Whether the investigating officers are entitled to qualified immunity

QUESTIONS PRESENTED On May 16, 2016, members of the East Hartford Police Department (the “EHPD”) began investigating the murder of Marshall Wiggins. On May 17, 2016, Laurence Washington called the EHPD and agreed to provide a sworn statement regarding his knowledge of Mr. Wiggins’ murder. As part of their investigation, officers from the EHPD discovered that three individuals were in the car when Mr. Wiggins was murdered: Mr. Wiggins, Laurence Washington, and Michael Gaston. Washington protested his innocence in his sworn written statement and indicated that Mr. Gaston had murdered Mr. Wiggins. The questions presented are: 1. Whether the Court of Appeals improperly denied qualified immunity by requiring an officer to disclose his subjective intent and state of mind in a_ warrant application in direct contravention of this Court’s precedent in Devenpeck v. Alford, 5438 U.S. 146, 153 (2004), which established that “an arresting officer’s state of mind (except for the facts that he knows) is irrelevant to the existence of probable cause” and that “[e]venhanded law enforcement is best achieved by the application of objective standards of conduct, rather than standards that ii depend upon the subjective state of mind of the officer,” in holding that the investigating officers were not entitled to qualified immunity because they may have subjectively believed Washington’s protestations of innocence? 2. Whether the Court of Appeals improperly decided an important issue of law with respect to qualified immunity and created a circuit split that should be addressed when it determined that the investigating officers were not entitled to qualified immunity for failing to include each of Washington’s protestations of innocence, even those that they did not deem credible, in a warrant for his arrest where the Court itself acknowledged that an officer is not required to investigate an individual’s innocent explanations, nor to resolve all credibility issues before making an arrest based on probable cause?