Opinion ID: 2801017
Heading Depth: 2
Heading Rank: 2

Heading: The Defendants’ Claim of Qualified Immunity

Text: In the event that plaintiff files an amended complaint following remand that rectifies the deficiencies we have outlined, the district court must focus more closely on the claims of qualified immunity as they relate to each defendant. We think it useful here to suggest some guidance in this regard. Qualified immunity shields government officials “from liability for civil damages insofar as their conduct does not violate clearly established statutory or constitutional rights of which a reasonable person would have known.” Harlow v. Fitzgerald, 457 U.S. 800, 818 (1982). It “provides ample protection to all but the plainly incompetent or those who knowingly violate the law.” Malley v. Briggs, 475 U.S. 335, 341 (1986). To lose immunity, an official must violate a right, the contours of which are “sufficiently clear that a reasonable official would understand that what he is doing violates that right.” Anderson v. Creighton, 483 U.S. 635, 640 (1987). 14 The Supreme Court has “repeatedly stressed the importance of resolving immunity questions at the earliest possible stage [of the] litigation.” Wood v. Moss, 134 S. Ct. 2056, 2065 n.4 (2014) (internal quotation marks omitted). “Because qualified immunity is an immunity from suit rather than a mere defense to liability[,] it is effectively lost if a case is erroneously permitted to go to trial.” Pearson v. Callahan, 555 U.S. 223, 231 (2009) (internal quotation marks and ellipsis omitted). While issues related to qualified immunity frequently must await a motion for summary judgment, that might not be the case here. A putative amended complaint, pleaded with the requisite specificity based on the hearing before Judge Sullivan, likely would enable the district court to address qualified immunity issues, at least in part, at the pleading stage. Section 2518(5) of Title III does not precisely define the minimization requirement. It states only that agents must “minimize the interception of communications not otherwise subject to interception.” 18 U.S.C. § 2518(5). In Scott v. United States, the Supreme Court articulated an “objective reasonableness” test to 15 determine whether agents have properly minimized calls. 436 U.S. 128, 138 (1978). This standard requires “an objective assessment of an officerʹs actions in light of the facts and circumstances then known to him.” Id. at 137. The district court must thus evaluate each agent’s minimization efforts under such an “objective reasonableness” standard based on the facts of this case to determine whether each defendant “would understand that what he is doing violates” Title III’s minimization requirement. Anderson, 483 U.S. at 640. The government argues on behalf of all but one defendant4 that a per se “two‐minute rule” derived from United States v. Bynum—treating calls monitored for less than two minutes as properly minimized—entitles agents to immunity for interceptions that did not exceed that duration. 485 F.2d 490 (2d Cir. 1973), vacated and remanded on other grounds, 417 U.S. 903 (1974). In Bynum, we held that a wiretap that monitored 2,058 calls in a vast narcotics conspiracy case did not violate Title III’s minimization requirement. The appellate staff of the Department of Justice’s Civil Division 4 submitted the brief for all defendants except Special Agent Adrian Busby. 16 Id. at 500‐02. We excluded calls under two minutes from our evaluation of the wiretap, noting that “in a case of such wide‐ ranging criminal activity as this, it would be too brief a period for an eavesdropper even with experience to identify the caller and characterize the conversation as merely social or possibly tainted.” Id. at 500. While our reasoning in Bynum, which didn’t pertain to any privileged communications, can be read to suggest a presumption that calls less than two minutes long need not be minimized, this is not a fixed rule for every case: whether the two‐minute presumption applies is a fact‐specific determination. This case does not present the same circumstances as Bynum. Many of the violations here took place in the early stages of the wiretap when defendants were less familiar with the case and with Mrs. Drimal’s lack of involvement in it, but the agents should have realized reasonably early in the wiretap that these husband and wife conversations were not relevant to the investigation. As Judge Sullivan noted in Goffer, Mr. and Mrs. Drimal occasionally discussed 17 “deeply personal and intimate” issues, 756 F. Supp. 2d at 594, and “in each of these calls it should have been apparent within seconds that the conversation was privileged and non‐pertinent,” id. at 595. As a result, the reasoning from Bynum that it would be too difficult to minimize calls under two minutes is not applicable here where agents could determine in seconds that the calls between husband and wife were entirely personal in nature. The two‐minute presumption we applied in Bynum thus does not automatically shield defendants against the failures to minimize calls under two minutes that the putative amended complaint is likely to allege. Should Drimal file an amended complaint, in assessing the defendants’ claim of qualified immunity on remand, the district court must consider the actions of each individual defendant. Cf. Gill v. Monroe Cnty. Depʹt of Soc. Servs., 547 F.2d 31, 32 (2d Cir. 1976) (remanding for district court to consider “each plaintiff, each cause of action and each defendant”). Government Exhibit 30, featured at the suppression hearing in the criminal case and of which we take 18 judicial notice,5 makes it apparent that different defendants responded differently to their duty to minimize: some may be able to successfully claim qualified immunity even at the pleading stage where others may not.6