{"id":11516,"date":"2014-05-11T02:00:57","date_gmt":"2014-05-11T07:00:57","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/fourthamendment.com\/?p=11516"},"modified":"2014-07-04T13:16:48","modified_gmt":"2014-07-04T18:16:48","slug":"ca7-warrantless-entry-to-seize-a-mental-health-patient-9-hrs-after-drs-call-wasnt-exigent-but-qualified-immunity-applies","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/fourthamendment.com\/?p=11516","title":{"rendered":"CA7: Warrantless entry to seize a mental health patient 9 hrs after Dr’s call wasn’t exigent, but qualified immunity applies"},"content":{"rendered":"

A police entry to seize a person and her guns 9 hours after a doctor\u2019s call she was a danger to herself or others was kind of \u201cexigent,\u201d but nevertheless treated as a violation of the Fourth Amendment. Still, qualified immunity and good faith protects the officers. The doctrines are explained in this case. Sutterfield v. City of Milwaukee<\/a>, 751 F.3d 542 (7th Cir. 2014) (concur<\/a>):<\/p>\n

Krysta Sutterfield sued the City of Milwaukee and several of its police officers after the officers forcibly entered her home to effectuate an emergency detention for purposes of a mental health evaluation, opened a locked container, and seized for safekeeping the gun and concealed-carry licenses they found inside. She contends that officers violated her rights under the Second, Fourth, and Fourteenth Amendments in doing so. We conclude that the warrantless entry into Sutterfield’s home was justified under the exigent circumstances exception to the Fourth Amendment’s warrant requirement, as the defendant officers had a reasonable basis to believe that Sutterfield posed an imminent danger of harm to herself. We shall assume, as the district court did, that the search of a closed container for a gun, and the ensuing seizure of that gun, violated Sutterfield’s Fourth Amendment rights. But we agree with the district court that even if the officers did exceed constitutional boundaries, they are protected by qualified immunity. See Sutterfield v. City of Milwaukee, 870 F. Supp. 2d 633 (E.D. Wis. 2012). We therefore affirm the district court’s decision to grant summary judgment in favor of the defendants.. . .<\/p>\n

The district court, as noted, found that the warrantless entry into Sutterfield’s home might be justified on the basis of the exigent circumstances doctrine. Sutterfield focuses the bulk of her argument on this possibility, contending that in view of the passage of nine hours between her physician’s initial phone call to the police and the point at which police sought entry into her home, the circumstances cannot be described as exigent, as there was ample opportunity for the police to obtain a warrant. She adds that her own conduct in refusing to open the door to her home and admit the police cannot be said to have created an exigency where none otherwise existed.<\/p>\n

There are three doctrines or exceptions to the warrant requirement that have been raised at one point or another in this case as possible justifications for the warrantless entry into Sutterfield’s home: the community caretaking doctrine, the emergency aid doctrine, and the exigent circumstances doctrine. For the reasons that follow, we believe that the entry into Sutterfield’s home was justified by the emergency aid doctrine, which the Supreme Court has deemed a subset of the exigent circumstances doctrine. But as there is some degree of overlap between the doctrines, the distinctions between them are not always clear, and all three doctrines are, to some degree, implicated in this case, we begin with a short discussion of each.<\/p>\n

. . .<\/p>\n

Exigency, for example, is defined by a time-urgent need to act that makes resort to the warrant process impractical. …<\/p>\n

The emergency aid doctrine logically is a better fit in this regard, its defining characteristic being urgency …, and there being no logical need to additionally consider probable cause and the availability of a standard criminal warrant. …<\/p>\n

The community caretaking doctrine has a more expansive temporal reach, in that its primary focus is on the purpose of police action rather than on its urgency. See Livingston, 1998 U. Chi. Legal Forum at 277 (“the relevance of time as a limiting principle in the exigency equation seems less apparent in these community caretaking intrusions\u2014since police could not have obtained a traditional warrant in any event”); see also Marinos, 22 Geo. Mason U. Civil Rts. L. J. at 280; Dimino, 66 Wash. & Lee L. Rev. at 1506. Moreover, as we have already mentioned and as we shall discuss further, because this doctrine presumes that the police are not acting for any law enforcement purpose, whether or not there is time to seek a traditional criminal warrant is immaterial (although, as we also discuss, a different type of warrant could be envisioned).<\/p>\n

As a matter of doctrine, then, the community caretaking doctrine would potentially be the best fit for this case, in that it captures the beneficent purpose for which police entered Sutterfield’s home and leaves more room for the delay that preceded it than the emergency aid doctrine otherwise might. And because there is no suggestion that police had any law enforcement motive in entering the home, there would be a ready basis on which to distinguish criminal cases like Patino, which demand a search warrant when there is, in fact, time in which to seek one.<\/p>\n

Yet, our decision in Pichany obviously forecloses reliance on the community caretaking doctrine here. Although the defendants invoked the community caretaking doctrine below, they have not pursued it on appeal, let alone asked us to reconsider Pichany. And the division among the federal circuits as to the appropriate scope of the community caretaking doctrine makes clear that there is no obvious answer as to whether it is appropriate to extend that doctrine beyond the automobile setting that the Supreme Court dealt with in Cady. The defendants have chosen instead to rely on the exigent circumstances exception to the warrant requirement and, in particular, the emergency aid exception that Brigham City places within the exigency framework, as the justification for their entry into their home. And ultimately, given the Court’s decision in Brigham City and our own decision in Fitzgerald, we believe they are right on that score.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

A police entry to seize a person and her guns 9 hours after a doctor\u2019s call she was a danger to herself or others was kind of \u201cexigent,\u201d but nevertheless treated as a violation of the Fourth Amendment. Still, qualified … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[45,3,40],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-11516","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-45","category-emergency-exigency","category-qualified-immunity"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/fourthamendment.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11516","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/fourthamendment.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/fourthamendment.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/fourthamendment.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/fourthamendment.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=11516"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/fourthamendment.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11516\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":12387,"href":"https:\/\/fourthamendment.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11516\/revisions\/12387"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/fourthamendment.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=11516"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/fourthamendment.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=11516"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/fourthamendment.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=11516"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}