stating that qualified immunity “protects government officials from liability for civil damages insofar as their conduct does not violate clearly established statutory or constitutional rights of which a reasonable person would have known,” should provide “government officials breathing room to make reasonable but mistaken judgments,” and should protect “all but the plainly incompetent or those who knowingly violate the law”
How later courts described this case
- stating that qualified immunity “protects government officials from liability for civil damages insofar as their conduct does not violate clearly established statutory or constitutional rights of which a reasonable person would have known,” should provide “government officials breathing room to make reasonable but mistaken judgments,” and should protect “all but the plainly incompetent or those who knowingly violate the law”
- holding that “[e]ven if the scope of the warrant were overbroad in authorizing a search for all guns when there was information only about a specific one,” under the circumstances, “it would not have been unreasonable for an officer to conclude that there was a fair probability that the [described gun] was not the only firearm [the accused] owned” (internal quotation marks omitted)
- concluding that officers’ reliance on a warrant to search for “all firearms and firearm-related materials” as well as gang-related materials was reasonable where the affidavit set forth that the suspect was a known gang member who had fired a sawed-off shotgun at a victim, irrespective of whether these allegations actually established probable cause for the full scope of the search
- explaining that though an officer is not automatically entitled to qualified immunity for seeking a warrant unsupported by probable cause simply because a magistrate approved the application, the fact that an officer is able to secure approval is “certainly pertinent” in assessing whether he could have held a reasonable belief that the warrant was supported by probable cause.
Written by the judges who cited it.
Distinguished
Distinguished by United States v. Harry Katzin, 732 F.3d 187 (2013)
) However, Messerschmidt is inapposite.
The opinion
Justice Breyer,
concurring.
The Court concludes that the officers acted reasonably in searching the house for “‘all firearms and firearm-related items/” Ante, at 548 (emphasis deleted). In support of *557 this conclusion, it cites two sets of circumstances. First, the majority points to “Bowen’s possession of one illegal gun, his gang membership, his willingness to use the gun to kill someone, and his concern about the police . . . Ante, at 549. Second, the majority notes that “[a] reasonable officer also could believe that seizure of the firearms was necessary to prevent further assaults on Kelly,” because “Bowen had already attempted to murder Kelly once with a firearm, and had yelled ‘I’ll kill you’ as she tried to escape from him.” Ibid. In my view, given all these circumstances together, the officers could reasonably have believed that the scope of their search was supported by probable cause. On that basis, I concur.