ALEXANDRIA, La. — Two Alexandria Police Department officers were denied qualified immunity on Fourth Amendment claims stemming from a 2022 traffic stop in which they allegedly fabricated a traffic violation to justify pulling over a motorist, according to a Sept. 22 decision by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit.
The original opinion, issued in Rosales v. Lewis, concerns a June 2022 incident in which officers Jim Lewis and Samul Terrell stopped a Mustang driven by Mario Rosales, who had New Mexico license plates. According to the opinion, Rosales changed lanes, approached a red light, activated his left turn signal and legally turned left — after which officers pulled him over.
Rosales’s passenger was his girlfriend, Gracie Lasyone.
According to the opinion, Rosales complied throughout the encounter. He handed over his license and registration, disclosed without being asked that he had a firearm in a bag in the back seat and declined to consent to a search of the vehicle.
Officers separated Rosales and Lasyone, administered Miranda warnings to both and questioned each about drugs, criminal history and their personal lives. Both Rosales and Lasyone also requested permission to use their phones to record the stop and were denied.
The stop lasted exactly 21 minutes. Rosales was ultimately issued three citations — for failure to signal, failure to register a vehicle and a vehicle registration violation.
All three of these citations were later dismissed.
The original opinion states that Rosales and Lasyone sued officers Lewis and Terrell in their individual capacities, alleging violations of the First and Fourth Amendments. The officers moved for judgment on the pleadings, asserting qualified immunity.
A federal magistrate judge recommended denial of those motions; the district court adopted that recommendation, and the officers appealed.
The Fifth Circuit affirmed the denial of qualified immunity on the Fourth Amendment claims. According to the opinion, the court found that the plaintiffs plausibly alleged officers lacked reasonable suspicion to initiate the stop in the first place, noting that the available body camera footage did not clearly contradict the allegation that Rosales used his turn signal lawfully and that officers fabricated a violation after the fact.
The court further found the law was already clearly established that police cannot stop a motorist without reasonable suspicion and manufacture a justification afterward.
The opinion also addressed the searches of Rosales conducted during the stop. According to the court, Officer Terrell’s pat-down of Rosales was plausibly unlawful both because the underlying stop itself was allegedly illegal and because the circumstances — a daytime stop in a non-high-crime area, lawful possession of a firearm and an expression of agitation — did not independently give rise to reasonable suspicion that Rosales was armed and dangerous.
As for Officer Lewis’s subsequent search of Rosales’s pockets, the opinion states the court found it exceeded what Terry v. Ohio permits, since a prior pat-down had already revealed no weapons.
However, the Fifth Circuit reversed the district court on the First Amendment claim. According to the opinion, while the right to record police in public is clearly established in the Fifth Circuit following Turner v. Lieutenant Driver (2017), that precedent did not clearly establish the more specific right to use a personal cellphone to record the encounter.
The officers therefore received qualified immunity on that claim, and it was dismissed.
The case now returns to the district court for further proceedings on the surviving Fourth Amendment claims.
A summary of the underlying opinion published by the legal research site Do It For The Case Law confirms that the court’s central holding is that the officers were not entitled to qualified immunity for Fourth Amendment violations but were entitled to it for the First Amendment claim regarding recording.
That summary notes the court applied the two-step Terry stop analysis, finding that the plaintiffs plausibly alleged the stop lacked reasonable suspicion at its inception and that the subsequent searches and prolonged detention were unlawful, while the specific right to record while detained during a traffic stop was not clearly established at the time, leading the court to grant qualified immunity on that count.
The decision carries meaningful implications for both civil rights litigation and policing practices in the Fifth Circuit. For plaintiffs, the ruling signals that allegations of a fabricated traffic stop — even without definitive video proof — can survive a qualified immunity motion at the pleading stage if body camera footage is ambiguous rather than clearly contradictory.
That is a significant threshold to clear in a circuit that has historically granted qualified immunity at high rates.
For law enforcement, the decision reinforces that pretextual stops premised on manufactured violations remain constitutionally vulnerable and that a pat-down revealing no weapons forecloses a follow-up pocket search under Terry. The First Amendment portion of the ruling, however, highlights a persistent and unresolved tension: People stopped by police may have a general right to record officers in public, but whether that right extends to recording one’s own detention remains unsettled law in the Fifth Circuit — leaving a practical gap precisely in the moments when documentation may matter most.
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