LEO’s May Need to Consider Victim’s Perspective Before Using Deadly Force
This case law update was written by James P. Garay Heelan, an attorney at the law firm of Shaw Bransford & Roth, where he has practiced federal personnel and employment law since 2012. Mr. Heelan represents federal personnel across the Executive Branch, including career senior executives, law enforcement officers, foreign service officers, intelligence officers, and agencies in matters of federal personnel and employment law.
Allowing a potential circuit split on the relevance of a victims view to the qualified immunity analysis to exist, the Supreme Court denied a petition for review of a Fourth Circuit decision denying qualified immunity to an officer who shot a man wielding a shotgun in his own home.
As FEDagent previously reported in September 2022, a North Carolina officer in 2018 responded to a property dispute and arrived on site just before midnight, alone and in full police uniform. Seeing a light on inside the home he responded to, the officer stepped onto the front porch, announced “sheriff’s office,” and knocked several times. Because no one answered, the officer went to the neighboring home to talk about the dispute.
While at the neighbor’s home, the officer saw the light go out inside the first home and returned to that property. Again on the front porch, the officer twice announced “sheriff’s office” and heard motion inside. He then heard someone rack a shotgun behind a door, so he called out multiple times either “drop it” or “put it down.”
Hearing no response to his instruction to disarm, the officer moved away from the door where he heard the shotgun. Service weapon in one hand, flashlight in the other, the officer passed a window and saw a man holding a shotgun. The officer reacted by firing his service weapon multiple times, killing the man inside.
The victim’s estate sued the office in a Section 1983 action, claiming the officer violated the victim’s Fourth Amendment rights. The federal trial court granted the officer’s motion for summary judgment on qualified immunity grounds, determining the officer had probable cause to believe the shotgun-wielding man was an immediate and serious threat. The estate then appealed to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit, which reversed the trial court’s decision.
Courts cannot grant summary judgment—a judgment on the merits of a case issued before a trial—where there are disputes of legally significant facts. In this case, the Fourth Circuit determined that a trial was necessary to resolve two key facts. First, the way in which the victim was holding the shotgun when the office saw him through the window before shooting him. Second, whether the officer was “readily recognizable” as a law enforcement officer while on the victim’s porch.
According to the officer’s petition to the Supreme Court, the Fourth Circuit’s decision broke from the precedent of six other circuit courts. The Fourth Circuit decision, the officer argued, improperly focused the qualified immunity argument on the victim’s intent—how he was holding the shotgun, whether he could have identified the officer as law enforcement—rather than the information known to the officer at the time he discharged his weapon.
Arguing against the officer’s petition, the victim’s estate argued the Fourth Circuit’s decision was correct. The issue of how the victim held the shotgun, the estate argued, went to the question of whether he was an objectively immediate threat.
The estate pushed back against the officer’s argument that the Fourth Circuit’s analysis improperly focused on the victim’s perspective. Whether the officer was readily recognizable as law enforcement, the estate argued, went to “whether a reasonable officer in those same circumstances would determined it was foreseeable that [the victim] would arm himself to investigate the nocturnal disturbance outside his home in rural North Carolina.”
“A reasonable officer operating under [the] facts and circumstance [of this case] would expect that a law-abiding rural homeowner would likely answer the door with a loaded firearm for the protection of his family,” the estate argued.
Ultimately, the officer’s petition failed to garner the votes of at least four of the nine Justices required for the Supreme Court to accept the petition for a decision. The Fourth Circuit decision therefore stands and the case will be sent back to the trial court for further proceedings.
By denying the officer’s petition without publishing an explanation, the Supreme Court leaves open to interpretation whether the Fourth Circuit’s qualified immunity analysis truly split from its six sister circuits and how it expects officers will approach homes where they suspect armed individuals are inside. These issues will be resolved through future litigation.
The Supreme Court filings in this case, Momphard v. Knibbs, are available here: https://www.supremecourt.gov/search.aspx?filename=/docket/docketfiles/html/public/22-8.html.
For over forty years, Shaw Bransford & Roth P.C. has provided superior representation on a wide range of federal employment law issues, from representing federal employees nationwide in administrative investigations, disciplinary and performance actions, and Bivens lawsuits, to handling security clearance adjudications and employment discrimination cases.