Plaintiff was arrested four times in nine months, but he doesn\u2019t plausibly allege that the arrests lacked probable cause. Hernandez v. Sheriff of Manatee Cty., 2025 U.S. App. LEXIS 17342 (11th Cir. July 14, 2025)*:<\/p>\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n
But “the Fourth Amendment does not require a perfect investigation before an arrest is made or a charge is brought.” See Harris v. Hixon, 102 F.4th 1120, 1125 (11th Cir. 2024). That is, an o\ufb03cer need not “explore or eliminate every theoretically plausible claim of innocence” to have probable cause. See Washington v. Rivera, 939 F.3d 1239, 1246 (11th Cir. 2019) (quotation and internal citation omitted). Nor does an o\ufb03cer’s failure to interview a suspect, without more, undermine probable cause. See District of Columbia v. Wesby, 583 U.S. 48, 61 (2018) (“[P]robable cause does not require o\ufb03cers to rule out a suspect’s innocent explanation[.]”). Instead, only an investigative defect\u2013like when an o\ufb03cer “consciously and deliberately d[oes] not make an e\ufb00ort to uncover reasonably discoverable, material information”\u2013undermines probable cause. Rivera, 939 F.3d at 1246 (quoting Kingsland v. City of Miami, 382 F.3d 1220, 1230 (11th Cir. 2004), abrogated on other grounds by Williams, 965 F.3d at 1159).<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Hernandez did not allege a sufficient investigative defect. The complaint did not contain any facts showing that Deputy Girgis “consciously and deliberately” avoided interviewing him. See id.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Plaintiff was arrested four times in nine months, but he doesn\u2019t plausibly allege that the arrests lacked probable cause. Hernandez v. Sheriff of Manatee Cty., 2025 U.S. App. LEXIS 17342 (11th Cir. July 14, 2025)*:<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[45,50,20],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-61466","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-45","category-arrest-or-entry-on-arrest","category-probable-cause"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/fourthamendment.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/61466","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=61466"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/fourthamendment.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/61466\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":61472,"href":"https:\/\/fourthamendment.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/61466\/revisions\/61472"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/fourthamendment.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=61466"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/fourthamendment.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=61466"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/fourthamendment.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=61466"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}