Opinion ID: 655577
Heading Depth: 2
Heading Rank: 5

Heading: Violation of Post's Due Process Rights

Text: 35 Count Five alleged that Danziger, Schlegel, Banks, Hurley, and Sellers-Sampson violated Post's procedural due process rights. Plaintiffs claim that defendants tried to harass, oppress and wholly ruin Post by having her arrested and prosecuted. 36 Plaintiffs rely on Espanola Way Corp. v. Meyerson, 690 F.2d 827 (11th Cir.1982). In Espanola, city officials were alleged to have formed and expressly ordered a task force to harass local hotels to drive the hotels out of business. Noting the sparse factual record (the district court proceedings took place before Harlow was decided) and that defendants did not actually assert qualified immunity (although in a memorandum to the district court defendants did assert their good faith), we decided the officials were not due summary judgment for losses that resulted when the task force issued over 300 plainly unwarranted building and fire code violations to one hotel. 37 We have a different record in this case. The code team's acts were not plainly unwarranted. From what plaintiffs have said, a code team could have reasonably believed that the max cap notices were justified. And, someone like Sellers-Sampson could have reasonably believed he could arrest Post because Big Louie's was still over the max cap after having received three notices in a row. Plaintiffs claim defendants deliberately used the code team to try to ruin Post. Even if this subjective motivation were true, no facts show the code team's objective conduct in inspecting for violations, issuing citations, or making arrests was plainly unjustified. Cf. United States v. Edenfield, 995 F.2d 197 (11th Cir.1993) (whether police violated due process turns on evidence of outrageous misconduct, not evidence of officer's motive for investigating defendants). 38 Issuing an unreasonably high number of fully warranted citations might violate due process. But, where no bright-line rule determines how many citations are too many, we are extremely wary of denying qualified immunity unless the number of citations falls well outside the range of lawful conduct. Lindsey, 936 F.2d at 559 (discussing whether length of seizure was long enough to violate clearly established law). Defendants are entitled to qualified immunity because no case clearly establishes that issuing three arguably justified citations and then making one arguably justified arrest over a period of about 30 days violates due process.