False arrest in the mental health context yields qualified immunity for the police officers

This false arrest case involves the police arresting the mother of an autistic young man who was taken into custody to see if he required adult protective services. The mother got herself arrested for trespass after she kept showing up to the hospital where her son was being evaluated. Eventually, the mother was taken in for a psychiatric evaluation but was released three hours later without being charged with any crime. The trial court said the mother has a false arrest claim, but the Court of Appeals grants the officers qualified immunity, and the case is over.

The case is Guan v. City of New York, issued on June 17. The hospital admitted the son for an emergency psychiatric evaluation, and the mother insisted that she see her son because of his disability, autism, and how he might react to the evaluation. She was kicked out of the hospital but she returned. Defendants say she was screaming in the emergency room. It got so bad that the mother was taken to a separate hospital for an evaluation. Upon her release, she sued for false arrest.

Probable cause is a defense to any false arrest claim. That's probable cause to believe the plaintiff caused a crime. But in the mental health context, probable cause exists when the police reasonably believe a person is dangerous to herself or others. That's the rule in this case. Making it harder to win these cases, qualified immunity is available to the police if they have "arguable probable cause," where they reasonably but mistakenly think they have probable cause based on the facts known to them at the time. This is a forgiving standard for the police. 

The police had probable cause to take in the mother for a mental health evaluation. The Court of Appeals (Chin, Pooler and Carney) does not determine whether probable cause actually existed, as they find instead the police have qualified immunity. That immunity attaches if the police did not violate clearly-established law, as determined through Supreme Court and Second Circuit case law. 

In 2017, when plaintiff was arrested, no case at that point held that police officers could not arrest someone for a mental health arrest when probable cause existed for a criminal arrest, without an additional finding of dangerousness. Here, there was probable cause to arrest the mother for trespass. The tricky part is that the Court says that while there was probable cause for a trespass arrest, the officers needed reason to believe she also was a danger to herself or others to make the emergency mental health evaluation. That reasoning helps people going forward, but it does not help plaintiff, but that legal principle was not in place when this case arose in 2017. Since the state of the law was not clear at the time, the officers were not on notice they were violating plaintiff's constitutional rights, and she therefore cannot sue them.