The Supreme Court unanimously ruled on May 15 that the mother of a man killed by police during a traffic stop may pursue a civil rights lawsuit against the officer who shot him.
The nation’s highest court found that the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit wrongly focused solely on the moment that the allegedly excessive force was used, as opposed to the moments leading up to the use of force.
“To assess whether an officer acted reasonably in using force, a court must consider all the relevant circumstances, including facts and events leading up to the climactic moment,” she wrote for the court.
Kagan recounted the facts of the case.
The case goes back to April 28, 2016, when Harris County, Texas, traffic enforcement officer Roberto Felix Jr. responded to a radio alert about an automobile that had outstanding toll violations. Felix spotted the car and pulled it over. The driver, Ashtian Barnes, directed his car to the shoulder of the highway, the opinion said.
Felix asked Barnes for his driver’s license and proof of insurance. Barnes said he didn’t have his license on him and that the car was a rental. Barnes while speaking was rummaging through papers in the car, which prompted Felix to tell him repeatedly to stop “digging around.”
Felix told Barnes he smelled marijuana and asked if anything was in the car that he should know about. Barnes said there might be identification in the trunk and opened the trunk from his seat. Felix directed Barnes to leave the vehicle, but Barnes opened the door without exiting and turned his ignition on, the opinion said.
Felix drew his gun as the car began moving forward and shouted an expletive in ordering Barnes not to move. Unable to see inside the car because his head was positioned above the roof, Felix fired twice into the car. Barnes stopped the car but was dead by the time back-up arrived.
“All told, about five seconds elapsed between when the car started moving and when it stopped. And within that period, two seconds passed between the moment Felix stepped on the doorsill and the moment he fired his first shot,” the opinion said.
“Respondent Roberto Felix, a twenty-year veteran officer from Houston, Texas, ordered Ashtian Barnes to step out of his vehicle during a routine traffic stop. Instead of complying, Barnes fled, driving off with Felix hanging onto the side of the car.
“And Barnes continued his flight despite Felix’s orders to stop and the obvious danger of death faced by Felix because of Barnes’s conduct. At the moment he used force, Felix reasonably feared for his life,” the brief said.
In the opinion, Kagan wrote that a police officer’s use of force runs afoul of the Fourth Amendment to the Constitution when it is not “objectively reasonable.”
And when assessing reasonableness, the court must look at the “totality of the circumstances,” she wrote.
The Fifth Circuit applied its moment-of-threat rule in which it examined only “the circumstances existing at the precise time an officer perceived the threat inducing him to shoot.”
“Today, we reject that approach as improperly narrowing the requisite Fourth Amendment analysis. To assess whether an officer acted reasonably in using force, a court must consider all the relevant circumstances, including facts and events leading up to the climactic moment,” the opinion said.
Kagan wrote that the lower court must now “consider the reasonableness of the shooting, using the lengthier timeframe we have prescribed.”
The Supreme Court vacated the Fifth Circuit ruling and sent the case back to the lower courts for “further proceedings consistent with this opinion.”
