No qualified immunity for officer

Where a member of a regional drug task force’s informant was unable to identify a woman from a photograph and did not take additional investigative steps to solidify the identification before taking the case to the grand jury, he lacked probable cause to arrest her.

Background

In the fall of 2013, David Cressell, who was then a member of a regional drug task force, utilized a confidential informant to purchase a small amount of Diazepam from a female resident of Pulaski County. Based on information provided by a colleague, Cressell concluded that the person who sold the Diazepam was Linda Trail. The person who actually sold the Diazepam to Cressell’s was not Trail; at the time of the sale, she was living in North Carolina.

Ten months later, Cressell presented his case to a local grand jury, naming Linda Trail as the individual who had unlawfully distributed drugs to his informant. The grand jury returned an indictment against Trail, and an arrest warrant was later entered into a national database.

A little over three years later, police officers in North Carolina arrested Trail on the Virginia warrant. Trail was incarcerated at a local jail in North Carolina for approximately one week before deputies from Pulaski County transported her back to Virginia. Approximately 24 hours after arriving in Virginia, a conscientious sheriff’s deputy determined that Linda Trail was not the person who had committed the offense described in the indictment and secured her release.

Trail filed this civil rights action against Cressell, alleging he violated her constitutional rights by arresting her without probable cause. Cressell moves for summary judgment under the doctrine of qualified immunity, arguing that he should be shielded from civil liability because he had probable cause to secure an indictment against Trail and therefore did not violate her constitutional rights.

Analysis

Reviewing the evidence in the record in the light most favorable to Trail, the court cannot conclude that Cressell had information from which a reasonable and prudent police officer could conclude there was probable cause to support her arrest.

Cressell testified that, when his informant was unable to identify Trail from the DMV photograph as the person who had sold the nerve pills, this gave him pause that he had identified the correct person. Cressell did not take any additional investigative steps to solidify the identification before proceeding to the grand jury.

While it is true that “an investigating officer need not exhaust every potential avenue of investigation, [he] must still conduct some sort of investigation and assemble individualized facts that link the suspect to the crime.” Based on the discrepancies known to him at the time—the different first names and the informant’s failure to identify Trail from the photograph—an investigative officer, exercising reasonable diligence, would have done more to solidify the preliminary conclusion that Trail was, in fact, the correct target.

Cressell argues he had sufficient probable cause based on the information Det. Grim communicated to him, and that he was not required to take any additional investigative steps. In support of this contention, he relies on the fact that he had “very similar first names, same last name, same boyfriend, information about a medical condition and same location for what he thought was one woman.”

But this argument, though appealing on its face, misses the mark. Under a totality-of-the-circumstances analysis and in light of Cressell’s failure to perform basic investigative tasks to determine the identity of his target, the court cannot conclude, as a matter of law, that probable cause existed justifying a grant of qualified immunity and, effectively, final judgment in favor of the defendant.

In addition, the court presumes, as it should under the Rule 56 standard, that Cressell failed to inform the grand jury of key facts that would have negated its finding of probable cause and, accordingly, that the independent probable-cause determination in this case does not trigger the usual protection of qualified immunity. Finally, the law on these issues—whether an individual with a name similar to the name of a suspected drug dealer and who has not been identified by anyone with knowledge of the drug sale—was undoubtedly clear at the time of the events in question.

Defendant’s motion for summary judgment denied.

Trail v. Cressell, Case No. 19-cv-00191, Oct. 13, 2020. WDVA at Roanoke (Cullen). VLW 020-3-519. 21 pp.