Document ID: s3://data.kl3m.ai/documents/govinfo/USCOURTS/USCOURTS-ca7-19-01816/USCOURTS-ca7-19-01816-0/pdf.json

Parties Involved:
Herbert Adams
Appellee
Blake Hollins
Appellee
Marquelle L. Smith
Appellant
J. T. Vancleave
Appellee

Document Text:

United States Court of Appeals 

For the Seventh Circuit 

Chicago, Illinois 60604 

Submitted February 10, 2020*

Decided February 11, 2020 

Before 

MICHAEL S. KANNE, Circuit Judge 

DIANE S. SYKES, Circuit Judge 

AMY J. ST. EVE, Circuit Judge

No. 19-1816 

MARQUELLE L. SMITH, 

Plaintiff-Appellant, 

v. 

HERBERT ADAMS, BLAKE HOLLINS, 

and J. T. VANCLEAVE, 

 Defendants-Appellees.

 Appeal from the United States District 

Court for the Southern District of Indiana, 

Evansville Division. 

No. 3:18-cv-00019-SEB-MPB 

Sarah Evans Barker, 

Judge. 

O R D E R 

 After he was arrested during a chaotic nighttime encounter, Marquelle Smith 

sued three officers, Herbert Adams, Blake Hollins, and J.T. VanCleave, from the 

Evansville Police Department in Indiana. He alleged that they violated his Fourth 

Amendment rights when they shot at his car, forcibly removed him from it, and 

*

 We have agreed to decide the case without oral argument because the briefs and 

record adequately present the facts and legal arguments, and oral argument would not 

significantly aid the court. FED. R. APP. P. 34(a)(2)(C). 

NONPRECEDENTIAL DISPOSITION 

To be cited only in accordance with Fed. R. App. P. 32.1 

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No. 19-1816 Page 2 

deployed a Taser on him. See 42 U.S.C. § 1983. (His complaint included additional 

claims and named the police department, county jail, and sheriff as defendants, but 

those claims and parties were dismissed, and Smith has not appealed those dismissals.) 

Both sides moved for summary judgment, and the district court granted the defendants’ 

motion. Smith appeals. Because the record properly before us establishes that the use of 

force was reasonable under the circumstances, we affirm. 

 At the outset, we address Smith’s concern that the district court limited the 

summary judgment record to the evidence designated by the defendant officers—

namely, their affidavits, bodycam recordings, and portions of Smith’s deposition 

testimony. Local rules required Smith to support each fact he asserted, and each factual 

dispute he raised, with citations to admissible evidence in the record or an appendix. 

S. D. IND. L.R. 56-1(b), (e), (f)(1)(A). Smith did not do so. While he insists that he too 

designated evidence, including 911 recordings, video footage, and officers’ depositions, 

he did not submit it to the court. (He attached only medical records, his deposition 

transcript, an affidavit about his injuries, and his criminal appellate briefs to his filings.) 

For this reason—and because she believed the officers’ bodycam recordings 

corroborated their testimony, see Scott v. Harris, 550 U.S. 372, 379–81 (2007)—the district 

judge ruled that there were no disputed facts and adopted the defendants’ account of 

events. 

Though Smith was proceeding pro se, the district judge was entitled to require 

strict compliance with the local rules after warning him about them. See McNeil v. 

United States, 508 U.S. 106, 113 (1993); McCurry v. Kenco Logistics Servs., LLC., 942 F.3d 

783, 786–87 (7th Cir. 2019). Smith did not properly cite or submit his evidence, and 

courts are not required to “wade through improper denials and legal argument in 

search of a genuinely disputed fact.” Curtis v. Costco Wholesale Corp., 807 F.3d 215, 219 

(7th Cir. 2015) (quoting Bordelon v. Chicago Sch. Reform Bd., 233 F.3d 524, 529 (7th Cir. 

2000)). So like the district court, we base our factual summary on the officers’ 

submissions, viewing them in the light most favorable to Smith. See Tolliver v. City of 

Chicago, 820 F.3d 237, 241 (7th Cir. 2016). We note that the bodycam footage is dark and 

frequently obstructed, rendering it susceptible to multiple interpretations. See Jackson v. 

Curry, 888 F.3d 259, 264 (7th Cir. 2018). But the audio clearly captures the officers’ 

orders and Smith’s post-arrest verbalizations, so those are not subject to contradiction. 

See Scott, 550 U.S. at 379–81; Johnson v. Rogers, 944 F.3d 966, 969–70 (7th Cir. 2019) 

(extracting undisputed facts from grainy video recording). 

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No. 19-1816 Page 3 

 Late one evening, officers from the Evansville Police Department responded to a 

911 call about shots fired and a group of people fighting. Officers Adams and Hollins 

were first on the scene and saw three people, including Smith, arguing near a parked 

car. They approached the group with their flashlights out and guns drawn and ordered 

the individuals to be quiet, show their hands, and step away from the car. Two 

complied, but Smith did not hear the order, got into the car, and started the engine. The 

officers yelled at him to stop and get out. Smith, however, accelerated—so rapidly that 

the tires squealed and left marks on the road. Adams and Hollins were in Smith’s path, 

so they fired their guns at the tires to stop the car (Adams three times and Hollins once). 

The shots hit the car, causing Smith to crash into a nearby garage. 

Officer VanCleave arrived shortly after the crash, and Hollins and Adams 

approached the car with their guns out. They again ordered Smith to show his hands 

and exit the car, but he did not comply and instead threw something out of the window. 

Hollins attempted to open the car door to get Smith out; at the same time, Smith moved 

his hands down towards his waist (to unfasten his seatbelt, he says). The officers again 

ordered Smith to keep his hands outside of the car and get out, and Smith shouted, 

“Pull me out, pull me out.” VanCleave and Hollins then attempted to pull Smith out of 

the car window, with VanCleave holding Smith’s arms to keep his hands in view. 

