Opinion ID: 4014921
Heading Depth: 3
Heading Rank: 1

Heading: Count I: the financial warrants

Text: To reiterate, Count I asserts that Dets. Cram and Rose violated the Fourth Amendment by swearing out and executing the financial warrants because those warrants were not supported by probable cause. In granting Cram and Rose summary judgment on this Count, the district court relied on Messerschmidt v. Millender, 132 S. Ct. 1235. The plaintiffs in Messerschmidt filed a civil action alleging violation of the Fourth Amendment based on the search of their residence pursuant to a warrant that was not supported by probable cause. Id. at 1244. The defendant officers, however, had obtained approval for the challenged warrant from a superior officer, a deputy district attorney, and ultimately the magistrate who signed the warrant. Id. at 1249. The Supreme Court held that although the warrant was ultimately found invalid, the officers were entitled to qualified immunity. Id. at 1250–51. In so doing, the Court opined: “Where the alleged Fourth Amendment violation involves a search or seizure pursuant to a warrant, the fact that a neutral magistrate has issued a warrant is the clearest indication that the officers acted in an objectively reasonable manner,” thus entitling those officers to qualified immunity. Id. at 1245. Nevertheless, the Court in Messerschmidt recognized that “[t]he ‘shield of immunity’ otherwise conferred by the warrant will be lost . . . where the warrant was ‘based on an affidavit so lacking in indicia of probable cause as to render official belief in its existence entirely 8 No. 15-1659 unreasonable.’” Id. at 1245 (internal citation omitted) (quoting United States v. Leon, 468 U.S. 897, 923 (1984)). But “the threshold for establishing this exception is a high one.” Id. [I]n the ordinary case, an officer cannot be expected to question the magistrate’s probable-cause determination because it is the magistrate’s responsibility to determine whether the officer’s allegations establish probable cause and, if so, to issue a warrant comporting in form with the requirements of the Fourth Amendment. Id. (internal brackets and quotation marks omitted). As an example of an instance in which officers would not be entitled to qualified immunity despite relying on a warrant signed by a magistrate, the Court cited Groh v. Ramirez, 540 U.S. 551 (2004). See Messerschmidt, 132 S. Ct. at 1250. In Groh, the challenged warrant authorizing the search of the suspect’s home was based on an alleged stockpile of illegal firearms allegedly located therein, but the warrant described the suspect’s house itself as the “person or property to be seized.” 540 U.S. at 554 (internal quotation marks omitted). The officers could not reasonably rely on that warrant, the Court held, because it contained a “glaring deficiency” that even “just a simple glance” would have revealed. Messerschmidt, 132 S. Ct. at 1250. The Court in Messerschmidt distinguished Groh, holding that deficiencies in a warrant are not sufficiently “glaring” when they “would have become apparent only upon a close parsing of the warrant application, and a comparison of the affidavit to the terms of the warrant to determine whether the affidavit established probable cause to search for all the items listed in the warrant.” Id. Plaintiffs apparently concede that Messerschmidt supplies the relevant analysis for Count I, but argue that by granting qualified immunity to Cram and Rose, the district court afforded those officers a “greater benefit of the doubt than was even contemplated by the court in Messerschmidt.” (Pls.’ Br. at 24.) We disagree. The affidavit supporting the financial warrants contained evidence of a sophisticated, years-long, and lucrative conspiracy to defraud BCBSM. 9 No. 15-1659 Such evidence made it reasonable for Cram and Rose to assume that the bank accounts described in the financial warrants—that is, those “related to” Sampson and Argyle—were likely to contain the proceeds of the alleged conspiracy. Under these circumstances, Cram and Rose were not “plainly incompetent,” see id. at 1244, for believing that the magistrate-approved financial warrants justified seizure of the bank accounts. Moreover, Plaintiffs cannot point to any defect in the financial warrants that was “glaring” in a way comparable to the defect at issue in Groh. Rather, the facts of this case more closely approximate those of Messerschmidt, in which potential defects in the warrant “would have become apparent only upon a close parsing of the warrant application.” Id. at 1250. Thus, we disagree with Plaintiffs that the district court misapplied Messerschmidt, and we affirm the court’s grant of summary judgment to Cram and Rose as to Count I. 2. Count II: execution of the financial warrants and seizure of accounts belonging to Fourth Street In Count II, Plaintiffs argue that Cram and Rose violated the Fourth Amendment by seizing accounts held by Fourth Street, which was not explicitly identified in the financial warrants as an entity whose accounts were to be seized. Under our case law, however, “a search does not become invalid merely because some items not covered by a warrant are seized. Rather, an otherwise valid search becomes an impermissible general search only where the searching officers demonstrate a flagrant disregard for the limitations of a search warrant.” Marcilis v. Twp. of Redford, 693 F.3d 589, 602 (6th Cir. 2012). Here, the financial warrants authorized the seizure of “any and all accounts related” to “Dr. John Sampson, MD.” Bank employees determined that Fourth Street’s accounts fit that description because Sampson was a signer on the accounts. Under these circumstances, we cannot say that Cram or Rose exhibited a 10 No. 15-1659 “flagrant disregard for the limitations of the search warrant” by seizing Fourth Street’s accounts. See id. Those officers are therefore entitled to qualified immunity on this Count. 3. Count V: civilian participation in the execution of the search warrants In Count V, Plaintiffs argue that the individual officers who executed the search warrants violated Plaintiffs’ Fourth Amendment rights by allowing BCBSM employees to participate in the raids. Below, the district court held that the officers are entitled to qualified immunity on this Count because our holding in Bray v. Planned Parenthood Columbia-Willamette Inc., 746 F.3d 229 (6th Cir. 2014), suggests that the constitutionally permissible extent of civilian participation in the execution of a warrant was not clearly established at the time of the raids in this case. On appeal, Plaintiffs assert that the district court misinterpreted their argument: the court incorrectly “presum[ed] that the BCBSM representatives’ participation in the raids was to ‘assist’ the officers in a law enforcement purpose” (Pls.’ Br. at 18), and that Plaintiffs’ claim concerned the permissible extent of such participation. Plaintiffs state that their real argument is (and was) “that the warrants were obtained by defendant Gee-Cram to provide [BCBSM with] access to the Plaintiffs’ premises, and bank accounts and thereafter the BCBSM representatives actually conducted the raids while the law enforcement officers were little more than observers.” (Id.) Under this understanding of the facts, Plaintiffs argue, the unconstitutionality of the defendant officers’ actions was clear under existing cases—namely, Bills v. Aseltine, 958 F.2d 697 (6th Cir. 1992), and Wilson v. Layne, 526 U.S. 603 (1999). In Bills, the defendant police officer invited a civilian into a residence that was the subject of a search warrant. 958 F.2d at 702. The officer had already finished executing the warrant and had located the warrant’s target—an allegedly stolen generator. Id. The civilian was not interested in the generator; rather, he was looking for other items in the residence that 11 No. 15-1659 may have been stolen from his employer. Id. We held that under these facts, it was “undisputed that [the civilian] was not on the premises for the purpose of the search warrant.” Id. In other words, “[the civilian] was present, not in aid of the officers or their mission, but for his own purposes involving the recovery of stolen . . . property not mentioned in any warrant.” Id. In holding that these facts established a violation of the Fourth Amendment, we stated: “Police may constitutionally call upon private citizens to assist them, and where assistance is rendered in aid of a warrant, and not for some other purpose, the bounds of reasonableness have not been overstepped.” Id. at 706 (citing United States v. Clouston, 623 F.2d 485 (6th Cir. 1980)); see also Stack v. Killian, 96 F.3d 159, 162–63 (6th Cir. 1996) (reaffirming Bills’s holding). Similarly, in Wilson, officers invited newspaper reporters to join them in the execution of arrest warrants at a suspect’s residence. 526 U.S. at 607. The reporters were not there to assist the officers, but “were working on a story for their own purposes . . . as evidenced in part by the fact that the newspaper and not the police retained the photographs” taken by the reporters inside the suspect’s home. Id. at 613. On the basis of these facts, the Supreme Court held that it is a violation of the Fourth Amendment for police to bring members of the media or other third parties into a home during the execution of a warrant when the presence of the third parties in the home was not in aid of the execution of the warrant. Id. at 614. We agree with Plaintiffs that Bills and Wilson clearly establish that officers may not permit or facilitate civilian participation in the execution of a warrant unless such participation is “in aid of” the warrant. Bills, 958 F.2d at 703–04 (concluding that “[t]he critical question . . . is whether the police officers engaged in any constitutionally unreasonable act in permitting or facilitating” the private party’s participation in the execution of the warrant). The critical question in this case, therefore, is whether the evidence in the record creates a dispute of fact as 12 No. 15-1659 to whether the defendant officers permitted or facilitated the BCBSM employees’ participation in the raids for some purpose other than aiding in the execution of the warrants. We conclude that no such dispute exists. As noted in Plaintiff’s own statement of undisputed facts, Cram testified that she requested assistance from BCBSM employees in order to facilitate execution of the warrants. Although Plaintiffs assert that this “self-serving” testimony is disputed, they point to no evidence—other than their own conclusory assertions—supporting an inference that the officers permitted or facilitated BCBSM’s participation for purposes wholly unrelated to the warrant. See Arendale v. City of Memphis, 519 F.3d 587, 605 (6th Cir. 2008) (“Conclusory assertions, supported only by Plaintiff’s own opinions, cannot withstand a motion for summary judgment.”). In other words, nothing in the record leads us to believe that the actions taken by the BCBSM employees during the raid were so divorced from the purposes of the warrant that they were analogous to the private parties’ actions in Bills or Wilson. This is not, for example, a case where private parties entered Plaintiffs’ offices only after law enforcement’s search had concluded, seeking items completely unconnected to the purposes of the warrant. See Bills, 958 F.2d at 702. Certainly, Plaintiffs’ facts and allegations suggest that the BCBSM employees may have been acting in their own self-interest while participating in the raid. But “[t]his is a civil action for damages against . . . police officers and their employers, and the question is whether those defendants committed acts that resulted in a constitutionally unreasonable intrusion into [Plaintiffs’ offices and residence].” Bills, 958 F.2d at 703 (emphasis in original). Nothing in Bills or Wilson suggests that the mere existence of some self-interest on the part of the BCBSM employees rendered the defendant officers’ actions unconstitutional. To the extent Plaintiffs 13 No. 15-1659 argue otherwise, their arguments fall outside the boundaries of the law clearly established by those cases.4 We therefore conclude that the individual officers are entitled to qualified immunity as to Count V. C. Plaintiffs’ claims against the municipal defendants Finally, in Count VI of their complaint, Plaintiffs allege that defendants Jackson County and Blackman Township are liable under Monell for their failure to train the defendant officers regarding the proper supervision of private party participants during a raid or a seizure of bank accounts. However, because we conclude that the individual officers did not commit any underlying constitutional violations, Plaintiffs’ municipal claims are foreclosed. See Watkins v. City of Battle Creek, 273 F.3d 682, 687 (6th Cir. 2001) (citing City of Los Angeles v. Heller, 475 U.S. 796, 799 (1986)).