Two federal appeals cases test the reach of qualified immunity defenses

Two recent federal appeals court decisions indicate that the qualified immunity doctrine, which shields government officials from civil rights lawsuits, has practical limits. The 5th and 8th Circuits ruled in favor of plaintiffs this month, finding that state actors cannot hide behind the defense when their actions violate constitutional principles that have been established for decades. These rulings challenge the idea that plaintiffs must cite nearly identical precedents to survive a motion to dismiss.

The legal framework for these cases dates back to a 1982 Supreme Court decision. Before that, a federal statute from 1871 allowed citizens to sue state and local officials for violating constitutional rights. Since 1982, however, courts have required plaintiffs to show that the violated law was clearly established. This standard often forces victims to find prior cases with closely matching facts, a hurdle that can be difficult to clear even in cases of apparent misconduct.

The first case involved a traffic stop in Alexandria, Louisiana. In 2022, Mario Rosales and his girlfriend, Gracie Lasyone, sued two local police officers, Samuel Terrell and Jim Lewis. The couple alleged the officers stopped their car without legal justification. The officers ordered the pair out of the vehicle and detained them for 21 minutes. During that time, the officers questioned them about illegal drugs, frisked Rosales, and told him to empty his pockets. The officers argued that the stop was legally sound and that any violation was not clearly established by precedent.

Last month, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 5th Circuit rejected that argument. The three-judge panel unanimously ruled that the plaintiffs had plausibly alleged violations of the Fourth Amendment. The court cited a 1968 Supreme Court decision that set the standard for reasonable suspicion during detentions and frisks. Because those principles had been the law of the land for more than half a century, the panel found that the officers failed to meet the required legal tests. The ruling suggests that long-standing rules are difficult to ignore, even when the specific scenario is unique.

The second case presented a rarer scenario in Taney County, Missouri. Judge Eric Eighmy jailed two children, then ages 12 and 14, after a 2019 custody hearing. The children had agreed with their parents that the mother would have primary custody, but they resisted going home with her. Eighmy intervened, warning the minors that they might end up in foster care if they did not comply. When they still resisted, he placed them in holding cells for between 20 and 40 minutes. The children later sued, arguing that Eighmy lacked probable cause to detain them.

The U.S. Court of Appeals for the 8th Circuit agreed with the plaintiffs this month. The panel unanimously held that the confinement clearly violated the Fourth Amendment because Eighmy had no probable cause to believe the children committed an offense. Eighmy argued that he did not know the law was clearly established because no prior case involved a judge jailing children in such a manner. The court rejected that claim, citing its own decision from more than a decade ago. The panel noted that the lack of a prior case with fundamentally similar facts did not help the judge, given how clear the underlying legal standard was.

Both decisions rely on the same core principle: qualified immunity does not protect officials who flout basic constitutional rules. The 5th Circuit focused on the age of the traffic stop standards, while the 8th Circuit emphasized the clarity of the probable cause requirement. In the Louisiana case, the officers argued that the violation was not clearly established, a position the court found unpersuasive given the half-century history of the relevant law. In the Missouri case, the judge argued that the bizarre nature of the detention shielded him from liability. Both arguments failed because the courts found the underlying rights were well defined.