Complex search and seizure case will go to trial in Syracuse

This is a police misconduct case against the Syracuse Police Department. The police raided the plaintiff's house and searched the place up and down, all without a warrant. Plaintiff was ultimately arrested. So we have a claim for unlawful search and seizure, false arrest, and malicious prosecution under the Fourteenth Amendment. The district court granted summary judgment on all claims, but the Court of Appeals reverses on most of the claims, which will go to trial.

The case is Alexander v. City of Syracuse, issued on March 14. This is a complex case: the ruling is 85 pages long, and the case was argued in October 2023. The facts are ugly. According the decision, a young woman suffered a brutal sexual assault at the plaintiff's house the night before. The police barged into the house and stayed there for 12.5 hours. Then after later getting a warrant, the police returned and found drugs in the house, prompting plaintiff's arrest. 

Plaintiff has a case because the police had a chance to obtain a warrant before they entered the house but did not do so. The Court of Appeals (Lee and Robinson, with Judge Newman in dissent) holds there were no exigent circumstances that permit police entry into the house without obtaining a warrant. There may have been a brutal sexual assault the night before, but that does not mean violent activity was taking place when the police decided to enter the house, or that someone was in the process of destroying evidence. The warrants rules, especially under settled law, hold police to a strict framework when they want to enter your house with a warrant. Under the law, a man's home is his castle. The Second Circuit says the police never explained why they did not get a warrant that night.

We have an interesting dissent. Judge Newman views the case from an entirely different angle, stating that plaintiff was operating a prostitution business from his house and sold narcotics, and a 19 year-old was brutally raped the night before the police showed up. Plaintiff was apparently her pimp. You do not want to read the details of what happened to this women, but the dissent's point is that the police reasonably believed they had to enter the house right away after what had happened to this woman. Here is how Judge Newman wraps up his dissent: 

Alexander’s house was a den of prostitution, a base for selling narcotics, and the scene of a brutal rape committed against a teenager, for whom Alexander was the pimp, when he was in the living room while the rape was being committed in the basement. The prospect that Alexander will have an opportunity to require a conscientious police detective to pay him money damages is a bizarre result that even Kafka could not have imagined.

Dissents like this -- decrying the possibility that an undeserving plaintiff may recover money from a public defendant -- are rare, but they are not uncommon. I recall a decision from 1999 when another Second Circuit judge bemoaned how a Section 1983 plaintiff who suffered little damages was able to force a municipality to a costly trial. That case was Amato v. City of Saratoga Springs. 

The concurrence in Amato was written by a conservative judge, but a liberal judge wrote the dissent in Alexander. These judges are not always predictable. What I draw from the dissent is that there is no official way to resolve any case, particularly one brought under the Constitution, where the legal standards are judge-made and therefore draw from case law, which may have different interpretations. Think about it: a different judicial panel could have ruled for the City in this appeal. Even a liberal judge who might ordinarily sympathize with the plaintiff will rule against the plaintiff if they feel strongly about it.