Facts
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In November 2020, the Rosenberg, Texas Police Department received a report that a group of armed suspects had pointed a firearm at several bystanders. The report included a description of the suspects’ vehicle: a white Dodge Charger with black rims and tinted windows. Less than ten minutes later, Officer Adam Vasquez, observed a car matching the vehicle’s description near the location of the reported incident. Officer Vasquez pulled the car over and radioed for backup. Officers John Clausen, Matthew Newport, Arthur Love, and John Delgado responded to Officer Vasquez’s request for backup and arrived within several minutes.
Because the report had indicated the presence of multiple armed suspects, the officers elected to proceed with a high-risk vehicle stop. As part of the department’s standard procedure for such stops, Officer Vasquez directed the occupants of the Dodge Charger to throw the car keys out the vehicle’s window. The Officers then directed the occupants of the vehicle to step out of the car one at a time, slowly approach the Officers, and be handcuffed for the duration of the stop. Officers Vasquez and Clausen recorded the stop on their body cameras.
Unbeknownst to the Officers, plaintiffs Regina Armstead and Michael Lewis, an elderly couple, were the car’s only occupants. Lewis had a stent implanted in his left forearm to accomplish dialysis. According to Lewis, placing anything, including a pair of handcuffs, on Lewis’s left arm risked damaging the stent.
Police first ordered Armstead, who was driving, to exit the vehicle and approach them. She complied with their instructions. As she did, she informed Officer Newport that her husband was a dialysis patient. Police then ordered Lewis to leave the car and approach them, which he did. Officer Love handcuffed Lewis. Here, Lewis’s account diverges from that of the Officers. Lewis states that he told the Officers he could not have anything placed on his left arm both when he left his car and again immediately after he was handcuffed. The police contend that they only learned of Lewis’s condition after he was handcuffed.
Based on video footage of the incident, Lewis appeared to be in some discomfort after being handcuffed; he grunted and winced on his way to the police car. After Officer Love secured Lewis in the back of a squad car, the Officers demanded that any remaining passengers exit the Dodge Charger. When no one else emerged, the Officers approached the car, verified the absence of weapons or other passengers, and secured the scene. Within four minutes, the police removed Lewis’s handcuffs. Including the time it took police to secure the scene, Lewis remained in handcuffs for about six minutes.
After the incident, Lewis experienced pain in his wrist. At his next dialysis appointment, he discovered that his stent had been damaged. To repair the stent, Lewis underwent surgery. In August 2022, Lewis and Armstead filed suit on various claims, including an excessive force claim. The district court granted qualified immunity on all claims except Lewis’s excessive force claim against the five defendant Officers. The district court denied qualified immunity for the excessive force claim, finding a genuine dispute of material fact existed about when Lewis informed the Officers about his condition. The Officers appealed. The 5th reversed.
Analysis
Lewis and the Officers dispute whether the Officers had advance notice of Lewis’s condition, either from Lewis and Armstead’s statements to the officers or Lewis’s expressions of discomfort. Regardless, with or without notice, the Officers’ conduct does not amount to a violation of clearly established law. The district court should have granted qualified immunity to the Officers.
To show that the Officers violated a clearly established right, Lewis cites several precedents from this court. The facts in these cases bear little resemblance to the case at issue here. In Deville, during a routine traffic stop, police broke the plaintiff’s car window, pulled her from her vehicle, threw her against the side of her car, and then applied tight handcuffs. The plaintiff suffered significant injuries to her wrists, abdomen, jaw, and head, prompting the court to deny qualified immunity. A few years before, in Heitschmidt, the plaintiff suffered serious and permanent injury to his wrists after police left him in handcuffs for four and a half hours, ignoring his repeated complaints that the handcuffs were too tight. Based on those facts, the court denied qualified immunity.
Neither Deville nor Heitschmidt looks anything like this case. The force applied in each case was significantly greater in either degree or duration than the force used by the Officers here. On top of that, neither case involved a high-risk stop or a search for armed suspects, during which officers face a pressing need to secure the scene quickly. In contrast, the Officers restrained Lewis for six minutes while searching for a group of armed suspects. Taken together, the exigency created by the high-risk stop, the short duration of the handcuffing, and the minimal force applied mean that the Officers’ conduct did not run afoul of Deville or Heitschmidt.
Unable to point to a case with facts closely analogous to those at issue here, Lewis turns to the more general principle in this court’s case law that police can use only minimal force on compliant suspects. Once again, though, the cases Lewis cites involve a far greater degree of force than the defendant Officers applied here. See Guedry (finding qualified immunity inappropriate where officers struck a mostly compliant suspect with a baton thirteen times and tased him three times during a traffic stop); Cooper (denying qualified immunity where an officer did not prevent a K9 unit from biting a DUI suspect for several minutes); Bush (rejecting a qualified immunity defense where an officer allegedly shoved the plaintiff’s head against a car window hard enough to break two of her teeth after she was already handcuffed); Ramirez (refusing to grant qualified immunity where police repeatedly tased someone who did not match the suspect’s description). This array of inapposite precedent falls far short of demonstrating that every reasonable officer would have concluded the defendant Officers acted unconstitutionally in this case. Moreover, none of these cases involves a question whether officers were aware of preexisting health problems that rendered a plaintiff more susceptible to injury.
Aside from being handcuffed for under six minutes, Lewis did not complain about the handcuffs or tell the Officers he was in pain. Indeed, Lewis did not exhibit any discomfort other than briefly grunting and wincing as an officer helped him to his feet after handcuffing him.
Finally, that Lewis remained in handcuffs for four minutes after the Officers had secured the scene does not render qualified immunity inapplicable. Despite casting a wide net, Lewis turns up no cases sufficiently close to the facts here to describe a clearly established right that these Officers violated. Even if the Officers had notice of Lewis’s health condition, they lacked notice that handcuffing Lewis would violate the law. None of our cases prohibit briefly handcuffing a suspect during a high-risk stop while officers strive to secure the scene, even if it takes the officers a few minutes to remove the cuffs once the scene is secure. Lewis has thus failed to refute the Officers’ qualified immunity defense. Because the absence of clearly established law is dispositive, we do not separately assess whether the Officers’ actions constituted excessive force under the Fourth Amendment.
Qualified immunity is appropriate here, and that finding does not require us to resolve disputes of material fact. Accordingly, we REVERSE the district court’s denial of qualified immunity.
https://www.ca5.uscourts.gov/opinions/pub/24/24-20484-CV0.pdf