Opinion ID: 204764
Heading Depth: 2
Heading Rank: 2

Heading: constitutionality of arrest

Text: FOR CONCEALING IDENTITY The Supreme Court held in 1979 that police officers lacking “reasonable suspicion to believe [a person] was engaged or had engaged in criminal conduct” may not demand identification and arrest the person for failing to provide it. 1 Brown v. Texas, 443 U.S. 47, 53 (1979). That remains black letter Fourth Amendment law. See Keylon v. City of Albuquerque, 535 F.3d 1210, 1216 (2008) (holding, following Brown, that “to arrest for concealing identity [in violation of N. M. Stat. Ann. § 30-22-3], there must be reasonable suspicion of some predicate, underlying crime”). Mr. Romero argued, both in the summary judgment proceedings and in his renewed motion for judgment as a matter of law (JMOL), that officer Schum lacked reasonable suspicion of underlying criminal activity to justify the demand for his identification and that his resulting arrest for concealing identity was impermissible under the Fourth Amendment principle recognized in Brown and applied in Keylon. The district court’s final analysis of the matter, in its order 1 Indeed, it was not until 2004 that the Supreme Court definitively held that reasonable suspicion, giving rise to a valid investigatory stop, was a sufficient basis upon which to premise a demand for identification punishable by arrest for noncompliance. Hiibel v. Sixth Judicial Dist. Court of Nev., 542 U.S. 177, 184, 186-89 (2004); see Brown, 443 U.S. at 53 n.3 (leaving question open); see also Albright v. Rodriguez, 51 F.3d 1531, 1537-39 (10th Cir. 1995) (noting unsettled state of law and granting arresting officer qualified immunity where arrest for concealing identity occurred during investigatory stop supported by reasonable suspicion). -6- denying the motion for JMOL, turned solely on a rejection of the legal premise of Mr. Romero’s argument, regarding the arresting officer’s need for reasonable suspicion of a predicate crime, finding that this premise was not established law in 2006 when the events in this case took place 2: Prior to the trial, the Court, ruling on a motion for summary judgment, concluded that Defendant had probable cause to arrest Plaintiff for the misdemeanor offense of concealing his identity. Plaintiff requests the Court “to determine as a matter of law that Defendant lacked probable cause to arrest Plaintiff pursuant to Keylon.” Keylon states “to arrest for concealing identity, there must be reasonable suspicion of some predicate, underlying offense.” The Court will not “determine as a matter of law that Defendant lacked the requisite probable cause to arrest Plaintiff pursuant to Keylon” because Keylon was decided two years after Defendant arrested plaintiff . . . [and] an earlier case involving New Mexico’s concealing identity statute did not state that an officer must have reasonable suspicion of some predicate, underlying crime before arresting a person for concealing identity. See Albright v. Rodriguez, 51 F.3d 1531, 1537 (10th Cir. 1995) (“Twice the Supreme Court has specifically refused to determine whether an individual can be arrested for refusing to identify himself in the context of a lawful investigatory stop. The issue remains unsettled.”). District Court Order dated March 17, 2010, at 5-6 (Aplt. App. vol. I, at 177-78) (quotation and citations omitted). We cannot uphold this analysis. While Keylon was decided in 2008, it applied a Fourth Amendment principle recognized thirty years earlier in Brown. 2 Presumably, the district court was tacitly invoking officer Schum’s defense of qualified immunity, which would prevail unless Mr. Romero showed not only that his arrest was improper but that the impropriety would have been “apparent to a reasonable officer in light of preexisting law.” Thomas v. Durastanti, 607 F.3d 655, 669 (10th Cir. 2010) (emphasis added). -7- Indeed, consistent with the fact that it was applying law already clearly established, Keylon itself did not just find a constitutional violation, see 535 F.3d at 1216-17, but went on to deny qualified immunity as well, id. at 1217-20. See also Richardson v. Bonds, 860 F.2d 1427, 1432 (7th Cir. 1988) (holding that by 1985 “it was clearly established that a private citizen could not be arrested for failing to identify himself in response to an inquiry which was part of a legitimate police investigation, absent other suspicious circumstances”). In no way can the timing of Keylon be relied upon to either deny a constitutional violation or grant qualified immunity here. Nor does Albright alter the analysis. Once the Supreme Court established the pertinent legal principle in Brown, this circuit court could not purport to nullify it in Albright. And of course we did not. Rather, we acknowledged Brown’s predicate-crime principle, see Albright, 51 F.3d at 1537 n.4–which was satisfied because the officer had both probable cause as to concealing identity and reasonable suspicion for obstruction of justice, id. at 1537–and focused, rather, on the converse question Brown left open: whether an arrest for concealing identity is permissible even if the officer had reasonable suspicion of criminal activity sufficient to stop the suspect, id. at 1537-38. See also supra note 1. That the unsettled nature of the latter question afforded qualified immunity to the arresting officer in Albright, who had reasonable suspicion to stop the plaintiff, in no way supports the denial of a constitutional violation or the grant of qualified immunity -8- to officer Schum here absent a finding that he likewise had reasonable suspicion of criminal activity by Mr. Romero. We must therefore look elsewhere for an affirmable rationale