Cox v. Cache County , 664 F. App'x 703 ( 2016 )

FILED
United States Court of Appeals
UNITED STATES COURT OF APPEALS Tenth Circuit
FOR THE TENTH CIRCUIT November 2, 2016
_________________________________
Elisabeth A. Shumaker
Clerk of Court
DARREN E. COX; COX HONEY OF
UTAH, LLC, a Utah limited liability
company,
Plaintiffs - Appellants,
No. 14-4123
v. (D.C. No. 1:08-CV-00124-CW)
(D. Utah)
CACHE COUNTY, a Utah municipal
corporation; BOX ELDER COUNTY, a
Utah municipal corporation; MARTIN
JAMES, individually and in his official
capacity as county bee inspector of Cache
County and Box Elder County; ELMER
JAMES, an individual; SOLARTRAC,
INC., d/b/a Slide Ridge Honey, a Utah
corporation,
Defendants - Appellees.
_________________________________
ORDER AND JUDGMENT*
_________________________________
Before BRISCOE, EBEL, and BACHARACH, Circuit Judges.
_________________________________
Plaintiff-Appellant Darren Cox, a Utah beekeeper, challenges the district
court’s determination that the county bee inspector, Defendant-Appellee Martin
James, was entitled to qualified immunity on Cox’s claim that James violated the
*
This order and judgment is not binding precedent, except under the doctrines
of law of the case, res judicata, and collateral estoppel. It may be cited, however, for
its persuasive value consistent with Fed. R. App. P. 32.1 and 10th Cir. R. 32.1.
Fourth Amendment when he inspected Cox’s apiary without a warrant. Having
jurisdiction under Fed. R. Civ. P. 54(b) and 28 U.S.C. § 1291, we AFFIRM.1
I. BACKGROUND
James is the bee inspector for both Cache and Box Elder Counties. When
James became the bee inspector in April 2007, Cox informed the Counties that James
could not inspect Cox’s apiaries. The Counties agreed, as did James.
In May 2007, James was in Box Elder County, near Fielding, Utah, moving
some of his own beehives because a nearby farmer was going to spray pesticide,
which can be harmful to bees. As James was leaving, he noticed some other hives in
a nearby field owned by Milton Williams. Williams was mowing grass nearby.
According to James, without first talking to Williams, James approached the hives in
order to determine who owned them, so James could warn the hive owner about the
pesticide spraying. After spending two or three minutes looking at the hives, the bees
started acting aggressively, so James returned to his truck and left.
Though located on Williams’s property, the hives belonged to Cox. Cox sued
Inspector James, among others, alleging a number of state and federal claims. There
is only one claim at issue here: Cox’s 42 U.S.C. § 1983 claim for damages against
James, in his individual capacity, alleging James violated the Fourth Amendment
when he “inspected” Cox’s beehives without a warrant. The district court held James
was entitled to qualified immunity on this claim and granted him summary judgment
1
Because a second appellant, Plaintiff Cox Honey, LLC, failed to establish its
standing to pursue this appeal, we dismiss Cox Honey as an appellant.
2
on that basis. Later, the district court denied Cox relief on his motion seeking
reconsideration. In this appeal, Cox challenges both the district court’s qualified
immunity decision and its denial of relief on reconsideration.
II. DISCUSSION
A. The district court did not err procedurally in granting James qualified
immunity
Cox contends that the district court abused its discretion in making several
procedural rulings. We disagree.
Cox first complains that the district court failed to notify him that the court
intended to convert James’s motion to dismiss, by which James invoked his qualified
immunity defense, into a Fed. R. Civ. P. 56 motion for summary judgment. But,
because it was Cox who initiated the conversion to summary judgment by relying on
facts and evidence outside the pleadings to oppose James’s qualified immunity
defense, Cox had actual notice that the court might convert the motion to dismiss into
one for summary judgment. See Arnold v. Air Midwest, Inc., 100 F.3d 857, 859 n.2
(10th Cir. 1996). Thus, Cox “is scarcely in a position to claim unfair surprise or
inequity.” Id.
Cox further asserts that the district court abused its discretion in not granting
his request, made during a hearing on James’s motion for qualified immunity, to file
a surreply to address new facts and legal arguments that James asserted for the first
time in his reply filed in support of qualified immunity. Having reviewed the
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transcript of the hearing on qualified immunity, however, we conclude Cox never
specifically requested to file a surreply.
