Degollado v. City of Port Lavaca

Hemp and marijuana are the same plant. What separates the legal one from the crime is a number, the concentration of a single compound. So when a crime lab reports only that a product contains THC, it has not answered the question that decides everything, and in Degollado v. City of Port Lavaca the Fifth Circuit had to say who bears the cost of that gap.

The setup

After the 2018 federal farm bill removed hemp, cannabis carrying no more than three-tenths of one percent delta-9 THC, from the controlled-substances list, a Port Lavaca shop opened selling hemp and delta-8 products it treated as legal. Officers ran undercover buys and sent the products to the state crime lab. The lab reported that the products contained THC. It did not report the concentration, and it did not say whether the THC was the legal kind or the illegal kind. The officer who prepared the warrant affidavit swore that the lab had confirmed a controlled substance. On that warrant, two people were arrested and roughly fourteen thousand dollars in inventory was seized. Eight months later the prosecutor dismissed the charges over concerns about the officers. The products were never returned. The shop owner and an employee sued under the federal civil rights statute.

The affidavit

The heart of the Fourth Amendment claim was that affidavit. Under Franks v. Delaware, a warrant can be torn down if the officer who swore it out put a falsehood in it, but not just any falsehood. The lie has to be deliberate, or made with reckless disregard for the truth, which means the officer actually harbored serious doubts about what he was swearing and swore it anyway. Negligence does not count. The Fifth Circuit agreed that one statement in the affidavit was inaccurate: the lab had not confirmed an illegal substance, it had found THC of an unspecified amount and type. But the court held the officer’s reliance on the lab was negligent, not reckless. Given the genuine legal murk around the newer forms of THC, the court would not say he entertained serious doubts when he read a lab result reporting THC as meaning something illegal. In the court’s words, it “may have been negligent to assume the crime lab results meant the substances were illegal ... but we cannot say that it was reckless to do so.” No reckless falsehood meant no Franks violation, and without a Franks violation the officers kept their qualified immunity.

The city

The plaintiffs also sued the city itself, arguing it had failed to train its officers on the line between legal hemp and illegal marijuana. That claim ran into Monell. A city is not liable under the civil rights statute just because one of its officers did something wrong, because there is no respondeat superior in civil rights, no automatic liability of the employer for the employee. The plaintiff has to show the city’s own policy or custom caused the injury, and for a failure-to-train claim that means deliberate indifference under City of Canton v. Harris, a conscious choice to leave officers unprepared for a task they will predictably face. Ordinarily proving that takes a pattern of similar violations. There is a narrow theory that a single incident can be enough, but the Fifth Circuit has, by its own account, consistently rejected it. A bare allegation that one officer was not properly trained about delta-8, with no pattern behind it, could not clear the bar, and the municipal claim was dismissed.

Why it matters

The case is a clean map of two walls a civil rights plaintiff has to climb, and where each one is anchored. The first wall is the state of mind. Being wrong is not the standard. The officer whose affidavit oversells a lab report may have been careless, but careless is not reckless, and qualified immunity lives in exactly that difference. If you litigate the affidavit, you are not proving the officer was mistaken, which is easy. You are proving he doubted himself and signed anyway, which is hard, and you build it out of what he knew at the moment he signed. The second wall is Monell. Suing the city is not a detour around the officer’s immunity, it is a separate and steeper climb that usually demands a pattern, not a single bad night. Knowing which wall you are standing at, and what that climb actually requires, is the difference between a complaint that survives and one that is dismissed with prejudice before discovery ever opens.

Degollado v. City of Port Lavaca, No. 25-40206 (5th Cir. Aug. 18, 2026) (per curiam, unpublished), affirming dismissal. On attacking a warrant affidavit, see Franks v. Delaware, 438 U.S. 154 (1978) (a warrant falls only for a deliberate falsehood or reckless disregard for the truth, not mere negligence). On suing the government, see Monell v. Department of Social Services, 436 U.S. 658 (1978) (no respondeat superior; the entity’s own policy or custom must cause the injury) and City of Canton v. Harris, 489 U.S. 378 (1989) (failure to train is actionable only where it amounts to deliberate indifference). Analyzed here for the lawyering, not the politics. This is general information, not legal advice.