Harte v. Board Comm'rs Cnty of Johnson, No. 16-3014 (10th Cir. 2017)
Annotate this CaseRobert Harte and his two children visited a garden store where they purchased a small bag of supplies to grow tomatoes and other vegetables in the basement of the family home as an educational project with his 13-year-old son. Unbeknownst to Harte, Sergeant James Wingo of the Missouri State Highway Patrol was parked nearby in an unmarked car, watching the store as part of a ‘pet project’ where he would spend three or four hours per day surveilling the garden store, keeping meticulous notes on all of the customers: their sex, age, vehicle description, license plate number, and what they purchased. More than five months later, a sergeant in the Johnson County Sheriff’s Office (“JCSO”), emailed Wingo about the possibility of conducting a joint operation on April 20; the idea stemmed from a multi-agency raid on indoor marijuana growers that was conducted on the same date the previous year. That raid, known as “Operation Constant Gardener,” was spearheaded by Wingo on the basis of several hundred tips he had amassed from his garden store surveillance. The raid would end with police searching the Harte's trash and finding loose tea leaves, suspecting a marijuana grow operation in the Harte house. A SWAT team descended on the family home (complete with battering ram, bulletproof vests, and assault rifles), keeping the entire family under armed guard for two and a half hours. In this appeal, the Tenth Circuit affirmed in part and reversed in part the district court’s grant of summary judgment in favor of the defendants-officers. The court affirmed the grant of summary judgment on all claims asserted against defendant Jim Wingo, and affirmed as to the plaintiffs’ excessive force and Monell liability claims. However, the Court reversed the district court’s grant of summary judgment on the unlawful search and seizure claims asserted against the remaining defendants. On remand, plaintiffs’ claim under Franks v. Delaware, 438 U.S. 154 (1978), was limited to their theory that one or more of the remaining defendants lied about the results of the field tests conducted in April 2012 on the tea leaves collected from the plaintiffs’ trash. The Court further reversed summary judgment as to the four state-law claims raised on appeal.
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