Court Opinion

ID: 9492334
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-05 14:38:39.006732+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T17:55:15.306982
License: Public Domain

BATCHELDER,
dissenting in part.
For the reasons that follow, I respectfully dissent from the majority’s holding that Defendant Robertson is not entitled to summary judgment on grounds of qualified immunity on Painter’s claim of false arrest. Relying on Estate of Dietrich v. Burrows, 167 F.3d 1007 (6th Cir.1999), the majority holds — wrongly, in my view — that Painter’s affirmative defense under § 2923.12(C)(2) vitiated the officers’ probable cause to arrest him for carrying a concealed weapon. Painter was arrested for carrying a concealed weapon in violation of Ohio Rev.Code § 2923.12 but at trial was able to avail himself of one of the affirmative defenses found in subsection (C). The affirmative defense provision states:
(C) It is an affirmative defense to a charge under this section of carrying or having control of a weapon other than dangerous ordnance, that the actor was *573not othenvise prohibited by law from having the weapon, and that any of the following apply:
(2) The weapon was carried or kept ready at hand by the actor for defensive purposes, while the actor was engaged in a lawful activity and had reasonable cause to fear a criminal attack upon himself or a member of his family, or upon his home, such as would justify a prudent man in going armed.
Ohio Rev.Code § 2923.12 (emphasis added). The language of the statute makes it clear that an affirmative defense to carrying a concealed weapon has two distinct parts, both of which must be present: (1) the actor must be “not otherwise prohibited by law from having the weapon,” and (2) at least one of the four enumerated justifications must apply to the actor’s concealed carrying of the weapon.
In Estate of Dietrich, the plaintiffs were a former township police chief and his son, who began performing armed money courier services which current township police officers had been performing, both on and off duty. Because of inquiries instigated by the plaintiffs, the township police department stopped providing the courier service. The defendants were members of the township police department; indeed one was the chief who ordered that the police department vehicles could no longer be used to provide courier service. Id. at 1009. One afternoon, when the defendants knew that the plaintiffs would be armed and performing their legitimate security duties, they maliciously arrested the plaintiffs and charged each of them with carrying a concealed weapon in violation of Ohio Rev.Code § 2923.12. Id. at 1009-10.
The district court in Estate of Dietrich found that the record proved conclusively that prior to the arrest, the arresting officers “knew who the plaintiffs were and also were fully aware that the plaintiffs were carrying firearms.... ” Id. at 1012. This Court affirmed the district court’s denial of qualified immunity, stating that “all the defendants in this matter knew, prior to arresting the Dietrichs, that the plaintiffs were legitimately armed ... [and] that the plaintiffs were justified — by statute — in carrying concealed weapons during their work.” Id. at 1011-12. We held that the arresting officers were not entitled to qualified immunity on the plaintiffs’ unlawful arrest claim because the affirmative defense provisions of § 2923.12(C) made clear that they lacked probable cause to effect an arrest. Id. at 1012. In so holding, the Court stated that “probable cause determinations involve an examination of all facts and circumstances within an officer’s knowledge at the time of an arrest.” Id. (citing Carroll v. United States, 267 U.S. 132, 162, 45 S.Ct. 280, 69 L.Ed. 543 (1925)) (emphasis in original).
The case before us here does not present the kind of unique factual circumstances found in Estate of Dietrich, where it was uncontroverted that the arresting officers knew, prior to arrest, that the actors were carrying concealed weapons, knew by virtue of the plaintiffs’ backgrounds that they were “not otherwise prohibited by law from having the weapon[s,]” and knew that their carrying of concealed weapons was justified under the statute. Here, except for Defendant Robertson, the officers did not know Painter at all; none of the officers knew that he was armed — indeed, the point of the search was to determine whether he had a gun; they certainly did not know, nor could they reasonably have known, that Painter was “not otherwise prohibited from carrying a concealed weapon” under the statute.
The majority states that Robertson “knew that Painter was a law-abiding model citizen who had never caused any trouble,” but there simply is no evidence in the record to support this statement. The sum total of the evidence pertaining to Robertson’s knowledge of Painter is (1) Painter’s affidavit statement that he and Robertson “had known each other for a long time before the night in question” and that on that night, Robertson had called *574him “Bobby;” (2) Painter’s testimony from the state court suppression hearing that Robertson had told Painter’s sister-in-law when she and Painter had first begun to operate the bar that if there was any trouble there, he would close the place down; (3) Robertson’s testimony from that suppression hearing that the incident in question was the “first trouble” he had ever had with Painter; and (4) Robertson’s acknowledgment that on the night in question, Painter had cooperated with him during their initial encounter but lied about being armed and about having weapons on the premises. There is no evidence in the record that Robertson had any knowledge whatsoever of Painter’s life outside of his activities as a bartender at Lucky’s Bar and Grill in Belmont County, Ohio; indeed it is undisputed that Painter not only was not a resident of Belmont County, he was not even a resident of Ohio. Certainly there is no evidence that Robertson knew that Painter was, as the majority describes him,
a 1987 graduate of the United States Military Academy at West Point, ... an honorably discharged Captain who had served five years in the United States Army as ... a military police commander at a major army base wherein he trained and supervised military police officers [, and a man who] had never been arrested, jailed, or charged with any crime.
Unlike the record in Estate of Dietrich, the record in this case does not conclusively establish that any of the arresting officers knew that the plaintiff was not otherwise prohibited from having a weapon, and that one of the four statutory justifications applied to his concealed possession of it.
The majority opinion establishes that for the purposes of qualified immunity in this circuit, “an examination of all facts and circumstances within an officer’s knowledge at the time of arrest” on a charge of carrying a concealed weapon is no longer enough. Estate of Dietrich, 167 F.3d at 1012 (citing Carroll, 267 U.S. at 162, 45 S.Ct. 280). Rather, an officer now must unilaterally determine whether the suspect is both justified under the statute and not otherwise prohibited from carrying a concealed weapon before that officer may effect an arrest. This is an obvious departure from our precedent and certainly was not clearly established in this Court or any court at the time of Painter’s arrest. For the foregoing reasons, I dissent.