supporting Mr. Romero’s arrest for concealing identity. In particular, we turn to the district court’s pretrial summary judgment decision, which while denying both parties’ motions, nevertheless indicated that officer Schum had an adequate legal basis for arresting Mr. Romero. For reasons explained above, we pass over the district court’s repeated point regarding the timing of the Keylon decision. The district court also attempted to distinguish Keylon factually. But it is the legal principle applied in Keylon–the predicate-crime requirement previously established in Brown–that plainly controls here, not the specific circumstances of its application in Keylon. Unless the cited circumstances bear on the operation of the Brown predicate-offense requirement, and they do not, they are distinctions without a difference. First, the district court emphasized that Mr. Romero concealed his identity not by passively refusing to divulge identifying information but by actively giving false information (at least as matters appeared to officer Schum after hearing from dispatch that no record had been found matching the birth date Schum had relayed 3). But this distinction relates to the factual basis for 3 The district court agreed with officer Schum that (1) it was reasonable to rely on the information supplied by dispatch and (2) this information, coupled with officer Schum’s experience that the absence of a record strongly suggests that a subject has supplied false identification, provided probable cause to arrest (continued...) -9- probable cause on the concealed-identity charge, not to the officer’s requisite reasonable suspicion of another, predicate crime, which is the material point. Neither the district court nor officer Schum, who parrots this factual distinction on appeal, has provided any explanation of how the manner in which Mr. Romero may have violated the concealed-identity statute could possibly obviate or satisfy the distinct threshold inquiry under Brown into the arresting officer’s reasonable suspicion of a another, predicate offense. Second, as officer Schum emphasizes on appeal, he “had reasonable suspicion to investigate Mr. Romero as he was, at the very least, a witness to the investigation into the runaway child.” Aplee. Br. at 10 (emphasis added). But Brown and its progeny require “reasonable suspicion to believe the [person detained for identification and arrested for failing to comply] was engaged or had engaged in criminal conduct.” Brown, 443 U.S. at 53 (emphasis added); see Hiibel v. Sixth Judicial Dist. Court of Nev., 542 U.S. 177, 184 (2004) (noting 3 (...continued) Mr. Romero for concealing identity after he refused to provide his social security number. Considering the circumstances, particularly officer Schum’s admission that Mr. Romero voluntarily gave his name, address, and phone number, right after his wife had presented her own documentary identification, it may be questionable whether probable cause existed to arrest Mr. Romero for concealing his identity, notwithstanding the lack of a record for him under the birth date he provided and his refusal to divulge his social security number to clear up the matter. But we do not pursue the point at this juncture. We limit our decision here to the district court’s failure to address the threshold condition whether Brown’s predicate-crime requirement was satisfied so as to permit a demand, on pain of arrest, for Mr. Romero’s identification in the first place. -10- Brown’s requirement of “reasonable suspicion to believe the suspect was involved in criminal activity”). “[W]hatever purposes may be served by ‘demanding identification from an individual [on pain of arrest for noncompliance] without any specific basis for believing he is involved in criminal activity, the guarantees of the Fourth Amendment do not allow it.’” Keylon, 535 F.3d at 1216 (summarizing and quoting Brown, 443 U.S. at 52, in parenthetical). We have not been cited a single authority carving out an exception from the categorical requirement of reasonable suspicion of a crime, stated in Brown in 1979 and restated in Hiibel in 2004, so as to permit the arrest of a mere witness for failing to provide identification on demand. 4 Under such circumstances, officer Schum “cannot reasonably have relied on an expectation that we would do so,” to retrospectively sanction conduct that was contrary to clearly established law. Manzanares v. Higdon, 575 F.3d 1135, 1147 (10th Cir. 2009) (holding officer who illegally held person in home without probable cause could not avoid clearly 4 In his appellate brief, officer Schum cites Walker v. City of Orem, 451 F.3d 1139 (10th Cir. 2006), for the proposition that, although “police have less authority to detain those who have witnessed a crime for investigatory purposes than to detain criminal suspects,” id. at 1148, police may, at least under certain circumstances, briefly detain witnesses to obtain identification and statements and to gain control of a crime scene, id. at 1148-49 (holding detention exceeded what might have been permissible for such purposes). Walker was solely about the permissibility of the temporary detention of witnesses, and its dictum about seeking identification as one reason for such detention is in any event a long way from holding–in the face of clearly established Supreme Court authority–that a witness may be arrested for refusing to comply with such a request. Indeed, the very arrest held unlawful in Brown was for violating a state statute purporting to criminalize “Failure to Identify as Witness.” Brown, 443 U.S. at 49 n.1. -11- established constitutional prohibition by arguing that court should craft novel exception for potential witnesses).