Opinion ID: 2924322
Heading Depth: 2
Heading Rank: 2

Heading: Fourth Amendment Exigency

Text: The Fourth Amendment prevents police officers from intruding into a person’s house without first securing permission from a disinterested magistrate unless exigent circumstances would make it unreasonable to wait for judicial approval. “To arrest a person in his home, police officers need both probable cause and either a warrant or exigent circumstances.” Goodwin v. City of Painesville, 781 F.3d 314, 327 (6th Cir. 2015). For exigent circumstances to excuse a warrantless search or seizure, there must be both “compelling need for official action and no time to secure a warrant.” Missouri v. McNeely, 133 S. Ct. 1552, 1559 (2013) (quoting Michigan v. Tyler, 436 U.S. 499, 509 (1978)). “Police must, whenever practicable, obtain advance judicial approval of searches and seizures through the warrant procedure.” Terry v. Ohio, 392 U.S. 1, 20 (1968). Time is an essential factor when an immediate threat forms the basis for police claims of exigency. We have held that “[e]xigent circumstances terminate when the factors creating the exigency are negated.” Bing v. City of Whitehall, 456 F.3d 555, 565 (6th Cir. 2006) (citing Mincey v. Arizona, 437 U.S. 385, 393 (1978)). If the dangers persist or increase, the exigent circumstances also persist. See id. (“The passage of time did not terminate the exigency because the ticking of the clock did nothing to cut off Bing’s access to his gun, or cure him of his willingness to fire it, or move to safety the people nearby who refused to evacuate.”). But those dangers may diminish over time as police gain a measure of control, and when they do, the exigency and reasonableness of warrantless intrusions diminish in tandem. When police initiate action after a long delay with no new provocation, the delay itself may suggest an unreasonable evasion of the Fourth Amendment rather than a reasonable response to a dynamic threat. See O’Brien v. City of Grand Rapids, 23 F.3d 990, 998 (6th Cir. 1994) (“[T]he fact that the officers waited four-and-a-half hours before deciding to use the first probe belies defendants’ claim that exigent circumstances existed that prevented them from seeking a warrant.”). Any exigent circumstances that could have justified the warrantless use of tear gas and the throw phone would thus have to flow from some immediate threat posed by Carlson. The No. 13-2643 Carlson v. Fewins, et al. Page 9 defendants do not claim to have been in hot pursuit of Carlson or otherwise concerned that he might destroy vital evidence. Indeed, nothing indicates that the Team was pursuing him for any past crimes, at least not for anything other than the possible reckless discharge of a weapon identified by Fewins as a likely misdemeanor. A misdemeanor such as that would not generally establish exigent circumstances to justify a warrantless entry into Carlson’s house. See Welsh v. Wisconsin, 466 U.S. 740, 750 (1984) (“When the government’s interest is only to arrest for a minor offense, th[e] presumption of unreasonableness [that attaches to all warrantless home entries] is difficult to rebut, and the government usually should be allowed to make such arrests only with a warrant issued upon probable cause by a neutral and detached magistrate.” (footnote omitted)). Viewing the totality of the circumstances from the perspective of a reasonable officer at the time of the first tear gas barrage, Carlson was thought to be (and actually was) alone in the house. His neighbors were safely out of Carlson’s reach (though not, as it turns out, entirely safe from the tear gas). The Team had Carlson contained with snipers and other officers carefully monitoring his floodlit house. Even after Carlson stopped responding to their negotiator, they had family members near at hand with open lines of communication. They had time to call a convenience store for refreshments; they had time to call a judicial officer. The choice to call for granola bars but not a warrant appears to have been driven by the Sheriff’s misunderstanding of the Fourth Amendment. “[I]nconvenience to the officers and some slight delay . . . are never very convincing reasons . . . to bypass the constitutional [warrant] requirement.” Johnson, 333 U.S. at 15. Fewins’s approach—choosing not to even request a warrant because he thought a misdemeanor arrest warrant would not have been “handy” or “put [the Team] in a better bargaining spot”—misses the point entirely. Judicial warrants are not intended to blindly facilitate whatever course of action a sheriff prefers. They are required by the Fourth Amendment “so that an objective mind might weigh the need to invade th[e] privacy [of the home] in order to enforce the law.” McDonald v. United States, 335 U.S. 451, 455 (1948). The Fourth Amendment thus protects people from the power of the state by requiring judicial preapproval, time permitting, of intrusive or forceful entrances and seizures. Johnson, 333 U.S. at 13–14. No. 13-2643 Carlson v. Fewins, et al. Page 10 Instead of giving a sheriff the discretion to