Plaintiff had a big annual Halloween party at his Orange County mansion that the neighbors always complained about. This one was called “Casino Night,” so the OCSO decided to get a search warrant and raid the place with the SWAT team [remember the cases on the SWAT team can’t perform administrative searches?]. The search warrant was used as an excuse to detain plaintiffs 14 hours for questioning about conspiracy to gamble with two likely inoperable slot machines. The trial court erred in granting a directed verdict for the officers. The search warrant did not grant wholesale authority to detain the people inside on the whim of the officers for questioning. Guillory v. Hill, 2015 Cal. App. LEXIS 38 (4th Dist. January 16, 2015):
LeRoy Guillory and 12 other plaintiffs appeal from the trial court’s entry of judgment after granting Orange County Sheriff Department (OCSD) Investigator Michelle Hill’s motion for a directed verdict (Code Civ. Proc., § 630) at the close of evidence in a six-week trial on plaintiff’s civil rights claims.1 (42 U.S.C. § 1983 (hereafter § 1983).) Plaintiffs consist primarily of Halloween partygoers who were swept up and detained as long as 14 hours in a predawn police raid on a mansion by dozens of Special Weapons and Tactics (SWAT) officers in armored vehicles. The party, an annual event with hundreds of costumed attendees, had drawn neighbor complaints over the years. Based in part on a flyer advertising a “Casino Room” at the party, together with information a confidential informant provided and other intelligence Hill gathered, she obtained a warrant to search for evidence of illegal gaming at the mansion.
The search yielded two slot machines that the party host, Carl Vini Bergman, claimed were unplugged and inoperable, along with three grams of marijuana in a partygoer’s purse. …
Among other asserted civil rights violations, plaintiffs contend Hill violated their right to be free from unlawful seizure by prolonging their detention beyond the conclusion of the search of the residence. Hill questioned each of the plaintiffs before deciding they were free to go, but according to plaintiffs, the jury could infer the officers had concluded the search of the premises well before Hill began her interrogations and later released plaintiffs. Plaintiffs contend nothing justified their detention beyond the end of the search.
. . .
A well-targeted search warrant may be expected to yield evidence. But that by itself does not furnish officers with authority to further detain persons at the scene and require them to submit to questioning. As noted in Summers and Ganwich, a search warrant issues to collect evidence, not to elicit statements. Put another way, a magistrate’s search warrant is directed at places to search, not people to interrogate. (Summers, supra, 452 U.S. at p. 701 [“the information the officers seek normally will be obtained through the search and not through the detention”]; Ganwich, supra, 319 F.2d at p. 1124 [improper to prolong detention “to gain information from the detainees, rather than from the search”].)
Hill also relies on police stops authorized in Terry v. Ohio to justify plaintiffs’ continued detention beyond the end of the warrant search, based on the contraband recovered. (Terry v. Ohio, supra, 392 U.S. 1 (Terry).) Under Terry and its progeny, “an officer may, consistent with the Fourth Amendment, conduct a brief, investigatory stop when the officer has a reasonable, articulable suspicion that criminal activity is afoot.” (Illinois v. Wardlow (2000) 528 U.S. 119, 123 (Wardlow).) To justify an investigative detention, the circumstances apparent to the officer must include specific and articulable facts causing the officer to suspect criminal activity has taken place or is about to occur, and the person detained is involved in that activity. (Terry, supra, 392 U.S. at p. 22.) “‘Such detentions are permitted, notwithstanding the Fourth Amendment’s requirements of probable cause and a search warrant, because they are “limited intrusions” that are “justified by special law enforcement interests.” [Citations.]’ [Citation.]” (People v. Durazo (2004) 124 Cal.App.4th 728, 734 (Durazo).)
