Opinion ID: 3026437
Heading Depth: 2
Heading Rank: 2

Heading: Evolving Approaches to Applying the Test

Text: The length of the foregoing review notwithstanding, the two-step Saucier test can be stated simply. Its application, however, presents perplexing logical and practical problems. The point of immunity is to protect someone from the burden imposed by litigation itself. It is supposed to be “an immunity from suit rather than a mere defense to liability ... .” Mitchell v. Forsyth, 472 U.S. 511, 526 (1985) (original emphasis). Hence, the Supreme Court has instructed that “[i]mmunity ordinarily should be decided by the court long before trial.” Hunter v. Bryant, 502 U.S. 224, 228, (1991). That is well and good when there are no factual issues in a case, but often the facts are intensely disputed, and our precedent makes clear that such disputes must be resolved by a jury after a trial. E.g., Estate of Smith v. Marasco, 430 F.3d 140, 152-53 (3d 18 Cir. 2005); Curley I, 298 F.3d at 278; Reitz v. County of Bucks, 125 F.3d 139, 147 (3d Cir. 1997). As a practical matter, then, in such cases the immunity becomes no more than a mere defense, Sloman v. Tadlock, 21 F.3d 1462, 1468 n.6 (9th Cir. 1994), and a sometimes challenging one to establish at that. The fundamental challenge lies in the nature of the questions that compose the test. Since they are mixed questions of law and fact, one is left to ask who should answer them. As we noted in Curley I, “[a] disparity of opinion exists among our sister circuits as to whether a judge or jury should make the ultimate immunity determination.” 298 F.3d at 278 n.3. The First, Fourth, Seventh, and Eleventh Circuits have all indicated that qualified immunity is a question of law reserved for the court.8 The Fifth, Sixth, 8 See Rodriguez-Marin v. Rivera-Gonzalez, 438 F.3d 72, 83 (1st Cir. 2006) (“While preliminary factual questions regarding qualified immunity are sent to the jury, the legal question of the availability of qualified immunity is ultimately committed to the court’s judgment.”) (internal quotation marks omitted); Willingham v. Crooke, 412 F.3d 553, 560 (4th Cir. 2005) (“The issue having now come before us, we hold that the legal question of a defendant’s entitlement to qualified immunity under a particular set of facts should be decided by the court, not by the jury.”); Riccardo v. Rausch, 375 F.3d 521, 526 (7th Cir. 2004) (“Immunity, however, is a matter of law for the court, to be decided without deference to the jury’s resolution-and preferably before the case goes to the jury.”); Johnson v. Breeden, 280 F.3d 1308, 1318 (11th 19 Ninth, and Tenth Circuits have permitted the question to go to juries.9 Precedent from the Second and Eighth Circuits can be Cir. 2002) (“When the case goes to trial, the jury itself decides the issues of historical fact that are determinative of the qualified immunity defense, but the jury does not apply the law relating to qualified immunity to those historical facts it finds; that is the court’s duty.”). 9 See McCoy v. Hernandez, 203 F.3d 371, 376 (5th Cir. 2000) (“while qualified immunity ordinarily should be decided by the court long before trial, if the issue is not decided until trial the defense goes to the jury which must then determine the objective legal reasonableness of the officers’ conduct.”); Champion v. Outlook Nashville, Inc., 380 F.3d 893, 900 (6th Cir. 2004) (“The issue of whether qualified immunity is applicable to an official’s actions is a question of law. However, where the legal question of qualified immunity turns upon which version of the facts one accepts, the jury, not the judge, must determine liability.”) (internal citations and quotation marks omitted); Ortega v. O’Connor, 146 F.3d 1149, 1156 (9th Cir. 1998) (finding no error in “the district court’s ‘extra’ reasonableness test, which ... constituted an appropriate and proper instruction to the jury on the second prong of the defendants’ qualified immunity defense-whether a reasonable state official could have believed his conduct was lawful-the prong as to which the existence of factual disputes requires the jury’s determination.”); Maestas v. Lujan, 351 F.3d 1001, 1010 (10th Cir. 2003) (“In short, the disputed issues of material fact concerning the objective reasonableness of Mr. Lujan’s 20 viewed as being on both sides of the issue, with the evolution being toward reserving the question for the court.10 actions are dispositive of the qualified immunity issue. Further, as stated above, Mr. Lujan retained the defense of immunity from liability even though the jury was needed to resolve issues of objective legal reasonableness. Therefore, the district court properly presented the reasonableness element of the qualified immunity analysis to the jury.”). 