Supreme Court takes on accountability for police shootings

The Supreme Court seemed inclined Wednesday to make it somewhat easier for individuals to try to hold police officers accountable for using deadly force, in a case involving the fatal shooting of an unarmed Black man during a routine traffic stop in Texas.

Ashtian Barnes was killed by an officer in 2016 after being pulled over outside Houston while driving his girlfriend’s rental car, which had unpaid toll fees.

When Barnes began to drive away from the traffic stop, officer Roberto Felix Jr. stepped onto the driver’s side door sill and fired two shots, striking Barnes in the head and killing him. The officer’s dashboard camera recorded their deadly encounter, which lasted less than three minutes.

The question for the justices is just how much of that brief interaction courts should consider when evaluating whether a law enforcement officer acted reasonably in using deadly force. Should judges look only at what happened at the moment of threat in the seconds before Barnes was killed? Or should they examine the totality of the circumstances, including the officer’s actions leading up to the shooting?

Justices from across the ideological spectrum seemed to agree with the mother of the deceased driver that lower courts should widen their lens to look at the entire chain of events.

“You have to look at the whole picture, not just the two seconds” when the officer is on the car, said Nathaniel Zelinksy, an attorney for Barnes’s mother, Janice Hughes, who was in the courtroom Wednesday along with Felix, the officer who shot her son.

Justice Elena Kagan, a liberal, and Justice Neil M. Gorsuch, a conservative, suggested that the Supreme Court would send the case back to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 5th Circuit with instructions to take a broader look at the circumstances that led to Barnes’s death.

The Supreme Court will issue a ruling in the case by the end of June. The justices’ decision could expand the scope of evidence that judges must consider when individuals bring excessive-force claims against law enforcement officials. But even a ruling in favor of Barnes’s mother would not necessarily mean that those claims ultimately prevail. Police officers are often shielded from civil liability based on “qualified immunity” - the widely criticized legal doctrine that galvanized protesters and prompted debates in Congress and state legislatures following the murder of George Floyd in 2020.

In the Texas case before the Supreme Court, the 5th Circuit upheld a lower court finding that the officer’s actions were reasonable under the appeals court’s current standard of review. But one of the judges on the panel took the unusual step of calling on the justices to clarify for divided courts nationwide how judges should determine when deadly force is reasonable and constitutional.

Judge Patrick E. Higginbotham lamented in a separate opinion that a routine traffic stop “has again ended in the death of an unarmed black man, and again we cloak a police officer with qualified immunity, shielding his liability.” He called attention to the issue of what judges may consider, writing that the 5th Circuit’s narrow standard constrains its analysis to the “precise millisecond at which an officer deploys deadly force.”

That standard, Higginbotham wrote, requires judges to ignore “the reality of the role the officers played in bringing about the conditions said to necessitate deadly force.”

The 4th Amendment guards against “unreasonable searches and seizures” and prohibits law enforcement officers from using excessive force when carrying out arrests and other seizures. The Supreme Court has held that law enforcement officers violate those protections if they use deadly force without a reasonable belief that a person presents an imminent threat of harm to others or the officer.

Barnes’s mother sued Felix and Harris County, Texas, over the use of lethal force, which she said was a violation of her son’s constitutional rights.

A District Court judge sided with Felix, finding that the officer did not violate Barnes’s rights and that Felix had acted reasonably in response to Barnes’s refusal to exit the car and sudden move to restart the car on the side of a busy toll road.

In appealing that decision and the 5th Circuit ruling, lawyers for Hughes urged the Supreme Court to broaden its review of the officer’s actions to consider, for instance, that Felix had “unreasonably placed himself into danger in the preceding second,” by stepping onto the side of the car, and that Barnes was pulled over for a minor violation.

Attorney Luke McCloud, representing Felix on Wednesday, described him clinging to the side of the fleeing car and said the officer believed his life was in danger. McCloud warned against second-guessing officers’ split-second decisions and said the court’s ruling could make it more difficult to train officers.

Justice Brett M. Kavanaugh repeatedly seized on those concerns and asked about the real-world implications of a court ruling for police officers nationwide.

“What’s an officer supposed to do when, at a traffic stop, someone pulls away? Just let him go?” Kavanaugh asked.

A broad range of organizations filed court papers in support of Barnes’s position. The CATO Institute and criminal justice reform organizations told the court that the narrow test the 5th Circuit applied requires courts to ignore relevant facts and “frustrates accountability and contributes to an overreliance on the use of force by police, thereby undermining public confidence in law enforcement.”

Before President Donald Trump took office, the Biden administration staked out a middle ground in the case that the Justice Department continued to back in court Wednesday. Judges should defer to an officer’s split-second judgments, government lawyer Zoe Jacoby said, but should consider those actions in light of the full circumstances.