Bosarge v. Mississippi Bureau of Narcotics

796 F.3d 435, 2015 U.S. App. LEXIS 12193, 2015 WL 4282372
CourtCourt of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit
DecidedJuly 15, 2015
Docket14-60242
StatusPublished
Cited by119 cases

This text of 796 F.3d 435 (Bosarge v. Mississippi Bureau of Narcotics) is published on Counsel Stack Legal Research, covering Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit primary law. Counsel Stack provides free access to over 12 million legal documents including statutes, case law, regulations, and constitutions.

Bluebook
Bosarge v. Mississippi Bureau of Narcotics, 796 F.3d 435, 2015 U.S. App. LEXIS 12193, 2015 WL 4282372 (5th Cir. 2015).

Opinion

STEPHEN A. HIGGINSON, Circuit Judge:

Charles C. Bosarge sued the Mississippi Bureau of Narcotics and two state agents under 42 U.S.C. § 1983 and Mississippi state law. He alleged that the agents falsely identified him as a participant in a drug ring and caused him to be unlawfully detained for six months. The district court denied the Defendants’ motion requesting judgment on the pleadings or summary judgment on the basis of qualified or absolute immunity. On interlocutory appeal, we hold that the district court erred in denying the Defendants’ motion for judgment on the pleadings under Federal Rule of Civil Procedure 12(c).

FACTS AND PROCEEDINGS

On June 16, 2009, a federal grand jury indicted Charles C. Bosarge (a/k/a “Smooth”) and eighteen others. The defendants were charged with conspiracy to possess with intent to distribute methamphetamine in violation of 21 U.S.C. §§ 841(a)(1), 846. Bosarge was subsequently arrested and detained for six months. In December 2009, six weeks before a scheduled trial, the District Court for the Southern District of Mississippi dismissed Bosarge from the indictment without prejudice, pursuant to the government’s motion.

In his § 1983 lawsuit, Bosarge claimed that he “was prosecuted, arrested, and detained without probable cause and without due process of law, in violation of the Fourth and Fourteenth Amendments.” He alleged that Defendants Eric Fulton and Kyle Reynolds, 1 agents with the Mississippi Bureau of Narcotics, caused these violations by intentionally or recklessly misidentifying him as the person they viewed participating in a drug transaction. In *437 addition, Bosarge sought to hold the agents and the Mississippi Bureau of Narcotics liable for the state law torts of false arrest, false imprisonment, and malicious prosecution, and for violations of unnamed provisions of the Mississippi Constitution.

Bosarge’s pleadings alleged the following facts. Fulton and Reynolds, relying in part on wiretapped cell phone conversations, planned to observe a drug deal between a man named Timothy Isom and another suspect in a Best Buy parking lot in Hattiesburg, Mississippi, on November 21, 2008. After witnessing the drug deal, Fulton and Reynolds identified Bosarge as the second suspect, and “[t]his information was either provided directly to federal officials by Defendants Reynolds and Fulton, or was provided to federal officials by other state agents who did so on the basis of claims by Defendants Reynolds and Fulton that it was true.” However, Bosarge alleged that he was not the person in the Best Buy parking lot. He claimed that the agents “acted intentionally or recklessly in falsely identifying” him, and that they “knew or should have known that their identification of [him] was false.” Bosarge alleged that the agents identified him to reinforce a previously-formed conclusion that the man who met with Isom at the Best Buy was named Charles Bosarge. The agents reached that conclusion because the license plate of the second suspect’s car was registered to a woman named Mindi Bosarge, and Mindi Bo-sarge’s father or brother, Charles Bosarge, owned the cell phone used to communicate with Isom. Mindi Bosarge’s father or brother, Charles Bosarge, is a different person than the Plaintiff. While Bosarge (the Plaintiff) acknowledged that Fulton and Reynolds stated in affidavits that they “did not know the name of the Plaintiff prior to selecting his photograph as the person they saw at the Best Buy parking lot,” Bosarge claimed that “those affidavits are not necessarily accurate.”

Bosarge alleged that at the time of the meeting with Isom, he was working a 12-hour shift on a shrimp boat. He claimed that the person who participated in the drug deal with Isom was named Randall Eric Tillman. According to Bosarge, the agents “knew before the Best Buy surveillance that the person who was talking with Isom” on the cell phone “went by the nickname ‘Smooth,’ ” which is the “same nickname used by Randall Eric Tillman.” Bosarge alleged that Isom later identified the second person in the Best Buy parking lot as someone other than Bosarge. Bo-sarge alleged that that person, “whether Tillman or someone else,” “does not look enough like the Plaintiff so that the Plaintiff could be reasonably mistaken for him.”

Bosarge claimed that “[a]s a result of this false identification, federal prosecutors included Plaintiff in their request for an indictment.” Bosarge further alleged that Fulton “repeated the false identification” before the grand jury, and that “no other evidence implicating the Plaintiff was presented to the grand jury.” After Bo-sarge’s indictment and subsequent arrest, Reynolds testified as to the identification in an initial detention hearing in Mobile, Alabama, at which “[n]o other evidence was presented linking Plaintiff to this [drug] ring.” At a second detention hearing in Hattiesburg, Mississippi, the identification by Fulton and Reynolds was “used as a ground for continuing to detain” Bo-sarge.

Bosarge stressed that his lawsuit is “based on the false identification” that the Defendants provided to state or federal officials, and “not based on Agent Fulton’s testimony to the grand jury, Agent Reyn-oldses] testimony at the detention hearing in Mobile, the use of their prior testimony at the detention hearing in Hattiesburg, or their preparation to testify at any of these hearings.” Bosarge further alleged that *438 “the Defendant agents’ false testimony at those proceedings taints them so that those events do not break the chain of causation.”

Bosarge originally filed his complaint in the Circuit Court of Hinds County, Mississippi, against the Mississippi Bureau of Narcotics, Fulton, Reynolds, and John Does 1-10. The Defendants removed the case to federal court on the basis of federal question jurisdiction and supplemental jurisdiction. See 28 U.S.C. §§ 1331, 1367. 2 The Defendants raised a number of affirmative defenses, including absolute and qualified immunity. The district court directed Bosarge to file a reply under Federal Rule of Civil Procedure 7(a) “alleging with particularity the specific facts which, if true, would overcome the qualified immunity defenses raised by Defendants.” The district court also stayed all discovery.

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796 F.3d 435, 2015 U.S. App. LEXIS 12193, 2015 WL 4282372, Counsel Stack Legal Research, https://law.counselstack.com/opinion/bosarge-v-mississippi-bureau-of-narcotics-ca5-2015.