FOR PUBLICATION UNITED STATES COURT OF APPEALS FOR THE NINTH CIRCUIT DAVID P. DEMAREST, No. 20-15872 Plaintiff-Appellant, D.C. No. v. 2:16-cv-02271- MCE-KJN CITY OF VALLEJO, California, a municipality and charter city; JODI BROWN, Police Officer, as an OPINION individual and in official capacity; JEFF TAI, Police Officer, as an individual and in official capacity; HERMAN ROBINSON, Police Officer, as an individual and in official capacity, Defendants-Appellees, and JOSEPH KREINS, Former Police Chief, as an individual and in official capacity; ANDREW BIDOU, Police Chief, in official capacity, Defendants. Appeal from the United States District Court for the Eastern District of California Morrison C. England, Jr., District Judge, Presiding 2 DEMAREST V. CITY OF VALLEJO Argued and Submitted May 13, 2021 San Francisco, California Filed August 16, 2022 Before: J. Clifford Wallace, Jacqueline Nguyen, and Daniel P. Collins, Circuit Judges. Opinion by Judge Collins SUMMARY * Civil Rights The panel affirmed the district court’s summary judgment for defendants in an action brought pursuant to 42 U.S.C. § 1983 alleging that plaintiff’s Fourth Amendment rights were violated when he was arrested after declining a police officer’s repeated demands to show his driver’s license at a sobriety checkpoint and that the officer used excessive force in effectuating the arrest. Plaintiff alleged that the City of Vallejo violated the Fourth Amendment by adding license checks to what was concededly a sobriety checkpoint. Reviewing a line of relevant Supreme Court decisions, the panel derived a “two- step analysis” for assessing the validity of a checkpoint under the Fourth Amendment. At the first step, a court must determine, in accordance with City of Indianapolis v. * This summary constitutes no part of the opinion of the court. It has been prepared by court staff for the convenience of the reader. DEMAREST V. CITY OF VALLEJO 3 Edmond, 531 U.S. 32, 40 (2000), and Illinois v. Lidster, 540 U.S. 419 (2004), whether a checkpoint is “per se invalid” because its “primary purpose” is “to advance the general interest in crime control” with respect to the occupants of the vehicles being stopped. If the answer to that question is no, then the court must determine the checkpoint’s reasonableness, hence, its constitutionality, on the basis of the individual circumstances. Applying that two-step analysis to this case, the panel first held that because the City’s checkpoint did not have any impermissible primary purpose of advancing the general interest in crime control, it was not per se invalid. The panel then applied the factors for assessing reasonableness set forth in Lidster and concluded that the City’s systematic addition of driver’s license checks to an otherwise valid sobriety checkpoint was objectively reasonable under the Fourth Amendment. Given that the Supreme Court has said that removing unlicensed drivers from the road serves a “vital interest” in “highway safety” that would itself justify a traffic checkpoint, a request to produce licenses at an otherwise valid sobriety checkpoint clearly served an equally weighty interest. On this record, the license check interfered only minimally with liberty of …
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