Around 5 p.m. on a Wednesday in June 2022, Mario Rosales was driving his red Mustang on Jackson Street in Alexandria, Louisiana, waiting to turn left onto Dorchester Drive, when a police SUV pulled up behind him. After the traffic light turned green and Rosales made his turn, Officers Samuel Terrell and Jim Lewis activated their lights and pulled him over.
The officers later claimed Rosales had “failed to signal” his turn. But as dashcam video showed, that was not true: The Mustang’s left-turn signal was blinking as Rosales waited at the intersection. And after stopping Rosales and his girlfriend, Gracie Lasyone, who was sitting in the front passenger seat, Terrell and Lewis detained them for 21 minutes, during which the cops asked if there was anything illegal in the car, grilled them about drug use, frisked Rosales, instructed him to empty his pockets, and gave him and Lasyone the Miranda warning that typically accompanies an arrest.
Rosales and Lasyone sued Terrell and Lewis in federal court that November, arguing that the officers had violated their Fourth Amendment rights under color of law. Terrell and Lewis claimed they were protected by qualified immunity, a doctrine that bars such lawsuits unless they allege violations of “clearly established” law. A federal judge disagreed, and last week the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 5th Circuit upheld that decision, concluding that Rosales and Lasyone’s allegations were sufficient to defeat qualified immunity at this stage of the case.
That ruling by a unanimous three-judge panel is striking for two reasons. It illustrates the limits of the broad leeway that the Supreme Court has given police officers to stop and interrogate motorists. It also illustrates the limits of qualified immunity, which in many cases has prevented victims of outrageous police misconduct from pursuing constitutional claims because they were unable to cite sufficiently specific precedents.
In the 1968 case Terry v. Ohio, the Supreme Court ruled that police may stop someone when they reasonably suspect he is involved in criminal activity and may frisk him if they reasonably suspect he is “armed and dangerous.” Three decades later in Whren v. United States, the Court said reasonable suspicion of a traffic violation is enough to justify stopping a car, even when that allegation is a pretext for an unrelated criminal investigation. And when a traffic stop is legally justified, the Court has held in other cases, police may question the driver about unrelated matters and may order both the driver and any passengers out of the car in the interest of officer safety.
The impact of those rulings was clear when Terrell and Lewis pulled over Rosales and Lasyone. The cops ordered both of them to exit the car, and they interrogated them about their places of residence, itineraries, criminal histories, and personal habits.
