US Supreme Court Stanton v. Sims 12-1217

Decision here.

   Stanton was a cop in California who was responding to a call of a disturbance involving a baseball bat.  While we was arriving, he saw a few people leaving the area.  Finding one of them (who was hurrying towards a nearby house) suspicious, he ordered that person to stop.  That person looked at him, but ignored his order and ran through a gate into a yard with a taller-than-six-foot privacy fence.

   Stanton kicked the gate open.  Unfortunately, Sims (who was the owner of the property behind the fence, but who was not the person Stanton was chasing) was standing just on the other side of the fence.  He was injured, and he sued Stanton.

   The district court granted Stanton qualified immunity.  The Ninth Circuit reversed, holding that Stanton had violated Sims' clearly-established constitutional right by pursuing a misdemeanor suspect into his yard without first obtaining a warrant.  I'm not even kidding, that was their decision.

   Stanton appealed to the Supreme Court, where the Ninth Circuit was reversed again.  The court chose not to decide whether or not it was constitutional for Stanton to enter Sims' yard without a warrant, but simply pointed out that the question was far from being beyond debate.  Hot pursuit of fleeing felons is recognized as a reason to chase someone into their (or a) house, but different jurisdictions have different opinions about whether the same can be said of misdemeanors.  Some of those decisions turned on circumstances other than just the seriousness of the offense.  The decisions which the Ninth relied on in finding that the law was clearly established weren't all that on point, and the Supreme Court even dug up some California cases which suggested that it isn't really significant to hot pursuit whether the underlying offense is a misdemeanor or felony.

   So although this is one of those sometimes aggravating deciding-not-to-decide cases, the court did say that the issue of misdemeanor hot pursuits is still up for grabs, and therefore Stanton was entitled to qualified immunity after all.