CA7: Officers not liable for search of wrong apartment in reliance on SW description

In a § 1983 case over a search of the wrong apartment, the affidavit for the search warrant could be relied upon in good faith. The mistake was negligent at best, and it didn’t support civil liability here. The officers didn’t have to stop the search until they were sure they were wrong in case they were right. Wade v. Ramos, 2022 U.S. App. LEXIS 4411 (7th Cir. Feb. 17, 2022):

We turn finally to the search itself. The Wades contend that it was conducted unreasonably in two related senses. First, the officers knew or should have known “immediately” that they had the wrong apartment. Second, even if the initial confusion was understandable, they should have realized the mistake and abandoned the search of the Wades’ apartment long before they actually did.

We can quickly dismiss the first theory. The officers had a valid warrant on which they were entitled to rely. That warrant identified the second-floor apartment as the one to be searched. And the discovery of a short stairway leading up to the building’s first floor was not enough to alert them to the fact that there was some ambiguity in the identification of floors. When the officers reached the entry stairway, they had no reason to think that Doe had not recognized it for what it was. This is not a case like Jones v. Wilhelm, 425 F.3d 455, 463 (7th Cir. 2005), where the officers knew from prior surveillance that the warrant as phrased was “ambiguous and invalid on its face.” Nor does this case resemble Guzman v. City of Chicago, 565 F.3d 393, 395 (7th Cir. 2009), where officers had a warrant for a “single-family house” but arrived at the address only to find a real-estate office and two separate apartments. Given the facially valid warrant and the lack of immediately self-evident ambiguity, the officers were entitled to enter the Wades’ apartment to initiate a search.

The second aspect of the Wades’ failure-to-abandon argument finds a bit more purchase. The officers had an obligation to cease the search if and when they realized the mistake. HN8 “Law enforcement officers who discover that a search warrant does not clearly specify the premises to be searched must ordinarily stop and clear up the ambiguity before they conduct or continue the search.” Muhammad v. Pearson, 900 F.3d 898, 901 (7th Cir. 2018). And the ambiguity here might have been apparent to a conscientious officer after just a few minutes in the building. By that time, the officers were familiar with the building’s layout and multiple staircases, had discovered drugs in the downstairs unit, and knew from Johnson’s girlfriend that the downstairs unit—not the Wades’—was Johnson’s place of operations. On top of that, the officers’ quick entry to the downstairs unit and the accompanying “booms” remain unexplained. The officers’ account—that they were chasing Johnson—is both contradicted by Dotson and implausible. The officers have never explained how Johnson managed to vanish from the ground floor of a small residential building that was surrounded by officers who had all seen his picture and were there to arrest him.

But the Wades have not carried their evidentiary burden: the gaps in the record preclude sending this theory to a jury. Failure-to-abandon theories of liability such as that evaluated in Muhammad turn on each individual officer’s actual knowledge of the indicia of a mistake. Yet our record contains no information about when that knowledge accrued for specific defendants. We do not know when the upstairs police learned that drugs had been found downstairs. We do not know how far the upstairs search had progressed when the Wades came home, or when Ramos or the other commanding officers were told that they had come home. We do not know when the Wades informed the upstairs police that they, not Johnson, lived in the second-floor unit. We do not know how long it took to arrest Dotson. We do not know how long the upstairs search continued after Dotson was removed. We do not even know when the police wrapped up completely and left the building. The meager record the Wades have constructed is silent on each of these critical issues. And without such information, no reasonable jury could find that a specific officer realized a mistake had been made but nonetheless continued the search. Thus, the district court was correct to grant the officers summary judgment.