Court: No Immunity For Cops Who Waited Months To Test Heart Shaped Candy They Claimed Were Drugs
We know cops often can't differentiate innocuous substances from actual drugs. These from-the-hip determinations are just the manufacturing of reasonable suspicion and probable cause, something that allows cops to perform the searches and seizures they were planning to do anyway.
Whether it's the odor of marijuana" (something that can rarely be objectively examined in court) or shitty, cheap drug tests that think bird poop/cotton candy/drywall dust are illegal substances, cops almost always find a way to start searching and seizing. Then there are drug dogs, which are just as prone to respond to their handler's prompts as to the actual odor of drugs.
This is all supposed to be backstopped by actual lab tests, which will determine whether or not the training and experience" hunch was on the money. But even the drug labs are often broken. When freedom is on the line, it often appears law enforcement officers consider extended stays in local jails to just be the unfortunate side effect of the existence of the criminal element. If you were truly innocent, you wouldn't have been pulled over... or whatever.
Every so often, a court rights the wrongs the never-ending War on Drugs has created. The Third Circuit Court of Appeals [PDF] doesn't see anything warranting reversal (at least not at this point) in a case where cops pretended something was drugs and prosecutors pretended to not know any better for months after finding out what the cops seized wasn't drugs.
Fernando Saint-Jean, a Haitian-born US citizen, was pulled over by a Palisades, NJ police officer while returning from a family birthday party. The officer claimed the window tint was too dark and Saint-Jean was driving too slowly. Rather than address the alleged moving violations, Officer Michael Holland, along with the later-arriving Officer Fabricio Salazar, ordered Saint-Jean and his uncle out of the car. After a third officer arrived, Officer Holland talked Saint-Jean into consenting to a search of his vehicle.
The officers dug around for a bit before retrieving this supposed contraband.
In searching a storage compartment between the two front seats, the officers found three small, sealable plastic bags containing several heart-shaped objects. Those objects had the appearance of Valentine's Day candies, but Valentine's Day was two-and-a-half months earlier, and the officers suspected that the items were actually controlled substances - MDMA or ecstasy.
Apparently it's suspicious to not immediately consume any and all holiday-related candy one might obtain. Who knows what time period is considered acceptable for candy consumption, but this fell outside the parameters set by these officers' extensive training on holiday candy possession timeframes. Saint-Jean explained a co-worker had given him the candy and even offered to put the officers in touch with her. They refused to consider the most reasonable explanation for the candy's existence. They handcuffed Saint-Jean and took him to the police station.
This all could have been cleared up fairly quickly but the officers weren't interested in clearing things up.
The intake process at the police station included photographing and fingerprinting Saint-Jean; it did not involve administering any tests on the small, heart-shaped objects. Despite not testing the suspected drugs or calling Saint-Jean's coworker, two officers, Holland and Richard Dey, initiated legal proceedings against Saint-Jean. Those included a traffic summons and a criminal summons for possessing a controlled substance...
The drug charge didn't stick. Before his initial appearance, prosecutors downgraded the charge to disorderly person" (which still makes no sense given his cooperation with the candy-seeking officers). Two months after his initial appearance, the candy was tested by a New Jersey forensic lab. The final determination? It was candy.
Even though prosecutors received the report clearing Saint-Jean of alleged drug possession, they didn't drop the final charge against him until four months later.
The lower court granted absolute immunity to the prosecutors. However, it refused to extend immunity to the officers, both under New Jersey law as well as under federal law. The lower court also gave Saint-Jean a chance to amend his complaint to address deficiencies in his original lawsuit. Saint-Jean did so. While this was still under examination by the lower court, the officers appealed to the Third Circuit, seeking to overturn the lower court's refusal to extend immunity.
You're jumping the gun, says the Third Circuit - something that appears to be the officers' standard m.o. There's nothing to be appealed yet because the new complaint still needs a response from the officers, even if they plan to use pretty much the same arguments in hopes of getting the case dismissed.
[E]ven if this Court were to rule on qualified immunity now, the District Court would still need to compare the original complaint with the amended complaint and analyze whether the appellate ruling would apply after Saint-Jean's amendments. Due to the need for that subsequent comparison of the pleadings, immediate appellate review of the order would not conclusively determine the officers' entitlement to qualified immunity.
The officers will have to wait until the lower court rules before they can once again claim any reasonable officer that ignored the pretext of a stop to coerce a person into submitting to a search of their car - a search that only produced bags of candy the officers couldn't even be bothered to submit to a cheap field test - could not possibly know that this extended string of officious, freedom-threatening bullshit might violate Saint-Jean's Constitutional rights.
Good luck with that. The traffic stop occurred three years after the Supreme Court ruled that extending a traffic stop without reasonable suspicion violates the Fourth Amendment. And there doesn't seem to be anything on the record that suggests the officer that pulled over Saint-Jean had any reasonable suspicion he was carrying contraband in his car. He was compliant, provided a reasonable explanation for his travels, and - on top of everything else - submitted to a search. All of that is going to come into play when this is revisited and it's hard to believe the extension of this stop was justified by anything Saint-Jean did. But never count a court out when it comes to QI. Sometimes they're able to snatch cop victories from apparent defeat.