Page 21 - June 2017 Newsletter

that the officers were liable for the shooting on the theory that they had intentionally and recklessly brought about the shooting by entering the shack without a warrant. The 9th Circuit Court called this the “provocation rule,” which holds an officer liable if his or her actions provoked the violent situation and if his or her constitutional viola- tion (here, the unlawful entry into the Mendez residence) proximately caused an injury.
The case ultimately ended up before the United States Supreme Court to decide whether the 9th Circuit Court’s decision under the “provocation rule” was constitutional. The Supreme Court noted that the “provocation rule” was only used by the 9th Circuit and was heavily criticized in other circuits around the country. The Supreme Court has previously looked at police liability in Graham v. O’Connor and stated that a police officer’s use of force violates the Fourth Amendment only if it is objectively unreasonable under the facts and circumstances of each particular case. Officers often are forced to make quick decisions under duress and are therefore judged under those circumstanc- es. As a result, in more recent cases, the Supreme Court has suggested that an officer’s actions before his or her use of force are not irrelevant to the reasonableness inquiry.
The Supreme Court held that the officers could not be held liable under the 9th Circuit’s “provocation rule” be- cause such a rule was an unnecessary expansion of the Graham decision and no longer looked to the officers’ beliefs at the time of shooting. The Supreme Court not-
ed that when accounting for the officers’ point of view at the time they confronted the weapon in Mendez’s pointed at them, the shooting was not unreasonable. By asking a court to “look back in time to see if there was a different Fourth Amendment violation that is somehow tied to the eventual use of force,” the Supreme Court reasoned, the 9th Circuit’s “novel and unsupported” rule “conflates dis- tinct Fourth Amendment claims.”
In determining the reasonableness of the officers’ use of force, the Court is only to look at the circumstances im- mediately surrounding the shooting and not the events that led up to the shooting. Therefore, the officers’ war- rantless entrance into the home is not material and has no bearing on the officers’ liability in shooting someone they saw pointing a gun in their direction.
Alito noted that the provocation rule may be motivated by the notion that it is important to hold police officers liable for the foreseeable consequences of their constitu- tional torts.
“However, there is no need to distort the excessive force inquiry in order to accomplish this objective,” Alito said. “To the contrary, both parties accept the principle that plaintiffs can — subject to qualified immunity — gener- ally recover damages that are proximately caused by any Fourth Amendment violation.”
Law enforcement has already been forced to fight with a hand tied behind its back. Thankfully, the court prevented both hands from being restrained.d
CHICAGO LODGE 7 ■ JUNE 2017 21