By Andrew Chung
(Reuters) -The U.S. Supreme Court appeared inclined on Wednesday to revive a Texas woman’s civil rights lawsuit against the Houston police officer who fatally shot her son during a traffic stop in a case that could make it easier for plaintiffs to show that police unlawfully used excessive force.
The nine justices heard arguments in an appeal by Janice Hughes, whose 24-year-old son Ashtian Barnes was killed in the 2016 incident. Hughes appealed after a lower court dismissed her lawsuit that had accused the officer, Roberto Felix Jr., of violating the U.S. Constitution’s Fourth Amendment prohibition on unreasonable searches and seizures by using deadly force against her son.
Most of the justices seemed to agree that lower courts in the case improperly analyzed the incident by considering only the exact “moment of threat” to the officer, while excluding the officer’s actions leading up to the deadly episode. Some justices, however, worried that a ruling along those lines would deter police from doing their jobs.
Nathaniel Zelinsky, a lawyer for Hughes, asked the Supreme Court to reject the “moment of threat” doctrine, which he called a “kind of legal amnesia” that “defies common sense.” Zelinsky urged the justices instead to require courts to assess the “totality of the circumstances” to determine if an officer’s conduct was reasonable.
“Given the varied nature of encounters between police officers and citizens across the country … we’ve always said reasonableness is a totality of the circumstances,” conservative Justice Neil Gorsuch told Zoe Jacoby, a lawyer from the Justice Department who faulted the lower court’s decision.
Gorsuch noted that a powerful legal defense called qualified immunity is also available to “protect the officers in these cases.”
Hughes sued the officer and Harris County, seeking monetary damages. Lower courts found that Felix’s actions were reasonable, as they considered only the two seconds before the officer fired his first shot, when he was hanging onto the moving vehicle and believed his life was in danger.
Felix, a Harris County Constable’s Office traffic enforcement officer, pulled Barnes over on April 28, 2016, because the rented Toyota Corolla he was driving on a highway had outstanding toll violations.
Barnes searched for his license and proof of insurance, and suggested they might be in the trunk, according to court papers. Felix claimed to smell marijuana, though no evidence of drugs was found in the car, the filings showed.
Felix ordered Barnes out of the vehicle, but instead the car began to move forward, according to court papers. Felix stepped on to the driver’s door sill and shouted at Barnes not to move, then fired twice, the filings showed. Barnes died at the scene.
Local officials investigated the shooting but Felix was never charged with a crime. An internal police probe also cleared Felix of any wrongdoing, according to court papers.
At the moment Felix used force, “he was clinging to the side of a fleeing suspect’s car. And Felix reasonably believed that his life was in imminent danger. That conclusion should end this case,” his attorney, Luke McCloud, told the justices on Wednesday.
McCloud cautioned against a ruling that would make it harder for police to defend their use of force even if they made a mistake, used bad tactics or had poor planning.
Supreme Court precedent, McCloud said, “requires courts to put themselves in the shoes of the officer who used force, not to second-guess every decision the officer made in some of the most stressful circumstances imaginable.”
Conservative Justice Brett Kavanaugh appeared concerned about a ruling favoring Hughes.
“You know, officers, if they’re held liable for jumping on cars for anything that happens thereafter, are just going to let cars go,” Kavanaugh told Jacoby. “An individual officer … who is risk-averse on being held liable for something is just not going to do it.”
The lawsuit alleged that the shooting resulted from Felix’s dangerous decision “to pull his gun without provocation, then point that gun in Ashtian Barnes’ direction, then leaping onto a moving vehicle and firing twice into it without warning, with no clue as to what he was aiming at.”
The “moment of threat” doctrine is used by courts in several regions of the country, including the Texas federal courts overseen by the New Orleans-based 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, where this case was decided – but not in other federal courts, according to lawyers for Hughes.
A Supreme Court decision is expected by the end of June.
(Reporting by Andrew Chung in New York; Editing by Will Dunham)
