Last year, the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals issued a stunning ruling: There is no “clearly established law” holding that police officers violate the Fourth Amendment when they steal property that they seize with a warrant. The unanimous three-judge panel then dismissed a lawsuit against the city of Fresno and three police officers who stand accused of doing just that. Now the officers are asking the Supreme Court to reject the plaintiff’s efforts to overturn that ruling.

“Although the [officers] ought to have recognized that the alleged theft of [the] money and rare coins was morally wrong, they did not have clear notice that it violated the Fourth Amendment—which, as noted, is a different question,” Judge Milan Smith wrote in his opinion for the panel in Jessop v. City of Fresno. He argued that there was no “clearly established” precedent to establish that theft was a Fourth Amendment violation, and the panel declined to establish it themselves. The officers agreed, telling the Supreme Court that the Ninth Circuit “followed the rules for qualified immunity analysis, as laid down by this Court, to the letter.”

That is precisely the problem. Legal academics, judges, and even some Supreme Court justices have sharply criticized the Supreme Court’s rulings on qualified immunity in recent years. The judicial doctrine shields state and local officials from federal civil-rights lawsuits if their alleged misdeeds aren’t contrary to “clearly established law.” In some cases, this is an easy hurdle for plaintiffs whose rights are violated to overcome. But as the Ninth Circuit case shows, the high court’s qualified-immunity precedents can often lead to absurd outcomes.

The case began in 2013 with an investigation into illegal gambling activity. Three Fresno police officers—Derik Kumagai, Curt Chastain, and Tomas Cantu—obtained a search warrant from a local judge against two suspects, Micah Jessop and Brittan Ashjian, who owned an ATM business. The warrant authorized the officers to seize, among other things, any “monies, negotiable instruments, securities, or things of value” that they found. According to Jessop and Ashjian’s petition for the Supreme Court, the officers seized “several thousand dollars” from their homes and businesses in the course of executing the warrant.

A few hours after the initial searches, Jessop and Ashjian told the court, Kumagai returned alone to Jessop’s house while his wife was home alone and said he needed to search it a second time. From there, they allege that Kumagai went into the bedroom, where the officers had previously observed that Jessop kept a collection of rare coins, purportedly valued at $125,000. Kumagai spent several minutes alone in the bedroom, making this second sweep, and then left after saying his investigation was finished. According to their petition, the officers seized more than $275,000 from their searches, including the the coin collection, creating a discrepancy with the police inventory sheet the officers filed later that night, which stated that the officers had only seized $50,000 in cash. No charges were filed against Jessop and Ashjian, though the city and officers say they avoided charges by agreeing to become informants and forfeiting the $50,000.