U.S. Supreme Court won't hear qualified immunity case from rural Minnesota

The U.S. Supreme Court will not hear a challenge to a Minnesota case that widened the scope of the qualified immunity doctrine to cover a county highway engineer's detention of road construction workers in 2017.

The nation's high court on Monday denied an appeal filed on behalf of Central Specialties Inc., an Alexandria-based road repair company that had sued Mahnomen County highway engineer Jonathan Large for detaining two of its workers for hours in a dispute over truck load limits.

Michael Rengel and Ryan Fullerton, Large's attorneys, said the Supreme Court let stand lower court determinations that Large did not conduct a "law enforcement-style 'traffic stop' and did not act outside the scope of his position."

"The Supreme Court's decision finally ends CSI's years-long attempt to bully and harass the county engineer for doing his job, and puts an end to CSI's attempt to seek hundreds of thousands of dollars in alleged 'damages' from Mahnomen County taxpayers," the attorneys said.

Attorneys for Central Specialties this week warned that the U.S. Supreme Court's refusal to hear a challenge of the Eighth Circuit ruling in favor of Large will pave the way for government workers to act more freely outside their job duties while facing no consequences for violating constitutional rights.

"The Supreme Court has left in place a dangerous precedent that in no way accomplishes the original goal of qualified immunity, which was supposed to be about police officers who are forced to make split-second decisions," said Anya Bidwell, an attorney from the Virginia-based libertarian nonprofit Institute for Justice, in a statement this week. "Now, ironically, a county highway engineer who goes beyond his job duties and acts like he has the power of a police officer is probably better protected than an actual police officer acting within his job duties."

The state contracted with Central Specialties in 2016 for road work on a state highway. Central Specialties and Large were at odds over 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 empty trucks.

One morning in July 2017, Large persuaded the Mahnomen County Board to change the highway's weight restriction so that even the empty trucks would violate the weight limit. Large later pulled over two trucks and detained them for more than three hours over the new weight limit established that day. The county Sheriff's Office and tribal police refused to intervene, and a State Patrol citation for the trucks was dismissed a day later.

The Eighth Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals last year found that Large's actions were protected under the 40-year-old qualified immunity doctrine. Attorneys for Central Specialties, meanwhile, painted Large as a rogue government official acting far outside the scope of his authority.

The Eighth Circuit majority opinion, which the U.S. Supreme Court has let stand, held that there was no court precedent barring someone in Large's position from acting in the way he did.

"It seems to me that the Supreme Court has basically said that anyone who works for the government, not just the police, can pull you over and detain you," Central Specialties President and CEO Allan Minnerath said in a statement Monday. "That's what happened to our drivers, and it's just not right. We are of course hugely disappointed."