decide whether to seek a warrant from a neutral judicial officer based on how helpful the warrant would be to the sheriff, “[t]he point of the Fourth Amendment” is to vest the discretion to approve or deny an officer’s plan to seize a person or search a house in a “neutral and detached magistrate.” Id. The warrant requirement is relaxed when an emergency situation makes it unreasonable to delay long enough to seek one, not when—as Fewins suggests here—a warrant simply would not have been particularly useful in the field. The facts available at summary judgment raise an inference that the Team had the time—and thus the constitutional obligation—to get a warrant from a judge before entering Carlson’s house with tear gas and surveillance equipment. “We are not dealing with formalities.” McDonald, 335 U.S. at 455. In this case, a neutral magistrate evaluating an application for an arrest warrant might have questioned the wisdom of a tear gas assault in response to Carlson’s statement that he “kn[e]w at some point [they were] going to deploy tear gas, and when [they did], that w[ould] be the start of the war. And [he was] going [to] kill everybody.” An objective judge might also have clarified whether the Team was trying to save a disturbed and dangerous man or take him into custody on a misdemeanor weapons charge. Whatever the goals, a judge setting parameters on the warrant might have taken note of experts’ consistent advice to law enforcement that, “[t]echniques of eliciting compliance on the part of [emotionally disturbed] subjects that may work with criminal subjects are not likely to work with emotionally disturbed people” so “officers should remain calm, exercise restraint, reassure the subject, avoid excitement, and attempt to avoid gathering crowds.” Michael Avery, Unreasonable Seizures of Unreasonable People: Defining the Totality of the Circumstances Relevant to Assessing the Police Use of Force against Emotionally Disturbed People, 34 Colum. Hum. Rts. L. Rev. 261, 293 (2003). Longstanding precedent in this circuit leaves the factual question of exigent circumstances to the jury in a civil case. A quarter-century ago, a panel facing similar circumstances explained: Although, in a motion to suppress evidence in a criminal case, the factual determination whether exigent circumstances existed to excuse a warrantless arrest is a question for the court, when the issue arises in a civil damage suit it is properly submitted to the jury providing, given the evidence on the matter, there is room for a difference of opinion. No. 13-2643 Carlson v. Fewins, et al. Page 11 Here, there is very considerable room for disagreement . . . . .... Since there was room for disagreement whether any of the exigent circumstances existed that are ordinarily held to justify a warrantless arrest, we hold that the jury should have been given the issue to decide under proper instructions. We therefore remand for a new trial. Jones v. Lewis, 874 F.2d 1125, 1130–31 (6th Cir. 1989) (emphasis added) (citations omitted); accord O’Brien, 23 F.3d at 998 (“In a civil damage suit, whether exigent circumstances existed to excuse a warrantless arrest is a question for the jury provided that, given the evidence on the matter, there is room for a difference of opinion.”). The Estate’s evidence suggests that in the split second of their choosing and without a warrant of any kind, the Team decided to end hours of tense, quiet waiting by taking the precise action that Carlson had described as “the start of the war.” A jury could find the totality of the circumstances made this unreasonable, not just with 20/20 hindsight, but from the perspective of any reasonable person responsible for rendering aid to an armed and obviously emotionally disturbed person and that no immediate danger exigency excused the various warrantless actions taken against Carlson while he was taking refuge in his home. In a situation such as this, where various inferences are possible, the courts have decided that the reasonableness of police conduct should be decided by a jury. We therefore reverse the district court’s order dismissing the counts against the county and the supervising officers and remand the case so a jury may decide whether the defendants’ various warrantless seizures and searches during a standoff that began with requests to save Carlson’s life and ended with a sniper shooting him dead were reasonable. We express no position on the merits of the alternative defenses pretermitted by the district court’s erroneous conclusion that exigent circumstances excused the warrant requirement—i.e., whether municipal liability attaches to the choices made by Fewins and Drzewiecki. See generally Pembauer v. City of Cincinnati, 475 U.S. 469, 483 (1986) (“We hold that municipal liability under § 1983 attaches where—and only where—a deliberate choice to follow a course of action is made from among various alternatives by the official or officials responsible for establishing final policy with respect to the subject matter in question.”). No. 13-2643 Carlson v. Fewins, et al. Page 12