A federal appeals panel ruled that Judge Eric Eighmy violated two children’s clearly established Fourth Amendment rights when courthouse officers locked them in holding cells after they refused to leave with their mother following a custody hearing.
The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Eighth Circuit denied the judge qualified immunity. A jury had already awarded each child $5,000 on the Fourth Amendment claims, and the district court added $326,637.22 in attorney fees after declining to cut the verdict.
The case turns on a basic limit on state power. Judges handle custody fights every day. They do not get to turn a child’s refusal to walk out with a parent into a jailhouse seizure without probable cause.
Bart Rockett and Kami Ballard divorced in Missouri. They stayed connected for a time so their children, described as aspiring performers who appeared on America’s Got Talent, could chase entertainment work tied to Los Angeles.
Ballard later sought sole custody before Judge Eighmy. At a hearing held several months afterward, the children waited outside the courtroom while the parents reached terms. Ballard would hold primary custody. Rockett would take the children at the beginning of each month and during TV pilot season.
After the hearing, neither child would leave with Ballard. An argument broke out in the courthouse lobby. The judge introduced himself, moved the children into a conference room, and told them they had no choice. Foster care came up as an option. They still refused.
A youth counselor reinforced the message that they had to listen to the judge. Eighmy then shifted them to a waiting area in the courthouse juvenile division and directed that someone keep an eye on them to make sure they did not go anywhere.
What followed left little room for spin. The judge led the children to two holding cells. A juvenile officer patted them down, ordered their socks and shoes off, and locked the doors while the judge stood by.
The Eighth Circuit found that the time spent in the holding-cell area ran between twenty and forty minutes. After a stretch the children later described as feeling like forever, the doors opened. Eighmy asked again whether they would leave with their mother. Both nodded yes. They were released.
Rockett later sued in federal district court, including Fourth Amendment claims for the children under the civil-rights statute 42 U.S.C. § 1983, which lets people seek damages when state actors violate federal rights under color of law. The jury’s $5,000 awards to each child stood, and the fee award followed.
Judge David Stras wrote for a panel joined by Judges Bobby Shepherd and Jane Kelly. The opinion, covered in a Reason Volokh Conspiracy report on the decision, framed the constitutional violation in plain terms.
“When Judge Eric Eighmy had courthouse officers lock two children in holding cells because they refused to leave with their mother following a custody hearing, he violated their clearly established Fourth Amendment rights....”
The court said a Fourth Amendment claim required a seizure that was also unreasonable. Locking the children up after the hearing was both. The panel stressed the absence of the usual criminal-law predicates.
“But here, Judge Eighmy did not have ‘probable cause to believe that [the children had] committed’ an offense, much less one that justified placing them in a holding cell.”
Their only misdeed, the court wrote, was one every parent knows well: resisting authority. Refusing to leave with a parent is not a jailable offense, even inside a custody case. The panel also found no exigent circumstances tied to danger to the children or anyone else.
Good intentions did not close the gap. The judges said they had no doubt Eighmy believed he acted in good faith, and possibly even in the children’s best interests. In Fourth Amendment law, though, good faith means reasonable reliance on binding appellate precedent or a warrant from a neutral magistrate. Neither was present.
No case allows a judge to detain children in a holding cell when they refuse to leave with a parent. A custody plan is no substitute for a warrant. Rough justice does not trump the Constitution.
Qualified immunity shields officials from damages unless they violate a right that was clearly established at the time. The Eighth Circuit held the law met that bar.
“‘[I]t would have been sufficiently clear [to] every reasonable official,’ Judge Eighmy included, that locking up two children for refusing to follow directions violated the Fourth Amendment.”
The panel pointed back more than a decade and a half. It is clearly established that a warrantless arrest without probable cause violates the Fourth Amendment. A reasonable judge should have known better.
Contempt theories did not rescue the detention either. Criminal contempt was off the table because the children were neither parties to the custody case nor present inside the courtroom. The power to punish a party for violating an injunction could not justify the lockup because Eighmy never issued one.
A 2023 Eighth Circuit decision had already stripped another layer of protection. Judicial immunity is old and broad, but it yields in two settings: nonjudicial actions, and judicial actions taken in the complete absence of all jurisdiction.
The earlier panel held that Eighmy’s choice to personally escort the children toward jail pushed a would-be judicial act too far. He crossed the line when he walked them there, stood by while they removed clothes and belongings, and personally returned later to release them.
The children had not even been in the courtroom, so contempt for disorderly or insolent behavior did not fit. Judges do not do double duty as jailers. Even assuming he could have ordered someone else to take the children to a cell, he could not put them there himself. The court said it had been unable to find any case extending judicial immunity that far. What he did was not a function normally performed by a judge.
Publicly confirmed pieces are sharp. Two children were seized and locked in separate courthouse holding cells after a Missouri custody hearing because they would not leave with their mother. The detention in the holding-cell area lasted twenty to forty minutes. A federal jury found Fourth Amendment violations and awarded $5,000 per child. The district court left that verdict intact and tacked on more than $326,000 in attorney fees. The Eighth Circuit has now held the seizure unreasonable and denied qualified immunity, after earlier rejecting judicial immunity for the judge’s personal jailing role.
Authorities and the published excerpts have not publicly filled every surrounding blank. Absolute calendar dates for the hearing, the trial judgment, and the latest opinion’s formal filing stamp are not set out in the account beyond a relative “decided today” marker and the 2023 year for the immunity ruling. The children’s names and ages are not stated. The Missouri courthouse’s city is not named. Broader claim-by-claim results beyond the Fourth Amendment awards are not detailed here.
Investigators and courts in related lanes would still need to determine any separate disciplinary consequences, if any are pursued, under state judicial-conduct rules. That question sits outside the damages rulings described in the federal opinions.
Custody courts wield real coercive power over families. That power is not a blank check to convert defiance into a cell door. The Fourth Amendment’s probable-cause rule exists precisely for moments when officials decide that force and confinement will settle a standoff.
The Eighth Circuit’s message was institutional, not theatrical. When a judge becomes the jailer of nonparty children outside the courtroom, immunity doctrines stop functioning as a shield for “rough justice.”
Black-letter limits on seizure still bind the people who wear the robe, and a courthouse that forgets that lesson invites the very federal damages actions this panel just left standing.
