stating that arresting officers are entitled to qualified immunity if “at the moment' the arrest was made ... the facts and circumstances within their knowledge and of which they had reasonably trustworthy information were sufficient to warrant a prudent man in believing” that the arrestee had violated the law
How later courts described this case
- stating that arresting officers are entitled to qualified immunity if “at the moment' the arrest was made ... the facts and circumstances within their knowledge and of which they had reasonably trustworthy information were sufficient to warrant a prudent man in believing” that the arrestee had violated the law
- stating that the question of whether a reasonable officer could have believed that he had probable cause to arrest was question for the court, not the trier of fact, on the officers’ summary judgment motion on qualified immunity grounds
- stating that the question of whether a reasonable officer could have believed that he had probable cause to arrest was a question for the court, not the trier of fact, on defendants’ summary judgment motion on qualified immunity grounds
- holding that police officers were entitled to qualified immunity for an allegedly wrongful arrest because a reasonable officer could have believed that probable cause existed to arrest the plaintiff for making a threat on the President
Written by the judges who cited it.
The opinion
Justice Kennedy,
dissenting.
Petitioners in this case are agents of the Secret Service. Among the questions presented are the proper interpretation of 18 U. S. C. § 871 (a), which prohibits mail threats against the President, and the proper standard for summary *235 judgment on grounds of qualified immunity. Whether implied or expressed, our resolution of these questions will be parsed by the Service and by later courts. The importance of these questions suggests that we should not dispose of them in summary fashion.
For the reasons stated in today’s per curiam opinion and in the dissent by Judge Trott in the Court of Appeals, I must agree that the holding of the Court of Appeals is open to serious question. The majority opinion of that court seems not to have considered all of the facts on which the agents relied, in particular the statements made by Bryant and his responses (or nonresponses) to the agents’ questions. This calls in question its determination that qualified immunity has not been established on summary judgment.
To reverse in this case, however, the Court considers an issue on which some doubt has been expressed, which is whether the Court of Appeals applied the correct legal standard to resolve the qualified immunity issue on summary judgment. Two Members of the Court disagree with the statement in the per curiam opinion that the Court of Appeals misstated the law. See ante, at 227; ante, at 229 (Scalia, J., concurring in judgment); ante, at 234 (Stevens, J., dissenting). Given this disagreement, as well as the precedential weight that later courts will accord to all of the questions presented in the case and addressed here in express terms or by clear implication, the case does not lend itself to summary disposition. I would set the case for full briefing and oral argument.
For these reasons, I dissent from the judgment of summary reversal in this case.