10 Compare Stephenson v. Doe, 332 F.3d 68, 81 (2d Cir. 2003) (“We believe that use of special interrogatories in this case resolves the difficulty of requiring the jury to decide ‘what the facts were that the officer faced or perceived’ and requiring the court to make the ultimate legal determination of whether qualified immunity attaches on those facts.”) with Oliveira v. Mayer, 23 F.3d 642, 650 (2d Cir. 1994) (“The District Court should have let the jury (a) resolve these factual disputes and (b) based on its findings, decide whether it was objectively reasonable for the defendants to believe that they were acting within the bounds of the law when they detained the plaintiffs.”); see also Kerman v. City of New York, 374 F.3d 93, 109 (2d Cir. 2004) (discussing roles of judge and jury in qualified immunity analysis, and citing both Stephenson and Oliveira). Compare Littrell v. Franklin, 388 F.3d 578, 585 (8th Cir. 2004) (“Where, as in this case, factual questions prevent a district court from ruling on the issue of qualified immunity, it is appropriate to tailor special interrogatories specific to the facts of the case. This practice allows the jury to make any requisite factual findings that the district court may then rely upon to make its own qualified 21 Our precedents too have evolved. Our recent precedents say that the court, not a jury, should decide whether there is immunity in any given case. E.g., Harvey v. Plains Twp. Police Dept., 421 F.3d 185, 194 n.12 (3d Cir. 2005); Carswell v. Borough of Homestead, 381 F.3d 235, 242 (3d Cir. 2004); Doe v. Groody, 361 F.3d 232, 238 (3d Cir. 2004). But that was not always our counsel. We had previously permitted the jury to answer the key immunity question of whether the challenged behavior of a government official was objectively reasonable. In Sharrar v. Felsing, 128 F.3d 810, 830-31 (3d Cir. 1997), we referred with approval to our earlier decision in Karnes v. Skrutski, 62 F.3d 485 (3d Cir. 1995), characterizing it as holding that, “a factual dispute relating to qualified immunity must be sent to the jury, and suggest[ing] that, at the same time, the jury would decide the issue of objective reasonableness.” Sharrar, 128 F.3d 830-31. immunity ruling. Special interrogatories related to the qualified immunity defense are not improper per se, but they must be carefully crafted so that the fact-finder’s role is limited to determining whether the underlying facts are as the plaintiff has alleged or proved.”) (internal citations and quotation marks omitted) with Turner v. Arkansas Ins. Dept., 297 F.3d 751, 754 (8th Cir. 2002) (in discussing an official’s burden to come forward with “undisputed and material facts that demonstrate that his actions were reasonable under the circumstances[,]” the Court stated that “[i]f such facts are undisputed, then that is a question of law to be reviewed by a court; if not, then it is a question for a jury and summary judgment is improper.”) 22 Later, in Curley I, we cited Sharrar for the proposition “that a jury can evaluate objective reasonableness when relevant factual issues are in dispute.”11 298 F.3d at 279. We also went on to say, however, that it would not be inappropriate “for a judge to decide the objective reasonableness issue once all the historical facts are no longer in dispute[,]” and we suggested the use of special interrogatories as a means to that end. Id. Finally, in a line of cases beginning with Doe v. Groody, we began highlighting that “qualified immunity is an objective question to be decided by the court as a matter of law.” Carswell, 381 F.3d at 242 (citing Doe, 361 F.3d at 238). In Carswell, we elaborated on that point. We explained that the jury “determines disputed historical facts material to the qualified immunity question[,]” and we again suggested that “District Courts may use special interrogatories to allow juries to perform this function,” id. (citing Curley I, 298 F.3d at 279). We emphasized that “[t]he court must make the ultimate determination on the availability of qualified immunity as a matter of law.” Id. That emphasis reemerged in Harvey, when we cited Carswell and Doe for the 11 We are not suggesting that the objective reasonableness of an officer’s view of the law may be submitted to the jury. Rather, we are recognizing that, when material issues of fact are in dispute, our past precedents, in particular Karnes, Sharrar, and Curley I, have allowed the jury to resolve those disputes and also to determine the objective reasonableness of the officer’s conduct in light of the facts. 23 proposition that qualified immunity is purely a question of law to be answered by the court. 421 F.3d at 194 n.12. It appears that much of the discussion in Carswell was dicta, since we were actually affirming in that case the grant of judgment for the defendant as a matter of law, following the presentation of the plaintiff’s case at trial. 