On Wednesday, the Seventh Circuit held that officers who detained a police sergeant without a warrant were entitled to qualified immunity. In Mucha v. Jackson, No. 14-3619, 2015 WL 3397026 (7th Cir. May 27, 2015), at the request of a public retirement system, a psychiatrist examined a police sergeant who had not reported to duty for seven months. In a report three weeks later, the psychiatrist stated that the sergeant was threatening to shoot police commanders and could not be sent back to work. The police department received the report a couple weeks after that. Two officers then went to the sergeant’s home, handcuffed him without an arrest warrant, drove him to a mental health facility, and signed an emergency detention form. The facility held the sergeant for three days.
The sergeant sued, alleging in part that two officers who detained him did so without warrant or other justification in violation of the Fourth Amendment. The district court denied these officers’ motion for judgment on the pleadings with respect to their claim for qualified immunity but the Seventh Circuit reversed. It dismissed the two officers, finding they were not violating clearly established law.
The Seventh Circuit held that a state law cannot preempt the Fourth Amendment, but it can establish a standard of conduct consistent with the amendment but particularized to a specific situation. The sergeant’s statements to the psychiatrist, the psychiatrist’s report, and the sergeant’s access to guns gave the arresting officers probable cause to believe he was mentally ill and posed a danger to himself and other officers, consistent with their state’s emergency detention statute. And though the sergeant had made these statements to the psychiatrist a month before the police acted, they were recent enough for the statute’s requirement of showing recent threats or attempts. The Seventh Circuit did not decide whether the police would have been deemed reasonable without the state detention statute, but, it wrote, “we imagine that they would have been.”
