Terrell Daniels, Jr. v. Kadarius Blakley

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[DO NOT PUBLISH]

In the

United States Court of Appeals

For the Eleventh Circuit

____________________

No. 24-12514

Non-Argument Calendar

____________________

TERRELL DANIELS, JR.,

Plaintiff-Appellant,

versus

KADARIUS BLAKLEY,

JASON MONTGOMERY,

SAMUEL WOOD,

Defendants-Appellees,

THE CITY OF BRUNSWICK,

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2 Opinion of the Court 24-12514

Defendant.

____________________

Appeal from the United States District Court

for the Southern District of Georgia

D.C. Docket No. 2:23-cv-00015-LGW-BWC

____________________

Before NEWSOM, GRANT, and TJOFLAT, Circuit Judges.

PER CURIAM:

Terrell Daniels appeals the District Court’s grant of sum-

mary judgment for three Brunswick, Georgia police officers on his

federal and state-law claims arising from a brief arrest. He contends

the officers lacked probable cause, used excessive force, and are not

entitled to qualified immunity. He also argues that the District

Court improperly rejected his claim for false imprisonment and

prematurely resolved factual disputes. We affirm.

I. Facts

On April 25, 2021, Brunswick police officers responded to a

reported physical attack at Gracemore Nursing Home. The call de-

scribed three suspects: two Black females and one Black male with

dreadlocks. At the scene, a Gracemore employee informed the of-

ficers that the assailants had fled across the street and identified one

of the girls as “OhnJyre,” wearing a pink tie-dye shirt.

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24-12514 Opinion of the Court 3

The officers crossed the street and knocked on the door of a

nearby house, where they were met by a woman who identified

herself as OhnJyre’s grandmother. While they were speaking, Dan-

iels arrived. He was a Black male with dreadlocks, tied up in a bun,

and was wearing a black shirt. He briefly shouted toward the Grac-

emore staff.

Officers Blakley and Wood returned to the nursing home,

where they viewed a nurse’s cellphone video of the altercation.

The footage, while poor in quality, appeared to show a Black male

with dreadlocks kicking nursing home staff. Officer Wood asked

whether the man who had just yelled at the staff across the street—

Daniels—was the person in the video. A Gracemore employee said

yes.

The officers returned to the house. Daniels was standing in

the driveway. Officer Blakley ordered him to put his hands behind

his back, and Daniels appeared to comply. Officer Blakley grabbed

his wrists, and as Officer Wood approached to apply handcuffs,

Daniels appeared to take a step forward. The officers took him to

the ground. Officer Blakley, with a leg across Daniels’s back, held

him down while Officer Montgomery handcuffed him. Daniels

protested that he had done nothing wrong. Officer Wood replied,

“We have you on video,” and told him he was going to jail.

But before they reached the patrol car, a nurse from Grace-

more stopped the officers and said Daniels was not the man in the

video. She described the actual suspect as shorter and darker-

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skinned. The officers then uncuffed Daniels and released him. The

entire detention lasted just under four minutes.

Daniels sued alleging various claims under state and federal

law from what he purports was a false arrest. The defendants

moved for summary judgment on qualified immunity grounds.

The District Court granted summary judgment for the defendants,

finding that the defendants violated no constitutional rights and

qualified immunity barred all claims.

Daniels appeals.

II. Discussion

Before reaching the merits of Daniels’s appeal, we must first

determine which claims are being appealed. That task is unneces-

sarily difficult.

Daniels’s brief is disorganized and replete with typograph-

ical errors, missing punctuation, and unclear prose. It repeatedly

appears to quote judicial decisions without the use of quotation

marks, leaving the appellees and the Court to guess whether the

statements originate from counsel or judicial decisions.1

1 The confusion is not limited to court decisions. In the table of authorities and

brief, Daniels’s counsel lists “Blackstone, supra”—as though supra were an edi-

tion—despite citing Blackstone only once. And Halsbury’s Laws of England ap-

pears both under “Other Sources” and, somehow, as a case.

There are also incorrect citations, sentences repeated verbatim, and sentence

fragments that trail off mid-thought.

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At times, Daniels’s brief verges on incomprehensibility. For

example, it states that “The Ferrells were detained without a war-

rant, and thus have a claim for false imprisonment, known under

common law as trespass upon a person.” No party named Ferrell

is involved in this action. It appears, rather, that the sentence—

again unmarked as a quotation—was copied from a Georgia state

court decision that is not cited anywhere in the brief. 2

That is not an isolated error. For example, Daniels’s brief

also says, “And we have applied that rationale to deny qualified im-

munity when the police have unnecessarily thrown non-resisting,

unhand cuffed [sic] suspects on the ground.” Again, this sentence

appears without quotation marks, and the “we” makes no sense in

this context. Rather, the line appears to be copied from Richmond

v. Badia, 47 F.4th 1172, 1184 (11th Cir. 2022), a case that is again

cited nowhere in Daniels’s brief.

We do not demand perfection. But we do require clarity and

proper citation to authority. Daniels’s briefing provides little of ei-

ther. As we have explained, issues not clearly raised in the briefs are

considered abandoned. Sapuppo v. Allstate Floridian Ins., 739 F.3d

678, 681 (11th Cir. 2014). A passing reference to a legal theory is not

enough to preserve it for appellate review. Id.

2 See Ferrell v. Mikula, 672 S.E.2d 7, 10 (Ga. Ct. App. 2008) (“In this case, the

Ferrells were detained without a warrant, and thus have a claim for false im-

prisonment, known under common law as trespass upon a person.” (citation

omitted)).