B. The district court did not err in granting James qualified immunity
Cox next challenges the district court’s decision to grant James qualified
immunity. We review de novo a district court’s qualified immunity decision made in
the context of summary judgment, viewing the evidence in the light most favorable to
the non-moving party, here Cox. See Vasquez v. Lewis, —F.3d —, 2016 WL
4436144, at *2 (10th Cir. Aug. 23, 2016). Qualified immunity shields “government
officials performing discretionary functions . . . from liability for civil damages
insofar as their conduct does not violate clearly established statutory or constitutional
rights of which a reasonable person would have known.” Harlow v. Fitzgerald, 457
U.S. 800, 818 (1982.)
1. James’s challenged conduct fell within his discretionary authority
Cox argues that James is not entitled to invoke qualified immunity because
James failed to establish, as a threshold matter, that his challenged conduct in
approaching and looking at Cox’s apiary fell within James’s discretionary authority
as county bee inspector. See Elwell v. Byers, 699 F.3d 1208, 1212 n.3 (10th Cir.
2012). We reject this argument, agreeing with the district court’s conclusion “that
Mr. James was legitimately acting within his authority as a bee inspector” when he
attempted to identify the owner of the hives located on Milt Williams’s property in
order to warn the owner about the pesticide spraying (App. 895-96). More to the
point, it was not clearly established at that time that James’s challenged actions fell
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outside a bee inspector’s scope of authority under the Utah Bee Inspection Act. See
Better Gov’t Bureau, Inc. v. McGraw (In re Allen), 106 F.3d 582, 593-94 (4th Cir.
1997).
Cox further contends that James’s challenged conduct was outside the
authority provided by his employment contracts with the Counties because, in those
contracts, James had agreed not to inspect Cox’s apiaries. But Cox, in opposing
James’s motion for qualified immunity, presented no evidence that James knew the
hives belonged to Cox. The district court, therefore, correctly concluded that
Inspector James’s challenged conduct fell within his discretionary authority.
2. Cox failed to show that James violated Cox’s clearly established Fourth
Amendment rights
When a government official asserts a qualified immunity defense, as James
did, the burden shifts to the plaintiff—here, Cox—to establish that the government
official (1) violated the plaintiff’s constitutional or statutory right, and (2) that the
right was clearly established at the time of the conduct. See Culver v. Armstrong,
832 F.3d 1213, 1217 (10th Cir. 2016). Courts can address these two inquiries in any
order and, if the plaintiff fails to meet his burden on either inquiry, the government
official is entitled to qualified immunity. See Pearson v. Callahan, 555 U.S. 223,
227, 232, 236 (2009).
Here, we address only the second inquiry. Statutory or constitutional rights
are clearly established if there is “a Supreme Court or Tenth Circuit decision on
point, or the clearly established weight of authority from other courts . . . found the
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law to be as the plaintiff maintains.” Cordova v. City of Albuquerque, 816 F.3d 645,
658 (10th Cir. 2016) (internal quotation marks omitted). The Supreme Court has
warned against “defining clearly established law at a high level of generality.”
Mullenix v. Luna, 136 S. Ct. 305, 308 (2015) (internal quotation marks omitted).
Instead, “[t]he dispositive question is whether the violative nature of particular
conduct is clearly established.” Id. (internal quotation marks omitted). “This inquiry
must be undertaken in light of the specific context of the case, not as a broad general
proposition.” Id. (internal quotation marks omitted).
In considering the specific context of this case, we accept the parties’
concession made in the district court that there is a factual dispute as to whether
James opened the hives when he was trying to identify their owner. Viewing that
fact in the light most favorable to Cox, see Vasquez, 2016 WL 4436144, at *2,
therefore, we assume that James opened the hives. Even so, Cox has failed to meet
his burden of showing that, in the specific context of this case, James violated Cox’s
clearly established Fourth Amendment rights by opening a sealed bee hive—a
movable structure or container located in an open field—for the purpose of
identifying the hives’ owner in order to warn the owner of potential harm to the
hives.
The question whether James violated the Fourth Amendment by opening Cox’s
hives under these circumstances turns on a number of nuanced and largely unsettled
questions, in light of the fact that (1) the alleged search at issue here took place in an
“open field,” see Oliver v. United States, 466 U.S. 170, 176-81 (1984); (2) involved a
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structure that is movable rather than an attached fixture on real property; (3) occurred
without objection of the land owner, who was nearby; (4) was undertaken for the
purpose of identifying the owner of the hives; (5) in order to warn the owner so he
could protect his hives from possibly harmful pesticide spraying; and (6) any
“search” at issue here would have resulted from opening and looking into the hives in
order to determine the identity of the owner rather than a full-blown inspection of the
contents of the hives which, according to both parties, would have required the use of
a protective beekeeping suit and would have involved smoking the bees in order to
subdue them and then deconstructing the hive in order to obtain samples for testing.
