Supreme Court shields police officer from suit
Ruling slammed by civil rights backers on left and right
WASHINGTON — The Supreme Court on Monday shielded a police officer from being sued for shooting an Arizona woman in her front yard, once again making it harder to bring legal action against officers who use excessive force, even against an innocent person.
With two dissents, the high court tossed out a lawsuit by a Tucson woman who was shot four times outside her home because she was seen carrying a large knife.
The ruling, which comes at a time of growing controversy over police shootings nationwide, effectively advises courts to rely more heavily on the officer’s view of such incidents, rather than the victim’s.
Justices Sonia Sotomayor and Ruth Bader Ginsburg said in dissent the victim did not threaten the police or a friend who was standing nearby. This “decision is not just wrong on the law; it also sends an alarming signal to law enforcement officers and the public. It tells officers that they can shoot first and think later,” Sotomayor wrote.
Civil liberties advocates on the right and left sharply criticized the ruling.
“Today’s ruling gives yet another green light to officers who use deadly force as a tool of first resort instead of last,” said Clark Neily, vice president of the libertarian Cato Institute. “It does so based on a legal doctrine — qualified immunity — that the Supreme Court invented out of whole cloth to help create a policy of near-zero accountability for law enforcement.”
David Cole, legal director for the American Civil Liberties Union, said officers who use lethal force unconstitutionally should be held accountable. “Giving a free pass to officers under these circumstances will only exacerbate the problem.”
Since the Civil War, federal law has allowed people to sue government officials, including the police, for violating their constitutional rights. But in recent years, the Supreme Court has erected a shield of immunity for police and said officers may not be sued unless victims can point to a nearly identical shooting that had been deemed unconstitutionally excessive in a previous decision.
Police shootings of unarmed people, many of them African-Americans, have sparked protests across the country, most recently in Sacramento, Calif. Often prosecutors have been reluctant to bring criminal charges in such cases because they would need to convince an entire jury that the officer was guilty beyond a reasonable doubt.
Civil suits that seek damages are in theory easier to win because plaintiffs need only present convincing evidence that the officer used unreasonable force. But the high court has repeatedly made it harder for victims to bring such claims before a jury.
In an eight-page unsigned opinion in Kisela v. Hughes, the justices did not rule on whether officer Andrew Kisela acted reasonably when he used potentially deadly force against Amy Hughes, who was standing in her driveway a few feet away from her friend and roommate, Sharon Chadwick. The police had been called after a neighbor reported seeing a woman acting strangely and carrying a large knife.
Rather than decide whether Kisela used excessive force, the court instead ruled he could not be sued because the victim could not cite a similar case involving a police shooting of a person holding a knife.
“Police officers are entitled to qualified immunity unless existing precedent squarely governs the specific facts at issue . ... This is far from an obvious case in which any competent officer would have known that shooting Hughes to protect Chadwick would violate the Fourth Amendment” and its ban on unreasonable seizures, the court said Monday.
The decision reversed the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals, which had allowed the woman’s lawsuit to go before a jury.