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Roberto Felix Jr., a law enforcement officer, pulled over Ashtian Barnes for suspected toll violations. Felix ordered Barnes to exit the vehicle, but Barnes began to drive away. As the car began to move forward, Felix 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 Felix on Barnes’s behalf, alleging that Felix violated Barnes’s Fourth Amendment right against excessive force. The district court granted summary judgment to Felix, applying the 5th Circuit Court of Appeals’s moment-of-threat rule. The Court of Appeals affirmed, explaining that the moment-of-threat rule requires asking only whether an officer was in danger at the moment of the threat that resulted in the use of deadly force. Under the rule, events leading up to the shooting are not relevant.
Here, the precise moment of threat was the two seconds when Felix was clinging to a moving car. Because Felix could then have reasonably believed his life was in danger, the panel held, the shooting was lawful.
The U.S. Supreme Court held that a claim that a law enforcement officer used excessive force during a stop or arrest is analyzed under the Fourth Amendment, which requires that the force deployed be objectively reasonable from the perspective of a reasonable officer at the scene.
The inquiry into the reasonableness of police force requires analyzing the totality of the circumstances. The court noted that the analysis demands careful attention to the facts and circumstances relating to the incident. It also noted the totality of the circumstances inquiry has no time limit. While the situation at the precise time of the shooting will often matter most, the court asserted that earlier facts and circumstances may bear on how a reasonable officer would have understood and responded to later ones.
Prior events may show why a reasonable officer would perceive otherwise ambiguous conduct as threatening, or instead as innocuous, the court explained.
The Supreme Court pointed to Plumhoff v. Rickard to illustrate the point. There, an officer’s use of deadly force was justified at the moment, partly because of what had transpired in the preceding period.
The court found that the moment-of-threat rule prevents the same sort of attention to context, and conflicts with its instruction to analyze the totality of the circumstances. By limiting their view to the two seconds before the shooting, the lower courts couldn’t take into account anything preceding that final moment.
They couldn’t consider the reasons for the stop or the earlier interactions between Felix and Barnes. And because of that limit, the Supreme Court found they couldn’t address whether the final two seconds of the encounter would look different if set within a longer time frame. The high court found that a rule like that, which precludes consideration of prior events in assessing a police shooting, is not reconcilable with the fact-dependent and context-sensitive approach the Supreme Court has prescribed. A court deciding a use-of-force case cannot review the totality of the circumstances if it has put on chronological blinders, the court noted.
The court didn’t address a separate question in this case about whether or how an officer’s own creation of a dangerous situation factors into the reasonableness analysis. The prior courts never confronted that issue, and it wasn’t the basis of the petition for certiorari.
The Supreme Court vacated the judgment and remanded the case.
Justice Elena Kagan delivered the opinion for a unanimous court. Justice Brett Kavanaugh filed a concurring opinion, in which Justices Clarence Thomas, Samuel Alito Jr. and Amy Coney Barrett joined.