The U.S. Supreme Court recently took up Barnes v. Felix, a case from the Fifth Circuit that applied the so-called moment-of-threat rule, wherein a court looks only to the circumstances existing at the precise time an officer perceived the threat inducing him to shoot to determine whether that shooting was reasonable or not. The Supreme Court rejected that approach as improperly narrowing the requisite Fourth Amendment analysis and clarified that a court must consider all the relevant circumstances, including facts and events leading up to the climactic moment, to assess whether an officer acted reasonably in using force—including deadly force.
Barnes v. Felix – Background
The Defendant law enforcement officer pulled over Ashtian Barnes for suspected toll violations and ordered him to exit the vehicle, but Barnes began to drive away. As the car began to move forward, the officer jumped onto its doorsill and fired two shots inside. Barnes was fatally hit but managed to stop the car. About five seconds elapsed between when the car started moving and when it stopped. Two seconds passed between the moment Felix stepped on the doorsill and the moment he fired his first shot. Barnes’s mother sued on his behalf, alleging that the officer violated Barnes’s Fourth Amendment right to be free from excessive force.
The district court granted summary judgment to the officer. In doing so, the district court applied the Fifth Circuit’s direction that, when an officer has used deadly force, a court could ask only about the situation existing “at the moment of the threat” that sparked the fatal shooting. Thus, the district court determined that the two seconds before the officer fired his first shot, when he was standing on the doorsill of a moving vehicle, was the determinative moment and, at that moment, the court found, an officer could reasonably think himself “at risk of serious harm.”
The Fifth Circuit affirmed, explaining that its inquiry was confined to whether the officer was in danger at the moment of the threat that resulted in his use of deadly force and that any prior events leading up to the shooting were irrelevant, and finding the officers’ actions reasonable at that point.
Holdings and Analysis
The Supreme Court vacated the judgment of the Fifth Circuit and remanded for further proceedings. The Supreme Court explained that the touchstone of the Fourth Amendment is reasonableness, as measured in objective terms. Consequently, an inquiry into the reasonableness of police force requires analyzing the totality of the circumstances, which has no time limit. Earlier facts and circumstances may bear on how a reasonable officer would have understood and responded to later ones, and the context of an entire encounter may inform the reasonableness of the use of force.
In sum, no rule that precludes consideration of prior events in assessing a police shooting is reconcilable with the fact-dependent and context-sensitive approach prescribed by the Supreme Court, and a court deciding a use-of-force case cannot review the totality of the circumstances if it has put on chronological blinders.
Takeaways
Parties in deadly-shooting excessive force cases in the Fifth Circuit must now be aware that the reasonableness of the officers’ actions will be assessed under the totality of the circumstances, and not just the moment of the threat. Accordingly, information regarding the entire context and totality of the circumstances must be considered.
As the Supreme Court explained, taking account of the entire context could benefit either party; as prior events could show, e.g., why a reasonable officer would have perceived otherwise ambiguous conduct of a suspect as threatening, or instead why such an officer would have perceived the same conduct as innocuous. Additionally, the history of the interaction, as well as other past circumstances known to the officer, may inform the reasonableness of the use of force.