{"id":6336,"date":"2012-01-19T18:30:03","date_gmt":"2011-12-01T07:27:50","guid":{"rendered":""},"modified":"-0001-11-30T00:00:00","modified_gmt":"2011-12-01T07:27:50","slug":"en-US","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/fourthamendment.com\/?p=6336","title":{"rendered":"CA9: Error of law in arrest where no statute shown violated denied officer qualified immunity"},"content":{"rendered":"

Plaintiff was arrested for \u201cscalping\u201d a free ticket from a radio promotion, but it turned out there was no law against it in Nevada. The district court erred in finding officer had qualified immunity for the arrest because this was an error of law. Rosenbaum v. Washoe County<\/a>, 663 F.3d 1071 (9th Cir. 2011)*:<\/p>\n

This is not a case where courts disagree about the contours of a constitutional right or where officers may be confused about what is required of them under various circumstances. As our analysis establishes, the statute is unambiguous, and not susceptible to the reading that the county suggests. Therefore, no reasonable officer could believe that Rosenbaum’s conduct violated this statute.<\/p>\n

Considering the facts in the light most favorable to Rosenbaum, all reasonably competent officers would have agreed that he was not committing a crime. There is no scalping law in Nevada; it is simply not a crime to sell tickets to a fair\u2014even when the tickets were received for free. His t-shirt did not suggest fraud, nor were the ticket buyers duped by the sale.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

His right to family integrity merely from being handcuffed in front of his children was not violated:<\/p>\n

We do not imply that verbal abuse\u2014and even verbal abuse to children in the midst of an arrest\u2014would never rise to the level of a constitutional violation. Rather, in this instance, the officers’ conduct does not \u201cshock the conscience.\u201d<\/p>\n

Because we conclude that the Rosenbaums’ right to family integrity was not violated, we need not reach the question of whether Forbus is entitled to qualified immunity for the violation of the right to family integrity.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

[Note: Criminal defense lawyers: indulge these civil cases. Like Jeff Foxworthy’s joke about his family tree, qualified immunity and the good faith exception have the same origins, and the cases often read the same and apply each other. Also remember that some of the most important Fourth Amendment cases are \u00a7 1983 cases.]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

b2evALnk.b2WPAutP Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"pingsdone","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-6336","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/fourthamendment.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6336","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/fourthamendment.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/fourthamendment.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/fourthamendment.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/fourthamendment.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=6336"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/fourthamendment.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6336\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/fourthamendment.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=6336"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/fourthamendment.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=6336"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/fourthamendment.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=6336"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}