The first oral arguments in a case against St. Louis County’s system of “wanteds” took place on February 28, and the constitutional challenge by ArchCity Defenders, co-counsel Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton & Garrison LLP and the Center for Constitutional Rights (CCR) will proceed to the next step.
The system of “wanteds,” also known as “wanteds for questioning,” in St. Louis County allows police officers to enter information about an individual they want to question in relation to a crime into a database. This can be seen by all other county police officers, who can then arrest the wanted individual, hold them for 24 hours and question them – without obtaining a warrant from a judge.
ArchCity and the CCR, two legal advocacy organizations, are challenging the system as violating several principle of the U.S. Constitution, including the Fourth Amendment right to protection against unreasonable search and seizure, the Fifth Amendment right to remain silent under police questioning, and the Fourteenth Amendment’s protection against being deprived of liberty without due process of law.
The fundamental legal question is whether police officers can determine that a person should be held for questioning without seeking a warrant from the judicial branch.
“Wanteds are used for serious state-level crimes and minor code violations alike, including traffic offenses,” the CCR said on its website. “In some cases, wanteds seem to be issued merely because officers want to take custody of an individual for questioning. It is unclear how long a wanted may stay in the system – potentially months or even years.”
The case, known as Furlow v. Belmar, names the St. Louis County Police Department and Police Chief Jon Belmar as defendants, along with several individual arresting officers. The defendants are Dwayne Furlow, Ralph Torres and Howard Liner, three people who were arrested and then released under the wanteds system. The attorneys with CCR and ArchCity hope to proceed with the case as a class-action lawsuit on behalf of everyone arrested because of a wanted. They are seeking actual and punitive damages.
In court on February 28, both sides sought an immediate judgment in their favor. Blake Strode, the executive director of ArchCity Defenders and one of the attorneys in the case, said it was “undisputed” in the case that the plaintiffs were held and questioned without judicial oversight.
Strode said that if the court would issue an immediate order that the wanteds system was unconstitutional, the plaintiffs’ attorneys would be willing to set aside the question of whether there was probable cause to arrest their three clients.
“The entire debate regarding probable cause, I think, is actually quite beside the point,” Strode said.
Strode argued that St. Louis County is abusing a Missouri law that allows suspects to be held for 24 hours before charges are filed. He argued that it is always unconstitutional to question a suspect in custody without at any point seeking a warrant.
St. Louis County Counselor Michael Hughes said the CCR and ArchCity were misinterpreting the cases they cited as precedent and that the wanteds procedure was permissible as long as the officers had probable cause.
“Everyone said, without exception, that they always had probable cause,” Hughes said. “There’s no underlying unconstitutional conduct by any of the named officers.”
In most jurisdictions, the norm is to obtain an arrest warrant before the arrest in most circumstances; exceptions might include arresting a suspect who is dangerous or fleeing a crime scene, or arrests that take place over a weekend or holiday when no judges are available.
In St. Louis County, Strode argued, the wanteds have replaced that system as the default.
“Police are allowed to arrest without a warrant as an exception to the warrant rule,” Strode said. “What they’re not allowed to do is have a system of warrantless arrests.”
One of the plaintiffs in the case, Ralph Torres, was arrested in his garage at his home, in front of his eight-year-old son. Several weeks had gone by since a wanted was issued for Torres’ arrest.
In all the cases being considered, the arresting officers did not know what crime the individual was suspected of committing, or why the officer who issued the wanted believed there was probable cause.
“They were purely acting on the probable cause of other officers’ determination, which is not permitted by the Fourth Amendment,” Strode said.
The plaintiffs’ attorneys also argued that the case should be allowed to proceed as a class action lawsuit because everyone who has been arrested because a wanted was issued for them shared the same underlying legal grievance.
Hughes said each case is simply too unique and too complex to make a determination about all suspects as a class.
The judge in the case, John Ross, asked each side of the case to write a legal brief on the class action question within the next 30 days, at which point he will make a determination of how the case should proceed.