For two clearly established reasons, the holding in Terry did not provide Hill with authority to hold the detainees for interrogation after the warrant search terminated. First, Terry does not authorize stopping and examining every person present where an officer believes a crime may have occurred. Instead, Terry requires individualized suspicion. (Brown v. Texas (1979) 443 U.S. 47, 51.) Without it, there is no basis to detain or continue to detain a person for questioning. For example, in United States v. Ward (9th Cir. 1973) 488 F.2d 162 (Ward), the court explained that the FBI’s detention of a person without “a founded suspicion [of] criminal activity” was unconstitutional. (Id. at p. 169.) There, the agents stopped a person they did not suspect of criminal activity to question him about a third person. As the court later elaborated, “Ward clearly restricts investigative witness detentions by showing that in the hierarchy of state interests justifying detention, the interest in detaining witnesses for information is of relatively low value.” (Maxwell v. County of San Diego (9th Cir. 2013) 708 F.3d 1075, 1084.) Here, the detainees’ mere presence in the same large mansion where some limited drug and gaming contraband was discovered did not furnish the requisite individualized suspicion. (See People v. Souza (1994) 9 Cal.4th 224, 230 [temporary detention requires “‘objective manifestation'” that “the person to be stopped is engaged in that [criminal] activity”].)
Hill suggests plaintiffs’ presence as invited overnight guests furnished evidence of their participation in a conspiracy to possess the marijuana and the gaming equipment. On review of a directed verdict, however, we must view the evidence in the light most favorable to the plaintiffs. (Wolf, supra, 162 Cal.App.4th at p. 1119.) A jury reasonably could reject the conspiracy claim as farfetched and unreasonable. Hill relies on the search team’s discovery of two slot machines “within a fully furnished ‘casino room'” and three grams of marijuana “in one of the bedrooms.” She argues that “given their physical proximity to the slot machines and the marijuana alone, [she] could reasonably suspect Plaintiffs of unlawful conduct — and detain them under Terry for further investigation.”
While Hill suggests artfully that the police discovered the marijuana “in a bedroom,” the jury could conclude based on more specific testimony that it was found in a partygoer’s purse. Nothing suggested it was for anything but her personal consumption or that it was an object of any conspiracy. Similarly, plaintiffs’ claims the slot machines were unplugged and inoperable presented a factual scenario in which it would be unreasonable to suspect any of the plaintiffs of engaging in illegal gaming or a conspiracy concerning the machines. Evidence from the search of misdemeanor gaming and marijuana offenses (§§ 330a, 330b, 330.1; Health & Saf. Code, § 11357, subd. (b)) that did not implicate public safety gave Hill no basis to further hold and question all the detainees past the end of the search. This is particularly true where Hill points to nothing in the applicable Penal Code provisions (see ante) to suggest that a partygoer’s use of the slot machines, if operable, was unlawful. A reasonable jury therefore could conclude the notion partygoers intended to conspire to possess the machines was an unreasonable pretext to prolong the detentions.
Second and related, even assuming a Terry stop was justified as to any of the detainees, the nature of such a stop is a “brief” investigatory hold (Wardlow, supra, 528 U.S. at p. 123) that is of “limited” scope and duration. (Durazo, supra, 124 Cal.App.4th at p. 734.) Here, a reasonable jury could resolve the facts in a manner rendering Terry wholly inapplicable. Hill testified her plan from the outset was to conclude the search and then interview the detainees. She did not begin interviewing any of the plaintiff detainees until 2:16 p.m., and a reasonable factfinder therefore could conclude the search ended shortly before that time, or ended much earlier at 7:00 a.m. as the plaintiffs assert. Hill, however, did not release any of the plaintiff detainees until between 4:30 p.m. and 9:00 p.m. Plaintiffs’ detention as long as 14 hours, and in some cases seven hours beyond Hill’s own estimate of when the warrant search ended at 2:00 p.m., does not remotely resemble the brief detention authorized in Terry. It was therefore improper for the trial court to grant a directed verdict disposing of plaintiffs’ prolonged detention claims.
