Adam Lane v. Adam Nading, Probation

United States Court of Appeals
For the Eighth Circuit
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No. 18-2194
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Adam Lane
lllllllllllllllllllllPlaintiff - Appellee
v.
Adam Nading, Probation and Parole Office
lllllllllllllllllllllDefendant
Joseph M. Boyd, Corporal, Police Officer #4338, Sebastian County Sheriff's Office
lllllllllllllllllllllDefendant - Appellant
Fort Smith Police Department; Probation and Parole Office
lllllllllllllllllllllDefendants
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No. 18-2426
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Adam Lane
lllllllllllllllllllllPlaintiff - Appellee
v.
Adam Nading, Probation and Parole Office
lllllllllllllllllllllDefendant - Appellant

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Joseph M. Boyd, Corporal, Police Officer #4338, Sebastian County Sheriff's
Office; Fort Smith Police Department; Probation and Parole Office
lllllllllllllllllllllDefendants
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Appeals from United States District Court
for the Western District of Arkansas - Ft. Smith
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Submitted: March 7, 2019
Filed: June 20, 2019
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Before BENTON, MELLOY, and SHEPHERD, Circuit Judges.
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MELLOY, Circuit Judge.
Arkansas state prisoner Adam Lane sued his former parole officer, Adam
Nading, and a Fort Smith police officer, Joseph Boyd, (collectively, the “officers”)
under 42 U.S.C. § 1983 for allegedly violating his Fourth Amendment right to be free
from unreasonable searches and seizures. He claimed that the officers failed to knock
and announce their presence before entering his hotel room, seizing narcotics and a
gun, and arresting him while he was on parole. The district court denied Nading’s
motion for judgment on the pleadings and Boyd’s motion to dismiss on the grounds
that the officers were not entitled to qualified immunity. The officers appeal. Having
jurisdiction under 28 U.S.C. § 1291, we reverse.
I. Background
The following facts are taken from Lane’s amended complaint and the
documents he references therein—namely, his original complaint and the Arkansas
Supreme Court opinion upholding his conviction. We accept these facts as true and
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view them in the light most favorable to Lane. See Stanley v. Finnegan, 899 F.3d
623, 625 (8th Cir. 2018) (setting forth the standard of review on “[a]n interlocutory
order denying a motion to dismiss based on qualified immunity”).
Lane was on parole in Arkansas in January 2015. As part of his conditions of
release from the Arkansas Department of Corrections, Lane consented to warrantless
searches and seizures of his “person, place of residence, and motor vehicles.” Lane
v. State, 513 S.W.3d 230, 233 (Ark. 2017). Lane appeared for his initial parole intake
with Nading but subsequently failed to report, a violation of his release conditions.
That same month, Lane committed another violation of his release conditions:
He began staying at a hotel in Fort Smith. The hotel was not his primary residence,
and he did not receive prior authorization from Nading before staying there. Nading
learned that Lane was staying at the hotel and went with Boyd to find Lane.
The officers enlisted a hotel worker to open Lane’s door for them. Without
knocking and announcing their presence, they entered the room. Inside, they found
Lane asleep with a female companion. They also found drugs and a handgun. The
officers arrested Lane, who signed an affidavit declaring that the drugs were his.
Lane was convicted in state court of multiple drug charges and simultaneous
possession of a firearm. He received a sentence of 70 years’ imprisonment. He
appealed to the Arkansas Supreme Court, which affirmed. See id. at 237. Relevant
to this case, the Arkansas Supreme Court held that the officers violated Lane’s Fourth
Amendment right to be free from unreasonable searches and seizures because they did
not knock and announce their presence before entering the hotel room.1
The Arkansas Supreme Court nevertheless extended the rule set forth in1
Hudson v. Michigan, 547 U.S. 586 (2006), and decided not to apply the exclusionary
rule to the evidence the officers seized. Lane, 513 S.W.3d at 235–36.
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Lane subsequently brought this action under 42 U.S.C. § 1983. After Lane
amended his complaint, the officers filed their answer. Along with the answer,
Nading filed a motion for judgment on the pleadings, and Boyd filed a motion to
dismiss. Both argued that they: (1) were immune from liability in their official
capacities under the doctrine of sovereign immunity; and (2) were immune from
liability in their individual capacities under the doctrine of qualified immunity
because they had not violated any of Lane’s clearly established constitutional rights.
