CA8: RS too fact bound to lend itself to overcoming QI defense in § 1983 case

Plaintiff suppressed his search in state court for lack of reasonable suspicion, but he can’t get over the qualified immunity hurdle to sue the officer for the detention. The reasonable suspicion was thin at best, and, instead of nervousness, the defendant was calm. Too calm for the officer. When defendant didn’t consent, he called for a drug dog. The cases don’t have enough of a pattern for a fact bound situation like this to show the officer should be denied qualified immunity. De La Rosa v. White, 2017 U.S. App. LEXIS 5273 (8th Cir. March 27, 2017):

In the district court, Trooper White pointed to objective, particular facts and explained why these facts led him to conclude he had reasonable suspicion to briefly extend De La Rosa’s detention to determine if a drug dog would alert to the exterior of a pickup truck traveling from Arizona to Illinois on Interstate 80. To be sure, on the merits, the existence of reasonable suspicion was a close question, because the facts on which Trooper White relied, taken together, did not raise as strong a suspicion of interstate drug trafficking as in prior cases such as Riley and Lebrun. But White relied on facts presenting substantial similarities with prior cases in which reasonable suspicion of drug trafficking was found and extension of a traffic stop was upheld.

In recent years, the Supreme Court has repeatedly reversed decisions denying qualified immunity where lower courts “misunderstood the ‘clearly established’ analysis.” White v. Pauly, 137 S. Ct. 548, 552, 196 L. Ed. 2d 463 (2017). To avoid qualified immunity, De La Rosa must show a “a robust consensus of cases of persuasive authority.” Here, there is no consensus to be found in the prior decisions that have resolved a fact-intensive Fourth Amendment issue under a governing standard that requires judges to “allow[] officers to draw on their own experience and specialized training to make inferences from and deductions about the cumulative information available to them that might well elude an untrained person.” Arvizu, 534 U.S. at 273 (quotation omitted). Trooper White is therefore entitled to qualified immunity from De La Rosa’s damage claims.