That which a district court judge called “murky” is crystal clear now, thanks to a 4th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals decision that establishes reasonable suspicion as the standard needed under the Fourth Amendment for arresting a probationer.
Until the April 28 decision in Jones v. Chandrasuwan, the laws regarding searching a probationer were much more comprehensible than those regulating arrest. The court noted that while the constitutionality of suspicionless searches of probationers is an “open question,” their seizure is not.
“The privacy interests and governmental interests implicated in arrests and searches are sufficiently different to foreclose the possibility of a constitutional suspicionless arrest of a probationer,” Judge Henry Floyd wrote for the unanimous panel.
The ruling may have come too late to benefit plaintiff Stanley Jones, however, as the court found that while his Fourth Amendment rights were violated, the right at issue had not yet been “clearly established.”
Probation, costs and fines
In 2009, Jones, then a 29-year-old Greensboro high school teacher, was charged with two counts of taking indecent liberties with a student. He resigned and began working as a salesman for a local Prime Communications office, where he was promoted and, in 2010, transferred to Augusta, Georgia.
In July 2010, Jones pleaded guilty in state court and received a suspended sentence and 24 months of probation. According to court documents, one of the conditions of that probation was that Jones pay $471.50 in court costs and fines. His probation officer was to create the schedule for payment.
Under the Interstate Compact for Adult Offender Supervision, Jones was allowed to transfer his supervision to Georgia, though North Carolina would retain jurisdiction over any subsequent probation revocation.
North Carolina was also responsible for collecting any fines imposed and notifying the Georgia Compact office of noncompliance. Georgia would then inform Jones that he was violating the conditions of his probation.
After pleading guilty, Jones met with Latonia Williams, a judicial services coordinator at the Greensboro probation office, where he applied for supervision transfer and signed a DCC-2 form used to schedule payment of financial obligations. But according to the court’s opinion, the form was incomplete, lacking the payment rate, due date and total amount of obligation. At that time, the Department of Community Corrections had not yet received the criminal judgment and was therefore unable to establish the parameters of supervision.
State law dictates that probationers “must be given a written statement explicitly setting forth the conditions on which he is being released,” a requirement that Floyd said has been read “quite strictly” by North Carolina courts.
“While [state law] allows a court to delegate to a probation officer the responsibility to determine a payment schedule, it does not give the probation officer the discretion to not set a payment plan or to not provide that payment plan in writing to the defendant,” Floyd wrote.
Jones’s attorney, S. Luke Largess of Tin, Fulton, Walker & Owen in Charlotte, said this was a case of the probation terms being unclear, not his client refusing to comply.
“If it were in writing, he would’ve paid it,” Floyd said. “He got the bill of cost and it said that the money had to be paid by July 7 … and that’s why he understood that that’s when the money was due.”
Moving on up
Just months after arriving in Augusta, Jones was promoted again and transferred to Savannah, Georgia. Records show that Georgia authorities never reported any violations of his probation.
Pursuant to DCC policy that requires a 180-day review prior to a probationer’s discharge, in January 2012, DCC employee Jay Lynn conducted that review and discovered that Jones had failed to pay any of the costs and fines imposed by the court.
On Jan. 25, 2012, the North Carolina Compact district coordinator Karl Waller sent a Compact Action Request to his Georgia counterpart instructing Jones to pay the costs and fines by Feb. 1.
On Feb. 9, with the fines still unpaid, Jones’s Savannah probation officer introduced him to the local Compact representative, who informed him of the unpaid money.
Jones said that he knew he still owed money and that it was his understanding that it needed to be paid in full before he was discharged from probation in July.
Jones agreed to pay the fines by the end of the month, and his probation file in North Carolina was forwarded to appellee Lanna Chandrasuwan, a Greensboro probation officer.
Court documents show that Chandrasuwan unsuccessfully tried to reach Jones by phone on March 8 when the fines remained unpaid. On March 12, she prepared a violation report alleging that Jones violated probation by failing to timely pay the fines. She sent Jones a letter informing him that he needed to contact her or return to Greensboro within two weeks to pay the fine.
Chandrasuwan received no response and on March 26 filed the violation report with the clerk of court.