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Accordingly, we address only the two issues that have been

adequately presented: whether the officers violated the Fourth

Amendment by arresting Daniels without probable cause, and

whether they used excessive force in effecting that arrest.

A. Daniels’s Arrest

Daniels argues that the officers arrested him without proba-

ble cause, in violation of the Fourth Amendment. The officers re-

spond that they are entitled to qualified immunity. We agree with

the officers.

Qualified immunity protects officers from suit unless they

violated a clearly established constitutional right. See Case v. Es-

linger, 555 F.3d 1317, 1325 (11th Cir. 2009). To overcome the de-

fense, Daniels must show both a constitutional violation and that

the law clearly established the unlawfulness of the officers’ con-

duct. See Pearson v. Callahan, 555 U.S. 223, 232, 129 S. Ct. 808, 815–

16 (2009). Here, we need not reach the second prong, because no

constitutional violation occurred. See id. at 236, 129 S. Ct. at 818.

First, we must determine the nature of Daniels’s detention:

whether it was a brief investigatory stop under Terry v. Ohio, 392

U.S. 1, 88 S. Ct. 1868 (1968), or a full-blown arrest requiring proba-

ble cause. United States v. Acosta, 363 F.3d 1141, 1144–46 (11th Cir.

2004) (distinguishing a Terry stop from an arrest). We treat Dan-

iels’s detention as an arrest. The officers placed Daniels in hand-

cuffs, told him he was “going to jail,” and began escorting him to-

ward a patrol car. They asked him no questions and did not re-

spond when he told officers he had an alibi. Under the factors we

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use to determine whether a stop was a Terry stop or arrest—includ-

ing the scope, intrusiveness, and purpose of the stop—this

amounted to an arrest. See id. at 1146.

That brings us to probable cause. An arrest is lawful if the

officers had probable cause to believe that Daniels committed an

offense. See Eslinger, 555 F.3d at 1326–27. Even if actual probable

cause was lacking, qualified immunity applies so long as the officers

had arguable probable cause—that is, if a reasonable officer in the

same situation could have believed that probable cause existed. See

id. at 1327.

Here, the officers had arguable probable cause. They re-

sponded to a reported altercation at a nursing home involving a

Black male with dreadlocks. Daniels matched that description—he

is a Black man with dreadlocks, and he appeared at the scene wear-

ing a black shirt, shortly after one of the female suspects arrived. A

nurse showed the officers a grainy cellphone video of the fight,

which appeared to depict a Black male with dreadlocks kicking

staff. When one officer asked a witness whether Daniels was the

man in the video, the witness said yes. Daniels also yelled at the

nursing home staff while officers were on scene, further linking

him to the altercation. Given the totality of the circumstances—the

description, the video, the eyewitness identification, and Daniels’s

conduct—reasonable officers could have believed he was the sus-

pect.

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That is more than enough to satisfy the forgiving standard

of arguable probable cause. The District Court correctly granted

summary judgment on this claim.

B. Excessive Force

Daniels next contends that the officers used excessive force

in taking him to the ground and handcuffing him. That claim also

fails.

The Fourth Amendment prohibits officers from using exces-

sive force when seizing a person. The inquiry is objective: whether

the force used was reasonable under the circumstances. See Graham

v. Connor, 490 U.S. 386, 396, 109 S. Ct. 1865, 1871–72 (1989). Courts

evaluate the need for force, the relationship between the need and

the amount of force used, and the extent of any injury. See Vinyard

v. Wilson, 311 F.3d 1340, 1347 (11th Cir. 2002).

Here, Daniels was suspected of a violent attack on nursing

home staff. Officers had seen a video of the attack and had been

told that Daniels was the man shown kicking a nurse. When Officer

Blakley ordered Daniels to put his hands behind his back, Daniels

appeared to comply. But as Officer Wood moved in to apply the

handcuffs, Daniels stiffened his shoulders and pulled forward. A

struggle ensued, and the officers brought him to the ground. Of-

ficer Blakley applied pressure across Daniels’s upper legs while Of-

ficer Montgomery cuffed him. Daniels was on the ground for un-

der a minute and in handcuffs for less than four. And while he says

he was injured, Daniels has never identified any specific injury—

nor does the bodycam footage suggest visible harm.

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This level of force was minimal. The officers did not use

strikes, chokeholds, or weapons. They did not yell or escalate.

They quickly subdued a suspect whom they reasonably believed to

be violent. That conduct was neither objectively unreasonable nor

constitutionally excessive. See Durruthy v. Pastor, 351 F.3d 1080,

1094 (11th Cir. 2003) (“[E]ven if the force applied by [the officer] in

effecting the arrest—forcing [the suspect] down to the ground and

placing him in handcuffs—was unnecessary, plainly it was not un-

lawful. The amount of force used was de minim[i]s.”); Nolin v.

Isbell, 207 F.3d 1253, 1257–58 (11th Cir. 2000) (“[T]his Circuit has

established the principle that the application of de minimis force,

without more, will not support a claim for excessive force in viola-

tion of the Fourth Amendment.”).

Because the force used was objectively reasonable, the offic-

ers committed no constitutional violation and are entitled to qual-

ified immunity.

C. State-Law Claims

Daniels also asserted claims under Georgia law, including

battery. But his appellate brief includes only a cursory reference to

those claims. Those claims are abandoned. See Sapuppo, 739 F.3d at

681. And even if they were not abandoned, we would affirm be-

cause the claims fail under Georgia law. See, e.g., O.C.G.A. § 51-1-

13 (providing that a battery claim must fail when a touching was

“justified under some rule of law”).

III. Conclusion

The District Court’s judgment is AFFIRMED.