Qualified Immunity

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7^th Circuit Court of Appeals

Case Name: Marcus D. Torry, et al. v. City of Chicago, et al.

Case No.: 18-1935

Officials: KANNE, BARRETT, and BRENNAN, Circuit Judges.

Focus: Qualified Immunity

One afternoon in 2014, three Chicago police officers stopped three black men in a grey sedan to investigate a nearby shooting that had happened a few hours earlier. When the passengers sued the officers a year later, none of the officers remembered the Terry stop. Lacking recall, they relied on other evidence to show that reasonable suspicion had existed for it. Cell phone footage taken by one of the plaintiffs during the encounter depicted Sergeant Robert King, the officer who initiated the stop, citing the plaintiffs’ suspicious behavior in the area of the shooting as the reason that he had pulled them over. And a police report showed that dispatches to officers investigating the shooting, including King, identified the suspects as three black men in a grey car. The descriptions of the car’s model varied, and none was an exact match for the car that the plaintiffs were driving. But reasonable suspicion can exist without an exact match, and the district court held that these descriptions were close enough to justify the Terry stop. In any event, the court said, the officers were entitled to qualified immunity because the stop did not violate clearly established law.

Before us, the plaintiffs have repeatedly suggested that the defendants’ failure of memory is a concession of liability. In other words, they maintain that if a police officer doesn’t remember a stop now, reasonable suspicion could not have justified it at the time. But the Fourth Amendment does not govern how an officer proves that he had reasonable suspicion for a Terry stop; he can rely on evidence other than his memory to establish what he knew when the stop occurred. The police report demonstrates that King knew that the suspects in the shooting had been identified as three black men driving a grey car, and the cell-phone video shows him giving the shooting as the reason for the stop. We agree with the district court that the officers are entitled to qualified immunity.

Affirmed

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Derek A Hawkins is trademark corporate counsel for Harley-Davidson. Hawkins oversees the prosecution and maintenance of the Harley-Davidson’s international trademark portfolio in emerging markets.