Can highway engineer detain trucks on road? U.S. Supreme Court asked to review Minnesota case

The U.S. Supreme Court is being asked to consider a case out of rural Minnesota that has the potential to shield all government officials — not just police — from being sued for acts such as detaining citizens.

Attorneys for Central Specialties, an Alexandria-based road repair company, want the court to weigh in on a lawsuit brought in 2018 after a Mahnomen County highway engineer stopped trucks driven by the contracted firm's employees for more than three hours.

The Eighth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals last year sided with the engineer, Jonathan Large, finding that his actions were protected under the 40-year-old qualified immunity doctrine. Attorneys from the Institute for Justice, a Virginia-based libertarian legal nonprofit representing Central Specialties, have instead argued that Large acted as a rogue government official and that his actions far exceeded his authority.

"The Supreme Court has always been clear: qualified immunity is intended to provide breathing room so officials can comfortably do their jobs," said Anya Bidwell, an attorney representing Central Specialties. "If they don't do their jobs but simply hide behind their government employment, like engineer Large did here, qualified immunity doesn't apply."

Some civil-liberties and police-reform advocates worry the case opens the door for all types of government employees to act as police, with citizens having little course for redress.

The case could join a growing line of new rulings where the nation's high court has significantly altered federal legal precedent. The Supreme Court's recently completed term will be best known for overturning Roe v. Wade. But the court also held that people denied Miranda warnings cannot sue police and, in a separate ruling, made it nearly impossible for Americans to sue federal law enforcement officers over constitutional violations.

The Eighth Circuit majority opinion, affirming the district court's decision, pointed out that there was no court precedent that someone in Large's position could not act in the way he did.

Large's attorneys, Michael Rengel and Ryan Fullerton, said in a written statement that they "have every confidence that if this matter were to come before the Supreme Court, those decisions would be affirmed."

The state contracted Central Specialties in 2016 for road work on a state highway. According to the company's attorneys, the agreement "roused new disagreements in an already contentious relationship between CSI (Central Specialties) and Large, centering on the number of roads that would be designed as haul roads and the company's ability to use non-haul roads as a return route for its empty trucks."

The company told Large one day in July 2017 that it planned to use a non-haul road to bring home empty semitrucks. The next morning, he persuaded Mahnomen County's board of commissioners to change the highway's weight restriction so that even the empty trucks would violate the weight limit. Central Specialties' attorneys argue that Large violated the constitutional rights of its employees when he pulled over two trucks and detained them for more than three hours over the new weight limit established earlier that day. The local Sheriff's Office and tribal police refused to intervene and a State Patrol citation for the trucks was dismissed a day later.

"If this county engineer or others like him are allowed to take on powers never given to them, it could put us out of business," said Allan Minnerath, Central Specialties' president, in a statement. "Jonathan Large doesn't have the authority to do what he did. We want to hold him accountable for his actions so he doesn't do it again and so other officials don't do things like this."

In their appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court, Central Specialties' attorneys want the court to settle a fractured interpretation of qualified immunity in the federal courts. Their appeal asks the court to determine whether officials must be found to have been acting within the scope of their authority before they are considered for qualified immunity protections — something federal circuits have ruled on differently.

T. Anansi Wilson, a Mitchell Hamline School of Law professor and founding director of the Center for the Study of Black Life and the Law, said reading about this case made him "more terrified than anything else."

Wilson said it evoked memories of the Fugitive Slave Act, which deputized citizens and other government officials with the authority to detain Black people.

"If this can happen in a white community for the government to go unchecked, if it can happen where there are no racial issues involved, then my God for the rest of us," Wilson said. "I'm concerned for government officials to be deputized in a way that gives them police power — that they will go unchecked and that will fall on people of color and those with indigenous and ethnic backgrounds."

Writing for the Eighth Circuit's majority opinion, Judge Bobby Shepherd wrote that it was notclearly established that Large "could not prevent trucks that he had reason to believe were operating above the posted weight limit from passing over and damaging the roadway or could not call law enforcement to investigate compliance with the new, reduced weight restrictions."

But in a dissent that began with the words, "there's a new sheriff in town," Judge L. Steven Grasz wrote that "nowhere is there a slightest hint in Minnesota law that a county engineer is a peace officer."

He said the ruling "implicitly cloaks such officials with near absolute immunity for their actions since there are no existing cases circumscribing or defining the scope of this newly discovered, unwritten law enforcement authority."