In May of 2010, a neighbor of one Amy Hughes “called 911 to
report that a woman was hacking a tree with a kitchen knife.” Officer Andrew
Kisela, a police officer in Tucson, Arizona, “and another police officer, Alex
Garcia, heard about the report over the radio in their patrol car and
responded. A few minutes later the person who had called 911 flagged down the
officers; gave them a description of the woman with the knife; and told them
the woman had been acting erratically. About the same time, a third police
officer, Lindsay Kunz, arrived on her bicycle.” [1]
Officer “Garcia spotted a woman, later identified as Sharon
Chadwick, standing next to a car in the driveway of a nearby house.” There was
a “chain-link fence with a locked gate” separating Ms. “Chadwick from the
officers. The officers then saw another woman…emerge from the house carrying a
large knife at her side.” The woman, who was later identified as Ms. Hughes, “matched
the description of the woman who had been seen hacking a tree. Hughes walked
toward Chadwick and stopped no more than six feet from her.”
At this point, all “three officers drew their guns.” They
ordered Ms. Hughes to drop the knife at least twice. Ms. Chadwick told both Ms.
Hughes and the officers to “take it easy.” Ms. “Hughes appeared calm, but she
did not acknowledge the officers’ presence or drop the knife. The top bar of
the chain-link fence” was blocking Officer “Kisela’s line of fire, so he dropped
to the ground and shot Hughes four times through the fence.” The officers then
“jumped the fence, handcuffed Hughes, and called paramedics, who transported
her to a hospital. There she was treated for non-life-threatening injuries.
Less than a minute had transpired from the moment the officers saw Chadwick to
the moment Kisela fired shots.”
Ms. Hughes sued Officer Kisela in federal district court,
alleging that Kisela had unconstitutionally used excessive force (intentional police
shootings are considered “seizures” under the 4th Amendment [2]),
and the case eventually made its way to the Supreme Court, which decided the case on April 2nd. The facts that your
humble servant has set forth above were the Court majority’s rendition of the
facts as viewed in the light most favorable to Ms. Hughes.
The reason why the Court had to consider the facts in that
manner is that the appeal arose out of the district court’s granting of a “summary
judgment” in favor of Officer Kisela, and summary judgments happen when a court
decides that one party has no conceivable case in a civil matter, thereby
making it pointless to bring in a jury. So an appellate court, in reviewing the
lower court’s decision, will take a look at the facts from the losing party’s
perspective to determine if that party had any case at all, which would make a
summary judgment inappropriate.
Interestingly, the Supreme Court did not reach a decision on
whether Officer Kisela’s actions violated the Fourth Amendment. Instead the
Court decided that the facts were insufficient for Ms. Hughes to overcome
Officer Kisela’s “qualified immunity.”
Police officers are entitled to qualified immunity against
civil suits when their “’conduct does
not violate clearly
established statutory or
constitutional rights of
which a reasonable
person would have known.’” The “’focus is
on whether the officer
had fair notice
that her conduct
was unlawful….’” In other words,
even if the officer actually violated someone’s constitutional rights, he is
shielded from suit unless a reasonable person would have known he was doing so.”
And a reasonable person knows that he is violating a constitutional right only
if existing precedent has “’placed the statutory or constitutional question beyond
debate.’” This means that qualified “’immunity
protects all but
the plainly incompetent or
those who knowingly
violate the law.’”
On these facts, the Court held that Officer Kisela was
entitled to qualified immunity, and that, because of that, there was no conceivable
way that Ms. Hughes could have a case against the officer, making proper the
grant of summary judgment against her. The circumstances were not such, the
Court held, where anyone in Officer Kisela’s shoes would know that he was
unlawfully violating the constitutional rights of Ms. Hughes.
Justice Sonia Sotomayor dissented from the Court’s decision,
taking issue with the Court’s rendition of the facts. Specifically, she noted,
the Court’s rendition left out the critical fact that the knife Ms. Hughes was carrying,
a kitchen knife, was being held down at her side, with the blade facing away
from Ms. Chadwick. Her view of the facts was this:
“Officer Andrew Kisela shot Amy Hughes while she was speaking
with her roommate, Sharon Chadwick, outside of their home. The record,
properly construed at
this stage, shows that
at the time
of the shooting:
Hughes stood stationary about
six feet away from
Chadwick, appeared ‘composed and
content,’…, and held
a kitchen knife
down at her
side with the blade
facing away from
Chadwick. Hughes was nowhere
near the officers,
had committed no
illegal act, was suspected
of no crime,
and did not
raise the knife in the
direction of Chadwick
or anyone else.
Faced with these facts,
the two other
responding officers held
their fire, and one
testified that he ‘wanted to
continue trying verbal command[s]
and see if
that would work.’…. But not Kisela. He thought it necessary to use deadly force,
and so, without giving a warning that he would open fire, he shot Hughes four
times, leaving her seriously injured. If this account of Kisela’s conduct
sounds unreasonable, that is because it was.
And yet, the Court today insulates that conduct from liability under the
doctrine of qualified immunity, holding that Kisela violated no ‘clearly established’
law….
“I disagree.
Viewing the facts in the
light most favorable
to Hughes, as
the Court must at summary
judgment, a jury could find that Kisela violated Hughes’
clearly established Fourth
Amendment rights by needlessly
resorting to lethal force.”
In cases of this kind, the view one takes too often depends
on his or her political persuasion. That, of course, is not how legal decisions
should be made. But your humble servant will submit that, as to liability, a fair-minded
and objective person (to the extent there is such a beast) will find this a
close case.
On the one hand, the officers were told of a woman with a
knife acting in a manner that manifested mental illness. They came upon a woman
matching her description, with a knife, within the proximity of Ms. Chadwick.
Although Ms. Hughes was six feet away from Ms. Chadwick, with the knife pointed
away from Ms. Chadwick, and appeared to be calm for the moment, there was no
assurance that Ms. Hughes wouldn’t suddenly erupt into an act of violence. Six
feet is not a long distance to run, and knives held to the side and pointed
away can be raised. Ms. Hughes was told to drop the knife at least twice, but
failed to do so. Plus, there was a chain-link fence between the officers and
the two women. And while Officer Kisela was the only officer who fired his
weapon, all three officers found the situation such that they drew their
sidearms. Viewed in this way, the shooting was a clearly justified action in
defense of Ms. Chadwick’s life.
On the other hand, Ms. Hughes never raised the knife, the
knife was a kitchen knife, mental illness does not equal a danger of violence,
Ms. Chadwick asked the officers (as well as Ms. Hughes) to “take it easy,” and
Officer Kisela never gave a warning to Ms. Hughes before opening fire even
though there was no indication of an immediate attack on Ms. Chadwick. From
this perspective, it appears that Officer Kisela violated Ms. Hughes’s Fourth
Amendment rights.
In other words, both sides had facts favorable to their side
with which to go before a jury. But a grant of summary judgment takes a case
away from a jury, and that should only happen when one side in a civil matter
has no case at all.
Here the Supreme Court decided that not allowing a jury to
hear the case was proper. But they did this based on a record. They didn’t
watch the witnesses testify or observe their demeanor to assess credibility as
would a jury, even though witness credibility could prove critical in a case
like this, which involve close factual questions. It can only be concluded that
the Court was mistaken in not allowing Ms. Hughes to take her case before a
jury.