Frank Napolitano, et al. v. Laurence Washington
FourthAmendment CriminalProcedure JusticiabilityDoctri
1. Whether the Court of Appeals improperly denied qualified immunity by requiring an officer to disclose his subjective intent and state of mind in a warrant application in direct contravention of this Court's precedent in Devenpeck v. Alford, 543 U.S. 146, 153 (2004), which established that "an arresting officer's state of mind (except for the facts that he knows) is irrelevant to the existence of probable cause" and that "[e]ven-handed law enforcement is best achieved by the application of objective standards of conduct, rather than standards that depend upon the subjective state of mind of the officer," in holding that the investigating officers were not entitled to qualified immunity because they may have subjectively believed Washington's protestations of innocence?
2. Whether the Court of Appeals improperly decided an important issue of law with respect to qualified immunity and created a circuit split that should be addressed when it determined that the investigating officers were not entitled to qualified immunity for failing to include each of Washington's protestations of innocence, even those that they did not deem credible, in a warrant for his arrest where the Court itself acknowledged that an officer is not required to investigate an individual's innocent explanations, nor to resolve all credibility issues before making an arrest based on probable cause?
Whether the investigating officers are entitled to qualified immunity