Where officers could not have reasonably believed that a parolee lived in a house where they conducted a warrantless parole search, the search violated the Fourth Amendment rights of the occupants and the officers were not entitled to qualified immunity in a suit under 42 U.S.C. section 1983. The officers involved in this search had no reasonable suspicion to believe that a crime had been committed, but were merely conducting searches of known parolees in order to “clean up” a Los Angeles neighborhood. One search involved the last known address of parolee Jamerson, who was in custody at the time of the search. His parole officer was aware of his custody status, and the plaintiff here informed the officers that Jamerson was in custody when they arrived to conduct the search. The searching officers, however, were working from a parole list that might have been compiled five months earlier. The Ninth Circuit found the search to be unreasonable under the Fourth Amendment because Jamerson had been incarcerated for six weeks at the time of the search, thus removing the only possible justification for the warrantless search. The court noted that “[w]ithout requiring a close temporal connection between a parolee and the residence to be searched, officers would have carte blanche to search, without probable cause, any place where a parolee used to live.”
Case Summaries