The district court granted the officers’ motions in part and denied them in part.
Regarding the official-capacity claims, the district court held that the doctrine of
sovereign immunity applied, so the officers could not be sued. Regarding the
individual-capacity claims, the district court said that “there appear[ed] to be a
consensus of both binding and persuasive federal law prior to January 27, 2015, that
a failure to knock and announce is a violation of the Fourth Amendment absent a
reasonable suspicion of exigency or futility.” The district court pointed to a Seventh
Circuit case, Green v. Butler, 420 F.3d 689 (7th Cir. 2005), and said that Green “held
that a failure to knock and announce is not waived when a parolee has signed an
agreement permitting warrantless searches.” Finally, the district court said that the
officers had “conceded that there was no exigency.” The district court determined
“that [the officers’] actions were unconstitutional.” “[W]ithout sufficient
information” to determine at that time whether the officers’ actions on the day of the
search “were those of reasonable officers such that they are entitled to qualified
immunity,” the district court declined to grant the officer’s motions on Lane’s
individual-capacity claims and allowed the case to proceed. The officers timely
appealed.
II. Discussion
The question presented is whether the district court erred in denying the
officers qualified immunity. We review both the denial of a motion to dismiss and
a motion for judgment on the pleadings de novo. See Kiesling v. Holladay, 859 F.3d
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529, 533 (8th Cir. 2017) (motion to dismiss); Prater v. Dahm, 89 F.3d 538, 540 (8th
Cir. 1996) (motion for judgment on the pleadings). We reverse if the officers are
“entitled to qualified immunity on the face of the complaint.” Kiesling, 859 F.3d at
533 (quoting Bradford v. Huckabee, 394 F.3d 1012, 1015 (8th Cir. 2005)).
The “officers are entitled to qualified immunity under § 1983 unless (1) they
violated a federal statutory or constitutional right, and (2) the unlawfulness of their
conduct was ‘clearly established at the time.’” District of Columbia v. Wesby, 138
S. Ct. 577, 589 (2018) (citation omitted). To be “clearly established,” the law must
be “sufficiently clear that every reasonable official would understand what he is doing
is unlawful.” Id. (internal quotation marks and citation omitted). Clearly established
law is “dictated by controlling authority or a robust consensus of cases of persuasive
authority.” Id. at 589–90 (internal quotation marks and citation omitted).
“[P]recedent must be clear enough that every reasonable official would interpret it to
establish the particular rule the plaintiff seeks to apply.” Id. at 590. “It is not enough
that the rule is suggested by then-existent precedent.” Id. The “clearly established”
standard, therefore, requires that a particular rule’s contours be well defined at a
“high ‘degree of specificity.’” Id. (citation omitted). Courts should not “define
clearly established law at a high level of generality” but should “identify a case where
an officer acting under similar circumstances . . . was held to have violated the Fourth
Amendment.” Id. (citation omitted). The case need not be “directly on point,” but
should place the lawfulness of the officer’s conduct “beyond debate.” Id. (citation
omitted).
Given the governing law, we hold that the officers are entitled to qualified
immunity on the face of the complaint. Even assuming that the officers violated the
Fourth Amendment by failing to knock and announce their presence before entering
Lane’s dwelling, it was not clearly established in January 2015 that failing to knock
and announce before entering the dwelling of a parolee was unlawful. That is
because neither the Arkansas Supreme Court, this Court, nor the U.S. Supreme Court
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had spoken on the specific issue of whether the knock-and-announce requirement
applies to parolees. Moreover, there existed no “robust consensus of cases of
persuasive authority” addressing the issue at the time the officers entered Lane’s
dwelling. Id. at 589–90.
Lane essentially argues that a robust consensus of persuasive authority had
established by January 2015 that the knock-and-announce requirement applies to
parolees. To support his argument, he cites the Seventh Circuit’s Green v. Butler
decision, a pair of district-court decisions, and an intermediate appellate-court2 3
decision out of California. We disagree. It is true that the cases Lane cites generally4
hold that an officer must knock and announce his presence before entering a parolee’s
dwelling. However, we do not consider a consensus based on the decision of a single
circuit and a handful of lower courts to be “robust.” Wesby, 138 S. Ct. at 589; see
Jacobson v. McCormick, 763 F.3d 914, 918 (8th Cir. 2014) (concluding that “two
decisions from other circuits did not place [an] issue beyond debate” in the absence
of controlling authority); Turner v. Arkansas Ins. Dep’t, 297 F.3d 751, 759 (8th Cir.