Midway through the effort, Smith started forcibly pulling away from the officers, 

hooked his feet inside the car, and appeared to reach for something. In response, 

VanCleave deployed his Taser on Smith, and the officers were finally able to pull him 

out of the car. 

Once Smith was on the ground, the officers continued ordering him to give them 

his hands, but Smith kept them under his stomach. After a brief struggle, they 

handcuffed him, and he apologized for his behavior. But he soon began cursing and 

struggling, so officers took him to the ground again. (No officer says so, but audio from 

the bodycam suggests that they used the Taser on him a second time.) Smith continued 

to curse and threatened to fight the officers. They eventually subdued him and placed 

him in custody. About an hour after his arrest, after Smith complained that they had 

beaten him, officers took him to the hospital for an examination. Smith denied any 

injuries, but a nurse tended to his eye and removed a Taser prong from his back. Later, 

at the jail, Smith discovered a second prong. 

When searches of his person and car yielded cocaine and marijuana, Smith was 

charged with drug possession as well as attempted aggravated battery for driving his 

car at the officers. A jury found him guilty of the drug counts but not guilty of 

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No. 19-1816 Page 4 

attempted aggravated battery. Smith sued Adams, Hollins, and VanCleave for using 

excessive force during his arrest and delaying his access to medical care in the 

aftermath. The district court entered summary judgment in favor of the defendants, 

determining that the officers’ use of force was reasonable under the circumstances and 

that, because little time elapsed between the arrest and his hospital visit, and Smith did 

not tell anyone that he was injured, they did not unconstitutionally impede his access to 

medical care. 

Smith appealed. When he asked to proceed in forma pauperis, the district court 

certified that his appeal was not in good faith. See 28 U.S.C. § 1915(a)(3). In this court, 

however, a motions judge allowed him to proceed in forma pauperis insofar as he could 

raise a nonfrivolous argument “that he was subjected to excessive force during and 

after his removal from the car.” That limiting order is one this merits panel may 

reconsider, see United States v. Alcantar, 83 F.3d 185, 191 (7th Cir. 1996), but nothing 

Smith raises in his briefs persuades us that we should. We limit our review to that issue. 

Smith first insists that Adams and Hollins used unreasonable force when they 

fired at his car because he did not have a gun, was not attempting to flee, and received 

no warning, and the use of lethal force was disproportionate to the misdemeanor drug 

possession crimes of which he was later convicted. A police officer’s use of force during 

an arrest is a seizure subject to the reasonableness requirement of the Fourth 

Amendment. Graham v. Connor, 490 U.S. 386, 394 (1985). We evaluate the reasonableness 

of an officer’s action from “the perspective of a reasonable officer on the scene,” not 

through “the 20/20 vision of hindsight.” Id. at 396. Relevant factors to evaluate include 

the severity of the crime at issue, whether the suspect posed an immediate threat to the 

officer’s safety, and whether the suspect was resisting arrest or attempting to flee. See id. 

We agree with the district court that firing four shots at Smith’s car was 

reasonable under the totality of the circumstances. Because Adams and Hollins 

encountered Smith while responding to a 911 call about shots fired and fighting, they 

reasonably believed that Smith might be armed. When they ordered him to show his 

hands, he (unlike the two others on the street) ignored them, entering a car instead. 

Smith asserts that he was only going home and not trying to flee, but officers knew only 

that he was disobeying orders and possibly armed. When he accelerated so rapidly that 

the tires squealed, they reasonably believed that he might hit them and fired their guns 

to stop the car. Smith emphasizes that he was not convicted of attempting to assault the 

officers, but his intent is irrelevant to whether the officers reasonably believed that they 

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No. 19-1816 Page 5 

faced death or serious bodily injury—the predicate to using deadly force. See Tennessee 

v. Garner, 471 U.S. 1, 11–12 (1985); Horton v. Pobjecky, 883 F.3d 941, 949 (7th Cir. 2018). 

Smith’s arguments that he was not armed and that he was convicted only of lowlevel offenses are based on hindsight, but only facts known to the officers at the time of 

the seizure matter in the reasonableness determination. See Graham 490 U.S. at 396;

Fitzgerald v. Santoro, 707 F.3d 725, 732–33 (7th Cir. 2013). And they fired only four shots 

at the bottom of the car; there is no dispute that they did not aim for Smith. See Plumhoff 

v. Rickard, 134 S. Ct. 2012, 2022 (2014) (firing 15 shots at suspect fleeing in car was 

reasonable to end risk posed by his reckless driving). 

 Smith also contends that the officers used excessive force when they dragged 

him out of the car, used a Taser on him, and wrestled him to the ground because, he 

asserts, he was not resisting arrest. But the record, including the bodycam audio, tells a 

different story of what officers reasonably perceived after the crash. Smith continued to 

disobey officers’ commands and refused to keep his hands in view and to get out of the 

car. They still did not know if he was armed. After Smith told them to pull him out of 

the car, he began to forcibly resist the extraction, so they used a Taser on him. The 

bodycam audio shows that, once Smith was out of the car, he briefly calmed down, 

apologized, and asked them to pull his pants up (which had slipped during the 

extraction). But he quickly resumed struggling and began cursing and threatening to 

fight the officers. They forcefully took him to the ground again (apparently using a 

second Taser blast) to incapacitate him. Overall, the evidence shows that he was 

violently resisting arrest, so no reasonable jury could find that the officers acted 

unreasonably when they forcefully subdued him. See United States v. Norris, 640 F.3d 

295, 303 (7th Cir. 2011) (use of Taser reasonable when suspect disobeyed commands and 

displayed intent to violently resist police). 

AFFIRMED 

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