We do not list here these difficult Fourth Amendment issues as a precursor to
deciding them. Instead, because these issues were inadequately briefed, both in the
district court and now on appeal, we decline to address them in order to decide
whether James violated Cox’s Fourth Amendment rights.
However, in light of the difficulty of these unsettled questions, we hold instead
that Cox failed to meet his burden of showing that James’s challenged conduct
violated clearly established Fourth Amendment rights. In addressing this question
before the district court, Cox asserted only that it was clearly established that a
warrantless search of commercial property was presumptively unreasonable. For that
proposition, he cited two Tenth Circuit cases, one involving the search of a
commercial office not open to the public, Mimics, Inc. v. Village of Angel Fire, 394
F.3d 836, 839-40, 842-45 (10th Cir. 2005), and the other addressing the search of an
industrial plant late at night because police discovered an open garage door at the
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plant, United States v. Bute, 43 F.3d 531, 532-33 (10th Cir. 1994). While generally
relevant, these two cases alone are insufficient to establish clearly that Inspector
James’s conduct at issue here, in opening a movable beehive located in an open field
for the purpose of identifying and warning the owner of possibly harmful pesticide
spraying, amounts to an unreasonable search under the Fourth Amendment. Cf.
Culver, 832 F.3d at 1218 (“Simply to say the law has long recognized one’s right to
be free from arrest absent probable cause casts way too high a level of generality
over our inquiry.”).
In support of his motion for reconsideration filed with the district court, Cox
instead relied upon a 1987 Sixth Circuit decision, Allinder v. Ohio, 808 F.2d 1180
(6th Cir. 1987), as clearly establishing that Cox had a reasonable expectation of
privacy in his hives sufficient to implicate Fourth Amendment protection. On appeal,
Cox again specifically relies only on Allinder. (He does assert on appeal that “there
is certainly enough precedent to clearly establish that a warrantless search of apiaries
violates the Fourth Amendment,” but fails to cite to any such authority. (Aplt. Br.
35.))
Allinder concluded that the Fourth Amendment protects apiaries, as personal
“effects,” from unreasonable searches. 808 F.2d at 1186. But, while the district
court in this case adopted Allinder’s reasoning to hold that the Fourth Amendment
applies to the search of an apiary located in an open field—an issue we do not
8
address here—Allinder, a lone and fairly old case from another circuit, cannot clearly
establish that conclusion as law in the Tenth Circuit.2 See Cordova, 816 F.3d at 658.
The Sixth Circuit in Allinder concluded that a full-blown inspection—prying
open the hive, smoking the bees, and deconstructing the hive in order to obtain
testing samples—was a search for purposes of the Fourth Amendment. 808 F.2d at
1183, 1186. But there are no facts in this case that suggest that James undertook
anything close to such a full-blown inspection during the two to three minutes he
looked at Cox’s hives.
For these reasons, we conclude that Cox failed to establish that Inspector
James’s conduct, in approaching and opening Cox’s hives in order to determine who
owned them, violated clearly established Fourth Amendment rights. We, therefore,
uphold the district court’s decision to grant James qualified immunity.
C. The district court did not abuse its discretion in denying Cox’s motion for
reconsideration
After the district court granted James qualified immunity, but before the court
finally resolved the rest of Cox’s claims, Cox filed with the district court a motion for
reconsideration. In that motion, he primarily raised the same arguments he asserts
now on appeal. For the reasons explained above, the district court did not abuse its
2
To the extent Cox asserts that, by approaching and opening Cox’s hives, James
violated the Utah Bee Inspection Act and breached his employment contracts, those
allegations alone do not establish a Fourth Amendment violation. And, in any event,
Cox did not assert any evidence establishing that Cox knew the hives at issue here
belonged to Cox.
9
discretion, see Rimbert v. Eli Lily & Co., 647 F.3d 1247, 1252 (10th Cir. 2011), in
denying Cox relief on reconsideration.
III. CONCLUSION
For the forgoing reasons, we AFFIRM that James was entitled to qualified
immunity on Cox’s Fourth Amendment claim.
Entered for the Court
David M. Ebel
Circuit Judge
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