In Johnson v. Nocco, No. 21-10670 (Oct. 2, 2023) (Wilson, Branch, Tjoflat), the Court, in a § 1983 action, held that the officers involved were entitled to qualified immunity.
In so holding, the Court addressed whether the Fourth Amendment precluded a law enforcement officer—who had stopped a vehicle for a traffic violation—from asking a passenger in the vehicle to identify himself absent a reasonable suspicion that the passenger has committed, is committing, or is likely to commit a criminal offense. Relying on officer safety, the Court answered in the negative.
Judge Branch concurred only in the judgment of the majority, noting that she would have started and stopped at the "clearly established" prong of the qualified-immunity analysis. She would not have addressed the first prong--whether the official violated a constitutional right--as Judge Tjoflat did in his majority opinion.
Judge Wilson dissented. He found it to be clearly established that law enforcement officers cannot require, by threat of arrest, that an individual identify himself absent reasonable suspicion of wrongdoing. With regard to officer safety, he noted that while traffic stops indeed pose unique risks to police officers, and those risks in turn may justify negligibly burdensome precautions, those precautions may not detour from the officer's mission. In Judge Wilson's view, although the Supreme Court has identified specific risks inherent in traffic stops and has crafted targeted procedural remedies to address them, it has required more to be shown if officers want to justify anything beyond temporarily controlling the physical movements of passengers. He concludes by noting that he "would go no further than to hold that in the context of a routine traffic stop, it is clear that general safety concerns do not justify officers requiring the names of passengers who are not suspected of any criminality." He would "leave for another panel and a different record the question of whether safety concerns at traffic stops can ever reasonably justify such an intrusion."
