Opinion ID: 2787500
Heading Depth: 5
Heading Rank: 3

Heading: The entire tasering incident

Text: Because Mr. Nall had a clearly established constitutional right not to be tasered when he was at most offering passive resistance to an officer, and because he also had a clearly established constitutional right not to be gratuitously tasered after ceasing all resistance to the officers, we affirm the district court’s denial of summary judgment with respect to Mr. Nall’s excessive force claim against Officer Soto. B. The Failure to Protect Claim Against Officers Collins and Hughes In some cases officers can be held liable for a Fourth Amendment excessive force violation when they were not the ones who actively struck the plaintiff. Durham v. Nu’Man, 97 F.3d 862, 866-67 (6th Cir. 1996) (providing several examples). A police officer may be held liable for failure to intervene during the application of excessive force when: “(1) the officer observed or had reason to know that excessive force would be or was being used; and (2) the officer had both the opportunity and the means to prevent the harm from occurring.” Turner v. Scott, 119 F.3d 425, 429 (6th Cir. 1997). The Nalls have presented sufficient evidence for a jury to rationally determine that Officers Hughes and Collings both failed to protect Mr. Nall from excessive force. As discussed in Section III.A above, the facts accepted in the light most favorable to the Plaintiffs show that Officer Soto’s use of force against Mr. Nall was excessive. Officer Hughes was with Officer Soto for the duration of the tasering, and Officer Collins was there for part of that time. Both were attempting to handcuff Mr. Nall as Officer Soto applied the Taser. Though the record does not indicate precisely when Officer Collins arrived, it shows that he was in the room and working to handcuff Mr. Nall before Officer Soto applied the Taser to Mr. Nall a second time. Witnesses indicate that Mr. Nall was convulsing uncontrollably and foaming at the mouth. Officer Hughes stated at deposition that rigidity in Mr. Nall’s arms as the officers tried to handcuff him would be consistent with the effects of a Taser on a group of muscles and could be the reason Mr. Nall did not move his arms as the officers instructed. No. 14-3120 Goodwin v. City of Painesville, et al. Page 18 Neither Officer Hughes nor Officer Collins told Officer Soto to release the Taser’s trigger during the first application, and neither officer attempted to prevent Officer Soto from administering the additional drive stun. Citing Turner, the Officers argue that because Officers Hughes and Collins did not see the Taser barbs actually strike Mr. Nall, they cannot be held liable for failure to protect. Turner concerned two discrete hits with the butt of gun in an officer’s equipment bag, one even by the plaintiffs’ account minor and apparently accidental, and the plaintiffs conceded that the officer who allegedly failed to assist had his back turned to them for the duration of the incident. Turner, 119 F.3d at 429-30. The Turner court found that there was no failure to protect when the record was “devoid of any suggestion” that the officer accused of failing to protect actually observed or should have known of the actions taken by the officer who applied the force. Id. at 429. But unlike Turner, the instant case involves a prolonged application of force and the officers who allegedly failed to protect were directly involved. Plaintiffs have presented sufficient evidence about Mr. Nall’s condition during the 21-second tasering to make it a jury question whether a reasonable officer in Officer Hughes’s or Officer Collins’s position would have seen that the force being applied to Mr. Nall was excessive and taken action to get Officer Soto to stop applying it. Because Turner demonstrates that Officers Collins and Hughes had a clearly-established duty to protect Mr. Nall dating back to at least 1997, and the facts indicate that both failed in this duty, we affirm the district court’s denial of qualified immunity to both officers on this claim. C. The Officers’ Entry into the Apartment The Supreme Court has declared, as a “basic principle of Fourth Amendment law,” that “searches and seizures inside a home without a warrant are presumptively unreasonable.” Payton, 445 U.S. at 586. Exigent circumstances are among the few “well-defined” and “carefully circumscribed” exceptions to the warrant requirement. See United States v. Williams, 354 F.3d 497, 503 (6th Cir. 2003) (citing Mincey v. Arizona, 437 U.S. 385, 390 (1978)). Because warrantless searches are presumptively unreasonable under the Fourth Amendment, the government bears a “heavy burden” of proving exigency. United States v. McClain, 444 F.3d 556, 562 (6th Cir. 2005) (citing Welsh v. Wisconsin, 466 U.S. 740, 749-50 (1984)). In general, No. 14-3120 Goodwin v. City of Painesville, et al. Page 19 exigent circumstances exist when “‘real immediate and serious consequences’ will ‘certainly occur’ if a police officer postpones action to obtain a warrant.” Williams, 354 F.3d at 503 (quoting Welsh, 466 U.S. at 