Court Opinion

ID: 9498804
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-05 17:28:12.443861+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T17:59:04.011952
License: Public Domain

KAREN NELSON MOORE, Circuit Judge,
dissenting.
When Officers Joseph E. Doyle, Eric Sporman, and Ken Souser (“officers”) entered both the backyard and home of Choice L. Causey and Henretta Bradley (“plaintiffs”) without a warrant, it was clearly established that there were no exigent circumstances to justify the warrant-less entry.1 Because I would thus affirm the district court’s order denying qualified immunity, I respectfully dissent.
The “physical entry of the home is the chief evil against which the wording of the Fourth Amendment is directed.” United States v. U.S. Dist. Court for E. Dist. of Mich, 407 U.S. 297, 313, 92 S.Ct. 2125, 32 L.Ed.2d 752 (1972). Accordingly, “the Fourth Amendment has drawn a firm line at the entrance to the house. Absent exigent circumstances, that threshold may not reasonably be crossed without a war*532rant.” Payton v. New York, 445 U.S. 573, 590, 100 S.Ct. 1371, 63 L.Ed.2d 639 (1980). When the government relies on exigent circumstances to justify a warrantless entry, it bears the burden of demonstrating that they existed. Welsh v. Wisconsin, 466 U.S. 740, 750, 104 S.Ct. 2091, 80 L.Ed.2d 732 (1984).
Relying principally on a report of the sound of gunshots coming from the plaintiffs’ backyard, the officers invoke the category of exigent circumstances implicated when “a suspect represents an immediate threat to officers and the public.” Shamaeizadeh v. Cunigan, 338 F.3d 535, 548 (6th Cir.2003), cert. denied, 541 U.S. 1041, 124 S.Ct. 2159, 158 L.Ed.2d 729 (2004). Our cases demonstrate that a shots-fired call must be accompanied by other evidence of the alleged shooter’s dangerousness in order to constitute an immediate threat. In Hancock v. Dodson, 958 F.2d 1367 (6th Cir.1992), exigent circumstances existed where, in addition to a shots-fired report, the police also knew that the suspect was “suicidal and possibly homicidal” (according to the suspect’s psychologist) and had threatened to kill any responding officer. Id. at 1369, 1375. In United States v. Bates, 84 F.3d 790 (6th Cir.1996), exigent circumstances were absent where, without more, the officers believed that suspects inside an apartment had a gun. Id. at 795. Explaining that “[t]he presence of a weapon creates an exigent circumstance, provided the government is able to prove they possessed information that the suspect was armed and likely to use a weapon or become violent,” we cited several examples of evidence that would establish such a likelihood: “threats to an officer’s safety, a criminal record reflecting violent tendencies, or a verified reputation of a suspect’s violent nature.” Id. Like the facts in Hancock, these examples evidence the suspected shooter’s dangerousness and therefore go to the immediacy of the threat.
We applied Bates in Dickerson v. McClellan, 101 F.3d 1151 (6th Cir.1996), finding exigent circumstances where a neighbor called 911 to report nine gunshots coming from a house and confirmed the report in person to responding officers, the occupant of the house was drunk, and the officers heard the occupant “yelling in a threatening tone.” Id. at 1154. The immediate threat was established not by the shots-fired report alone but by its combination with additional information that the alleged shooter was dangerous: he was drunk, and the police heard him shouting in a threatening manner. These circumstances are of a piece with the factors discussed in Hancock and Bates. Thus, in Hancock and Dickerson (and implicitly in Bates), we indicated that officers responding to a shots-fired report must have additional evidence of an immediate threat before entering a home without a warrant. In contrast, the officers here lacked any evidence of an immediate threat other than the shots-fired report itself.
Furthermore, even if a shots-fired report alone could establish exigent circumstances, the purported exigency would be extinguished by other circumstances showing that the gunshots did not represent an immediate threat. See O'Brien v. City of Grand Rapids, 23 F.3d 990, 997-98 (6th Cir.1994). Here, the officers possessed precisely this kind of information. First, the plaintiffs answered the officers’ knocks at the front door, explaining that they were fine and showing the officers that there were no signs of injury. Second, the plaintiffs’ neighbor told the officers that she had heard gunshots coming from the plaintiffs’ home on both the prior New Year’s Eve and the Fourth of July, and she did not suggest that any harm had come from these prior incidents. This in*533formation showed that the gunshots heard by the neighbor did not present an immediate threat. Instead, the plaintiffs were simply celebrating another holiday in their idiosyncratic way. Of course, such conduct might well be illegal (and is probably a bad idea in any event), but that is beside the point. The Fourth Amendment prohibits entering a home without a warrant simply to investigate criminal acts that might have been committed inside, so the officers should have obtained a warrant if they wanted to arrest the plaintiffs for shooting a gun into the air.
The majority’s reliance on Commonwealth v. Morrison, 429 Mass. 511, 710 N.E.2d 584 (1999), to endorse the officers’ dismissal of this evidence is unconvincing. It is true that the court concluded that the officers “might rightly be concerned that the assurances [a woman] gave them at the door were the result of intimidation by the defendant whom they had reason to believe was lurking within.” Id. at 587. Yet there were specific reasons for the officers to doubt the sincerity of the woman’s assurances: the officers knew that the defendant had been in the woman’s apartment earlier that night, which made it more likely that he was there again; the officers knew that the woman had a “history of domestic problems” with the defendant (culminating in a protective order against him), which made it more likely that he was willing to intimidate the woman and had a reason to do so (i.e., to avoid being caught violating the protective order); and earlier that night, the woman had lied to the officers about the defendant’s presence in her residence, which made it more likely that she was lying again. Id. at 585. Quite unlike Morrison, the officers here were aware of no facts to suggest that they should have disbelieved the plaintiffs’ assurances or the neighbor’s description of the plaintiffs’ celebratory shooting habits.
As the cases discussed above demonstrate, it was clearly established that the circumstances known to the officers at the time they entered the plaintiffs’ backyard and home were not exigent. Thus, the officers violated the plaintiffs’ clearly established Fourth Amendment rights by proceeding without a warrant and are not entitled to qualified immunity. Accordingly, I respectfully dissent.

. I agree that we need not address the issue of whether the officers' search (as opposed to entry) of the backyard violated the Fourth Amendment, because the plaintiffs have not properly raised it. Of course, the plaintiffs may request leave to amend their complaint under fed. R. Civ. P. 15(a).