381 F.3d at 239, 245. In a technical sense, then, the dicta is not binding. See Abdelfattah v. United States Dept. of Homeland Security, 488 F.3d 178, 185 (3d Cir. 2007) (“While ‘[i]t is the tradition of this court that the holding of a panel in a precedential opinion is binding on subsequent panels,’ Internal Operating Procedure 9.1, it is also well established that we are not bound by dictum in an earlier opinion.”) (citing Mariana v. Fisher, 338 F.3d 189, 201 (3d Cir. 2003)). It has nevertheless been repeated and understood as a definitive direction on the respective roles of judge and jury when a qualified immunity defense is raised. See, e.g., Johnson v. Anhorn, 416 F. Supp. 2d 338, 361 (E.D. Pa. 2006) (“[Q]ualified immunity is an objective question to be decided by the court as a matter of law... . The jury, however, determines disputed historical facts material to the qualified immunity question.”) (quoting Carswell, 381 F.3d at 242); Iwanejko v. Cohen & Grigsby, P.C., 2006 WL 2659109, at  (W.D. Pa. Sept. 15, 2006) (quoting Carswell and stating, “in the Third Circuit ‘qualified immunity is an objective question to be decided by the Court as a matter of law.’”); Brown v. City of Camden, 2006 WL 2177320, at  (D.N.J. July 27, 2006) (citing Carswell and saying “In this Circuit, the Court must make the ultimate determination on the availability of qualified immunity as a matter of law.”). 24 There is some irony in this, since Carswell relied on Curley I and Sharrar, correctly citing them as support for the proposition that objective reasonableness is a question of law. But neither Curley I nor Sharrar stand for the related proposition that the question of objective reasonableness cannot be presented to a jury. Indeed they both teach “that a jury can evaluate objective reasonableness when relevant factual issues are in dispute.” Curley I, 298 F.3d at 279; see also Sharrar, 128 F.3d at 830-31. Nevertheless, the Carswell approach, despite its limitations, see infra at section III. C., appears to have taken root and to represent the pattern and practice both in our Circuit and much of the rest of the country. We therefore take the opportunity to reiterate and clarify a central message from that case: whether an officer made a reasonable mistake of law and is thus entitled to qualified immunity is a question of law that is properly answered by the court, not a jury. Carswell, 381 F.3d at 242. When a district court submits that question of law to a jury, it commits reversible error. Question Three on the liability verdict sheet was evidently intended to reach the question of qualified immunity.12 However, as we discuss further below, the 12 We acknowledge again that our language in Curley I left open the possibility of giving that question to the jury. Discussing “the procedure for deciding the immunity question when the existence of disputed issues of fact precludes disposition on summary judgment,” 298 F.3d at 278, we stated: 25 We addressed the issue in Sharrar, in which we observed that the “reasonableness of the officers' beliefs or actions is not a jury question,” 128 F.3d at 828, but qualified that observation by later noting that a jury can evaluate objective reasonableness when relevant factual issues are in dispute, id. at 830-31. This is not to say, however, that it would be inappropriate for a judge to decide the objective reasonableness issue once all the historical facts are no longer in dispute. A judge may use special jury interrogatories, for instance, to permit the jury to resolve the disputed facts upon which the court can then determine, as a matter of law, the ultimate question of qualified immunity. Id. at 279. We cannot fault the District Court for following our instructions on remand. Unlike our dissenting colleague, we do not view Curley I as making “clear the respective roles of the judge and jury in cases such as this,” post at 18. To the extent Curley I can be read as allowing the District Court to submit the question of qualified immunity to the jury we are hard pressed to say the District Court erred in doing so. We hope, however, that it will now be clear that the second step in the Saucier analysis, i.e., whether an officer made a reasonable mistake about the legal constraints on police action and is entitled to qualified immunity, is a question of law that is exclusively for the court. When the ultimate question of the objective reasonableness of an officer’s behavior involves 26 question as framed actually pertains to whether there was any constitutional violation at all. Since it properly presented an essentially factual question regarding the constitutional violation, it was not error for the jury to consider it.