See 420 F.3d at 699 (holding that “there is no blanket exception to the [knock-2
and-announce] requirement for parolees absent exigency or futility” and as such an
officer is not excused from the requirement when entering a parolee’s home).
See Portnoy v. City of Davis, 663 F. Supp. 2d 949, 957 (E.D. Cal. 2009)3
(relying on Green for the proposition that “[a] parole or probation search does not
permit an exception to the knock and announce requirement unless there are exigent
circumstances or futility”); United States v. Musa, 288 F. Supp. 2d 1205, 1208 (D.
Kan. 2003) (rejecting an argument that the knock-and-announce rule did not apply
to parolees because the government had not cited, nor had the district court found,
“cases that extend a probationer’s diminished expectation of privacy to elimination
of the knock and announce requirement”), rev’d on other grounds, 401 F.3d 1208
(10th Cir. 2005).
See People v. Montenegro, 219 Cal. Rptr. 331, 334 (Cal. Ct. App. 1985)4
(holding that officers must comply with state statutory knock-and-announce
requirements when searching a parolee’s dwelling).
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2002) (“[T]he fact that two circuit cases and fifteen district court cases directly
support a proposition and the Supreme Court implicitly supports that same position
is sufficient to demonstrate that the law was ‘clearly established’ . . . .”); see also
Sauers v. Borough of Nesquehoning, 905 F.3d 711, 722 (3d Cir. 2018) (concluding
that a single circuit’s decision did not “amount[] to the robust consensus of cases of
persuasive authority in the Court of Appeals that we have held necessary to clearly
establish a right in the absence of controlling precedent” (internal quotation marks
and citation omitted)); McClendon v. City of Columbia, 305 F.3d 314, 329–33 (5th
Cir. 2002) (en banc) (“[T]he mere fact that a large number of courts [six circuits] had
recognized the existence of a right to be free from state-created danger in some
circumstances . . . is insufficient to clearly establish the unlawfulness of [the officer’s]
actions.”).
Furthermore, the U.S. Supreme Court has arguably called into question the
extent to which a parolee enjoys Fourth Amendment protections commensurate in
scope with those of non-parolees. In its 2006 Samson v. California decision, the
Court held that “the Fourth Amendment does not prohibit a police officer from
conducting a suspicionless search of a parolee.” 547 U.S. 843, 857 (2006). The
Court explained that “parole is an established variation on imprisonment of convicted
criminals,” id. at 850 (citation omitted), so parolees “have severely diminished
expectations of privacy,” id. at 852. In a situation where, like here, a parolee is
released on the condition that he must “submit to suspicionless searches by a parole
officer or other peace officer ‘at any time’” and is “unambiguously” made aware of
the condition, he lacks “an expectation of privacy that society would recognize as
legitimate.” Id. (citation omitted). By contrast, the State has “substantial” and
“overwhelming” interests in “supervising parolees because ‘parolees . . . are more
likely to commit future criminal offenses.’” Id. at 853 (quoting Pennsylvania Bd. of
Probation and Parole v. Scott, 524 U.S. 357, 365 (1998)). The State also has
“interests in reducing recidivism and thereby promoting reintegration and positive
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citizenship among” parolees that “warrant privacy intrusions that would not otherwise
be tolerated under the Fourth Amendment.” Id.
While we recognize that Samson does not address the issue of whether the
knock-and-announce rule applies to parolees, it certainly stands for the proposition
that parolees may be treated differently than non-parolees for some Fourth
Amendment purposes. Given that proposition and the fact that the Supreme Court
decided Samson after the Seventh Circuit decided Green, we hold it would not have
been clear to every reasonable officer in the defendant officers’ positions that failing
to knock and announce his presence before entering and searching Lane’s hotel room
violated the Fourth Amendment. Cf. Wesby, 138 S. Ct. at 589 (stating that to be
“clearly established,” the law must be “sufficiently clear that every reasonable official
would understand what he is doing is unlawful”). Because the law was not clear, the
officers are entitled to qualified immunity.
III. Conclusion
Accordingly, we reverse the judgment of the district court and remand for
further proceedings consistent with this opinion.
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