751). We have identified the emergency situations giving rise to the exigent circumstances exception to the warrant requirement as (1) hot pursuit of a fleeing felon, (2) imminent destruction of evidence, (3) the need to prevent a suspect’s escape, or (4) a risk of danger to the police or others. Williams, 354 F.3d at 503 (citing United States v. Johnson, 22 F.3d 674, 680 (6th Cir.1994)). After finding that “none of the traditionally recognized exigent circumstances is squarely presented under the facts” of the case before it, this court has also recognized an additional exigent circumstance, based on “an ongoing and highly intrusive breach of a neighborhood’s peace in the middle of the night.” United States v. Rohrig, 98 F.3d 1506, 1519 (6th Cir. 1996). Here, the Officers argue that they were permitted to enter the apartment under Rohrig’s limited exception to the warrant requirement or, in the alternative, on the traditional exception of risk of danger to others, on the basis that Mr. Nall had allegedly assaulted one person in the apartment and posed a risk to the other people inside. 1. The Rohrig analysis In Rohrig, two police officers responding to a late night noise complaint could hear loud music coming from the defendant’s home from about a block away. Id. at 1509. Soon after the officers arrived, a group of neighbors approached them to complain about the noise. Id. One officer banged repeatedly on the front door of the defendant’s home but received no response; the other unsuccessfully attempted to obtain the telephone number of the residence. Id. From outside the house, the officers observed two sets of stereo speakers inside and discovered that the home’s rear entrance had only an unlocked screen door securing it. Id. Both officers loudly announced their presence and then entered the house, continuing to announce their presence as they moved from room to room. Id. They discovered marijuana plants, the stereo, and the defendant, who was intoxicated and asleep on the floor. Id. No. 14-3120 Goodwin v. City of Painesville, et al. Page 20 In fashioning its “new exigency that justifies warrantless entry” on the above facts, the Rohrig court created a three-part test based on the Supreme Court’s Fourth Amendment jurisprudence: First, we must ask whether the Government has demonstrated a need for immediate action that would have been defeated if the . . . police officers had taken the time to secure a warrant. Next, we must identify the governmental interest being served by the officers’ entry into [the] home, and ask whether that interest is sufficiently important to justify a warrantless entry. Finally, we must weigh this governmental interest against Defendant’s interest in maintaining the privacy of his home, and ask whether Defendant’s conduct somehow diminished the reasonable expectation of privacy he would normally enjoy. Id. at 1518. The Rohrig court found that the very late hour, the blasting music audible from at least a block away, and the “irate group of pajama-clad neighbors” outside demonstrated that time was of the essence, and that the defendant’s expectation of privacy was diminished because he was “projecting loud noises into the neighborhood in the wee hours of the morning, thereby significantly disrupting his neighbors’ peace.” Id. at 1522. Considering the second prong, the government interest involved, the Rohrig court acknowledged that reliance on a noise ordinance might suggest a diminished government interest because Supreme Court precedent instructs that the weight of a government interest “should be measured in part by the severity of the offense being investigated.” Id. (citing Welsh, 466 U.S. at 742-43, 753-54. But the court found that the Welsh analysis “has less relevance as one moves away from traditional law enforcement functions and towards what the Supreme Court has referred to as ‘community caretaking functions.’” Rohrig, 98 F.3d at 1521 (quoting Cady v. Dombrowski, 413 U.S. 433, 441 (1973)). Because the officers in Rohrig were not aiming to “track down a suspected violator of a local ordinance,” the court found it “inappropriate to gauge the government’s interest by looking only to that ordinance.” 98 F.3d at 1521. Relying heavily on the specific facts presented, the court found that by entering the residence “for the limited purpose of locating and abating a nuisance,” the officers were restoring “the neighbors’ peaceful enjoyment of their homes and neighborhood,” and that given “the importance of preserving our communities,” the interest “is not so insignificant that it can never serve as justification for a warrantless entry into a home.” Id. No. 14-3120 Goodwin v. City of Painesville, et al. Page 21 Applying Rohrig to the facts here provides no exception to the warrant requirement. First, an argument between two people outside the Nalls’ home triggered the noise complaint that brought the officers there. But when Officer Soto arrived at the scene at about 1:33 a.m. the Nalls’ disputing guests were already inside and Soto could hear nothing until he was at the stairs to the Nalls’ apartment. Though the noise escalated after the officers gave their first warning and left, the Taser log shows that Mr. Nall was tasered at 1:41 a.m., under ten minutes after that initial warning. These facts cannot show that the Nalls were generating the type of ongoing and overbearing public disturbance that would give rise to the necessity for immediate action. The facts here also do not suggest a government interest in entering the home similar to that of the officers in Rohrig. In Rohrig, the officers entered seeking an occupant to turn off the blaring stereo; here, the Nalls were at home and responded to the officers’ knocks on the door on both occasions. The second time the officers came, they did not tell David Nall to quiet his home or issue him a citation for a noise violation; they immediately asked him to step out of the apartment, and then entered the apartment by force. The timing of the sequence of events matters. Several minutes of elevated noise cannot so diminish the Nalls’ interest in maintaining their privacy that a warrantless entry would be permitted under Rohrig. Rohrig—as expressly recognized in the opinion—is a narrow, fact-specific holding: We wish to emphasize the fact-specific nature of [our] holding. By this decision, we do not mean to fashion a broad ‘nuisance abatement’ exception to the general rule that warrantless entries into private homes are presumptively unreasonable. We simply find that, in some cases, it would serve no Fourth Amendment purpose to require that the police obtain a warrant before taking reasonable steps to abate an immediate, ongoing, and highly objectionable nuisance, and we conclude that this is just such a case. Rohrig, 98 F.3d at 1525 n.11. To allow entry under Rohrig on the facts of the instant case would transform Rohrig’s narrow holding into the broad nuisance abatement exception that the Rohrig court expressly eschewed. No reasonable officer could find that five to ten minutes of noise emanating from the Nall home late at night was such an “immediate, ongoing, and highly objectionable nuisance” as to permit warrantless entry absent additional facts sufficient to meet the recognized exceptions to the warrant requirement. No. 14-3120 Goodwin v. City of Painesville, et al. Page 22 2. Exigent circumstances based on threat of violence to officers or others Under the exigent circumstances exception concerning the threat of violence to officers or others, police officers “may enter a home without a warrant to render emergency assistance to an injured occupant or to protect an occupant from imminent injury.” Schreiber v. Moe, 596 F.3d 323, 329-30 (6th Cir. 2010) (quoting Michigan v. Fisher, 558 U.S. 45, 47 (2009) (internal quotation marks omitted)). For an entry to fall within this exception, there must exist “an objectively reasonable basis for believing . . . that a person within the house is in need of immediate aid.” Fisher, 558 U.S. at 47 (internal quotation marks and citations omitted). In civil cases, “this question is normally left to the jury” if “there is room for a difference of opinion.” Schreiber, 596 F.3d at 329-30 (citing Ingram v. City of Columbus, 185 F.3d 579, 587 (6th Cir.1999) (internal quotation marks omitted)). Here, the Officers argue that the exigent circumstances exception to the warrant requirement applies because Ms. Prochaska’s statements about Mr. Nall’s violent and threatening behavior in the apartment created an objectively reasonable belief in the minds of Officers Soto and Hughes that people within the house were in need of immediate aid. But as discussed in Section III.A.1 above, the Nalls have raised several concrete issues that place the credibility of Ms. Prochaska and the Officers at issue. The Nalls also note that when the Officers approached the Nalls’ residence, Ms. Prochaska herself had already left, that other guests were in the living room of the apartment, and that there was no indication that they needed any immediate assistance from the officers. Substantial authority has consistently indicated that warrantless entries based on the emergency aid exception require both the potential for injury to the officers or others and the need for swift action. The right to be free from warrantless search under this exception absent these factors is clearly established. The remaining question, which cannot be answered as a matter of law on summary judgment, is whether the facts of this case meet those criteria. Because the pertinent facts are in dispute under the emergency aid exception, and because the Rohrig exception does not apply, we affirm the district court’s denial of summary judgment on the basis of qualified immunity with respect to the warrantless entry. No. 14-3120 Goodwin v. City of Painesville, et al. Page 23 D. Ms. Nall’s Disorderly Conduct Arrest Officers Hughes and Tuttle arrested Ms. Nall for disorderly conduct during the conclusion of the incident with Mr. Nall. Ms. Nall admits that she raised her voice, cursed at the officers, and was upset, but argues that her acts were not unreasonable under the circumstances, and that the