The next day her letter to Jones—mailed to his Augusta address—was returned. Chandrasuwan added to the violation report that Jones had absconded, and obtained an arrest warrant.
Floyd noted in the court’s opinion that the conclusion that Jones was avoiding supervision was reached “without contacting Compact officials or the Georgia probation office.”
“It seems especially odd,” Floyd wrote in a footnote, “that Appellees … would not contact the Georgia Compact office to determine Jones’s whereabouts, especially when they knew Georgia probation officials had been in contact with Jones only a month earlier.”
U.S. Marshals arrested Jones at his home on May 1. The next day, his wife paid the fines in full. Jones was released from custody May 8, but not before being terminated from his job because he couldn’t work during his incarceration.
Jones filed suit in March 2013, alleging violations of his Fourth Amendment rights and for malicious prosecution. The case was moved to federal court, where a district court judge granted the appellees summary judgment on the grounds of qualified immunity.
Lowering the standard
On appeal, the 4th Circuit considered both prongs of the qualified immunity test. An affirmative defense to liability, qualified immunity protects government officials unless they violate a “statutory or constitutional right that was clearly established at the time of the challenged conduct.”
“After thinking hard about it twice, we determine that the two-step procedure is appropriate in this case in order to clearly establish the standard that probation officers must meet in order to arrest a probationer who allegedly violated the conditions of his probation,” Floyd wrote.
While the Fourth Amendment protects citizens against unreasonable searches and seizures, law provides only “conditional liberty” to probationers, based on reasonableness and the degree to which a search or seizure intrudes on an individual’s privacy versus its necessity in promoting legitimate governmental interests.
In 2001’s U.S. v. Knights, the Supreme Court held that reasonable suspicion that a probationer is engaging in criminal activity is sufficient to deem a warrantless search reasonable. But citing Segura v. United States, a 1984 ruling stating that different interests are implicated by seizures than searches, the 4th Circuit found that those interests are different enough to “foreclose the possibility of a constitutional suspicionless arrest of a probationer.”
Floyd noted the two primary goals of probation—rehabilitation and protecting society from future criminal violations—in writing that suspicionless arrests do little to advance those goals while arresting probationers reasonably believed to be in violation do advance them.
Balancing the interests of the government and the individual, Floyd wrote that a degree of suspicion less than probable cause is appropriate and satisfies the Constitution.
“Relying on Knights, we hold that reasonable suspicion in the arrest context is present when there is a sufficiently high probability that a probationer has violated the terms of his probation to make the intrusion on the individual’s privacy interest reasonable,” he wrote.
University of South Carolina School of Law professor Seth Stoughton called the lower standard a “pretty big change in doctrine,” despite case law that seemingly OKs a degree of suspicion lower than probable cause for probationers.
“Reducing the quantum of proof that’s needed to make a custodial arrest from probable cause to reasonable suspicion is a pretty big deal,” Stoughton said. “Even though the court restricts that to probationers, there’s been really no argument in Fourth Amendment jurisprudence that a custodial arrest requires less than probable cause.”
Win, lose or draw?
With the new standard established, the court closely but unanimously found that the appellees had no reasonable suspicion under which to arrest Jones. As noted earlier, the court held that there were insufficient attempts to contact Jones regarding payment of the fines and also that since Jones never received a written payment plan regarding the fines, that condition of his probation was unenforceable.
Without existing precedent regarding the standard, however, the court ruled that Jones’s right had not been clearly established.
“Although we find that Appellees violated Jones’s Fourth Amendment rights, we affirm the district court’s conclusion that they are entitled to qualified immunity because the right at issue was not clearly established at the time Appellees sought Jones’s arrest,” Floyd wrote.
The ruling was bittersweet for Largess, Jones’s attorney.
“The frustration in this case from a lawyer’s perspective is that the court finds that … the arrests were clearly unlawful but they weren’t clearly unconstitutional because the law hadn’t been clearly established as to what the standard was,” he said. “I tried to persuade the court that the unlawfulness of the arrest was apparent and that’s all the officers needed to know, but they didn’t agree with me.”
The 23-page decision is Jones v. Chandrasuwan (Lawyers Weekly No. 001-079-16). A digest of the opinion is available online at sclawyersweekly.com.
Follow Heath Hamacher on Twitter @SCLWHamacher