Dan Downey and Paul Bernhart received summary judgment on behalf of a former Meigs County Sheriff’s Deputy in a federal lawsuit alleging Fourth Amendment violations. The case involved law enforcement officers seizing “potpourri” (synthetic marijuana) from Plaintiff’s roadside stand in August, 2011. Ohio passed a law criminalizing synthetic marijuana in 2011, however the law did not go into effect until October, 2011. Instead, officers seized the synthetic marijuana as a harmful intoxicant pursuant to R.C. Section 2925.32. Plaintiff alleged that the statute did not apply to synthetic marijuana and that synthetic marijuana was not yet illegal in Ohio in August, 2011, when the officers seized it. Therefore, Plaintiff claimed that officers lacked probable cause to seize the synthetic marijuana in violation of the Fourth Amendment. In awarding summary judgment to the Defendants, the Court relied upon the recent United States Supreme Court case of Heien v. North Carolina 135 S. Ct. 530 (2014) which held that an officer’s reasonable mistake of law can give rise to reasonable suspicion necessary to detain an individual. Here, the Court extended Heien’s rationale to the probable cause analysis required to uphold a seizure under the Fourth Amendment. The Court found that the seizure did not violate the Fourth Amendment because it was objectively reasonable, even if mistaken, for officers to believe they had probable cause to seize the synthetic marijuana under the harmful intoxicant statute. Congratulations to the former Meigs County Sheriff’s Deputy and the FHKA defense team.
