Third Circuit Rules Officers Must Disclose Known Self-Defense Facts to Magistrates — But Shields Trooper Who Didn't

PHILADELPHIA (LN) — The Third Circuit on Monday handed down a precedential ruling that police officers must disclose to magistrate judges any facts they conclusively know would establish a self-defense claim — resolving a circuit-wide open question about the Fourth Amendment's reach into probable-cause affidavits — while still shielding the Pennsylvania State Trooper who charged Corey Kendig with criminal homicide after a strip-club parking lot brawl that left one man dead.

Kendig shot Jeremy Jones in the stomach during a late-night altercation outside Partner's Tavern on October 13, 2020, after Jones' friends confronted him over an alleged truck scam, punched him in the face, and put him in a chokehold on the ground. A jury acquitted Kendig on all counts in August 2021. He then sued Trooper Nicholas Stolar under 42 U.S.C. § 1983, arguing that Stolar's probable-cause affidavit omitted facts that would have told the magistrate Kendig acted in self-defense.

The Western District of Pennsylvania granted Stolar summary judgment on qualified immunity grounds, reasoning that self-defense facts are not relevant to the probable cause determination. The Third Circuit agreed on the outcome but rejected that reasoning outright.

Writing for the panel, U.S. Circuit Judge Jane Roth drew a new constitutional line: an officer who conclusively knows that an affirmative defense negates the requisite mental state of a charged offense — or excuses the offending conduct — must include those facts in the probable-cause affidavit. "The Fourth Amendment does not allow an officer to open the window to this exculpatory defense only to draw the blinds before the magistrate can look through," Roth wrote.

The court grounded the holding in Pennsylvania law, which treats self-defense as negating the mens rea for all three charges Stolar filed — criminal homicide, aggravated assault, and recklessly endangering another person. Because self-defense is not merely a trial-stage excuse but actually destroys the mental-state element of each offense, the panel said the line Stolar urged — a rigid categorical wall between exculpatory facts and affirmative-defense facts — could not hold.

The new rule stops well short of requiring officers to investigate or credit every self-defense claim a suspect makes at the scene. Officers need not "tell all," the panel said, and are not required to resolve "inherently fact-bound" defenses on the spot. The obligation kicks in only when the officer already possesses facts that conclusively establish the defense — and must then present those facts to the magistrate rather than filter them out.

The record in Kendig's own case illustrated how much Stolar knew and withheld. Two eyewitnesses told investigators Kendig was not the initial aggressor and was outnumbered. The tavern manager described Kendig as a "mellow dude" who had been "minding his own business," said Jones had previously been removed from the bar for drunkenly starting fights with other patrons, and told law enforcement he locked the tavern doors because Jones' friends were "pounding on [the] windows" and "trying to kill [Kendig]" after the shooting. Stolar himself admitted in a deposition that he believed Kendig's defense team would have a "very good case of self-defense" and said he did not withdraw the charges because "there was still a case to be made . . . it had to come out for the jury to decide that."

None of that was enough to strip Stolar of qualified immunity. Because no Third Circuit precedent and no robust consensus among the other circuits had clearly established the duty the panel now announces, Stolar had no notice that omitting those facts was unconstitutional. The court noted that district courts within the circuit had consistently declined to impose such a requirement, and that the circuits themselves remain divided on when affirmative defenses bear on probable cause.

The panel adopted as precedent the standard Judge D. Brooks Smith proposed a decade ago in a non-precedential concurrence in Mazuka v. Rice Township Police Department — a concurrence in which Smith predicted there would be "a time when we take on this issue."

Kendig was tried and acquitted; Stolar faces no civil liability. But going forward, every officer in the Third Circuit who drafts a probable-cause affidavit knowing the suspect has a conclusive self-defense claim must put those facts in front of the magistrate — or risk a Fourth Amendment lawsuit that qualified immunity will not automatically extinguish.