seeing someone running, or at least that he was not reasonable in inferring that the person he saw was Randall, especially given other evidence that Randall was not seen by anyone else at the time and was not found there after the shooting. Second, even if we assumed that Cherry had a reasonable belief that Randall had just entered the home, Cherry’s hot-pursuit-of-a-fleeing-felon argument is still fatally flawed as a matter of law. He identifies no felony other than Randall’s drug offenses. Cherry appears to believe that once a person has committed a felony, he is fair game for “hot pursuit” whenever he is spotted. This is a gross misunderstanding of the law. At the time of the shooting, clearly established law on hot pursuit required an “immediate or continuous” pursuit of a suspect from the crime scene. Welsh v. Wisconsin, 466 U.S. 9 740, 753 (1984); see United States v. Santana, 427 U.S. 38, 42–43 (1976); Warden v. Hayden, 387 U.S. 294, 298–99 (1967). Yet Randall’s drug felonies were more than a year in the past. Cherry relies on Santana, 427 U.S. 38, and Stanton v. Sims, 134 S. Ct. 3 (2013), as support for his conduct. But both cases featured a pursuit that began in a public place and immediately continued into private property. In Santana, officers arrested a woman who had just obtained drugs at a house and sold them to an undercover officer. See Santana, 427 U.S. at 40. When the woman said she had paid a “Mom Santana” for the drugs, the officers promptly returned to the house, where Santana was standing in the doorway. Id. The Supreme Court said that the officers could pursue Santana when she retreated into the house. See id. at 42‒43. Similarly, in Stanton an officer was pursuing a man who had committed the offense of disobeying the officer’s order to stop. See Stanton, 234 S. Ct. at 4. The officer pursued the man into a fenced-in yard. See id. Not only are the facts unlike those here, but Stanton confirmed that there had been no hot pursuit in Welsh, 466 U.S. 740, because “there was no immediate or continuous pursuit of Welsh from the scene of a crime.” Id. at 6 (brackets and internal quotation marks omitted). Cherry’s entry of Aaron’s home was clearly contrary to well-established law. He is not entitled to qualified immunity on the claim of unlawful entry. And because a reasonable jury could determine that the unlawful entry was the proximate cause of the fatal shooting of Aaron, cf. Martinez v. Carson, 697 F.3d 1252, 1255‒56 (10th Cir. 2012) (reasonable jury could find unlawful seizure was the proximate cause of later prolonged 10 detention), we need not decide whether Cherry used excessive force when he confronted Aaron.