CA10: While Fourth Amendment was violated by stops of customers coming from a bar, qualified immunity applied

While the officer who stopped customers coming from a bar violated the Fourth Amendment just for sobriety roving checkpoints, he was entitled to qualified immunity because the law was not clearly established. Kozel v. Duncan, 421 Fed. Appx. 843 (10th Cir. 2011) (unpublished)*:

We conclude that the district court erred in applying the closely-regulated industries exception to the warrant requirement. The entries into Wranglers were not “administrative inspections designed to enforce regulatory statutes.” New York v. Burger, 482 U.S. 691, 700 (1987). Rather, given the reports of underage drinking in Wranglers, officers entered in a traditional investigatory capacity for “gathering … criminal evidence” and enforcing the penal laws. Id.; see also id. at 712-13 (stating that “[a]dministrative statutes and penal laws may have the same ultimate purpose of remedying the social problem, but they have different subsidiary purposes and prescribe different methods of addressing the problem”). Consequently, because this case does not involve administrative inspections, “the well-established exception to the warrant requirement for administrative inspections of ‘closely regulated’ businesses,” id. at 712, does not apply. Cf. Ferguson v. City of Charleston, 532 U.S. 67, 83 n.21, 86 (2001) (holding that hospital’s administration of urine tests to detect cocaine use by pregnant women implicated the Fourth Amendment, and noting that the tests were not analogous to administrative inspections because they were “specifically designed to gather evidence of violations of penal laws”).

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Thus, even though there was a Fourth Amendment violation in detaining Wranglers’ patrons for sobriety checks, because Fourth Amendment law did not clearly establish the illegality of that conduct, Sheriff Duncan is entitled to qualified immunity.