officers therefore did not have probable cause to arrest her. On summary judgment, the district court held that—given the factual dispute about the legitimacy of the officers’ entry into the Nalls’ home and whether or not Officer Soto’s use of force was gratuitous—it was “not prepared to rule as a matter of law that Mrs. Nall’s loud verbal protests made from her couch should have constituted a criminal behavior in the eyes of a reasonable officer.” R. 69, PageID 2661. The validity of an arrest “does not depend on whether the suspect actually committed a crime . . . .” Michigan v. DeFillippo, 443 U.S. 31, 36 (1979). Rather, “a warrantless arrest by a law officer is reasonable under the Fourth Amendment where there is probable cause to believe that a criminal offense has been or is being committed.” Devenpeck v. Alford, 543 U.S. 146, 152 (2004). The Fourth Amendment standard for probable cause requires “facts and circumstances within the officer’s knowledge that are sufficient to warrant a prudent person, or one of reasonable caution, in believing, in the circumstances shown, that the suspect has committed, is committing, or is about to commit an offense.” DeFillippo, 443 U.S. at 37. The qualified immunity doctrine requires that “probable cause determinations, even if wrong, are not actionable as long as such determinations pass the test of reasonableness.” Jeffers v. Heavrin, 10 F.3d 380, 381 (6th Cir.1993). The reasonableness of an officer’s probable cause determination is a question of law. Id. (citing Hunter v. Bryant, 502 U.S. 224 (1991)). To determine whether the officers had probable cause to arrest Ms. Nall, the court “must look to the law of the jurisdiction at the time of the occurrence.” Ingram, 185 F.3d at 594. The officers arrested her for an alleged violation of Ohio Revised Code § 2917.11(A)(2), which states: “No person shall recklessly cause inconvenience, annoyance, or alarm to another by doing any of the following: . . . (2) Making unreasonable noise or an offensively coarse utterance, gesture, or display or communicating unwarranted and grossly abusive language to any person.” Under Ohio law, a person acts with the required mental state for the crime—recklessness— No. 14-3120 Goodwin v. City of Painesville, et al. Page 24 “when, with heedless indifference to the consequences, he perversely disregards a known risk that his conduct is likely to cause a certain result or is likely to be of a certain nature.” Ohio Rev. Code § 2901.22(C). Long ago, the Ohio Supreme Court held that “a person may not be punished under R.C. 2917.11(A)(2) for ‘recklessly caus(ing) inconvenience, annoyance, or alarm to another,’ by making an ‘offensively coarse utterance,’ or ‘communicating unwarranted and grossly abusive language to any person,’ unless the words spoken are likely, by their very utterance, to inflict injury or provoke the average person to an immediate retaliatory breach of the peace.” State v. Hoffman, 387 N.E.2d 239, 242 (Ohio 1979). The standard with regard to statements made to police officers is the same as for any other person: “The question is whether, under the circumstances, it is probable that a reasonable police officer would find her language and conduct annoying or alarming and would be provoked to want to respond violently.” Warren v. Patrone, 600 N.E.2d 344, 345 (Ohio Ct. App. 1991) (quoting State v. Johnson, 453 N.E.2d 1101, 1103 (Ohio Ct. App. 1982)). The result does not alter if the incident takes place in a dwelling: A man repeatedly yelling, “If you don’t have a f—ing warrant, get out” at police officers who entered an apartment was found not to be violating the disorderly conduct statute because the language would not “provoke the average person to an immediate retaliatory breach of the peace.” State v. Maynard, 673 N.E.2d 603, 604, 606 (Ohio Ct. App. 1996). Even if we were to assume, as the Officers argue, that the level of noise Ms. Nall was making could itself violate Section (A)(2), the fact remains that under the plain language of the statute, a disorderly conduct charge against her can stand only if she “recklessly caused inconvenience, annoyance, or alarm” by “unreasonably” making the noise. Ohio Rev. Code § 2917.11(A)(2). Ms. Nall testified that during the incident with Mr. Nall, she was screaming at the officers that they had no right to be in her house, that she was swearing, and that she was “freaked out.” One of the officers told Ms. Nall to “shut the f— up,” repeatedly tried to quiet her, and told her that he would arrest her if she did not calm down. R. 34-1, PageID 684-85. No. 14-3120 Goodwin v. City of Painesville, et al. Page 25 But because Ms. Nall had a clear basis to be concerned about her husband’s physical safety and was responding to a possibly illegal entry into her home by the officers, we cannot conclude at the summary judgment stage that her conduct was sufficiently reckless and unreasonable to allow an officer to reasonably believe there was probable cause to arrest her.3 Accordingly, we affirm the district court’s denial of summary judgment with regard to the arrest of Ms. Nall.