# Talk:Plumhoff v. Rickard

This review is transcluded from Talk:Plumhoff v. Rickard/GA1. The edit link for this section can be used to add comments to the review.
Reviewer: Usernameunique (talk · contribs) 04:29, 26 April 2020 (UTC)

Prior case law

Is it convention in these sorts of articles to have this section appear here, rather than following what happened in the lower courts? Naturally it would seem to belong afterwards, as it sets up the question on appeal.
Admittedly, this is my first time writing an article about a U.S. Supreme Court case, so I'm not 100% sure what the usual convention is for these articles. I followed the lead of other GA-class Supreme Court articles such as Lafler v. Cooper, written by my friend L235 (pinging him for perhaps further insight). Basically, I wanted to set up the legal background of the case—explaining the previous cases and constitutional principles that both the lower courts and the Supreme Court refer to in their decisions. Mz7 (talk) 18:47, 27 April 2020 (UTC)
@Mz7 and Usernameunique: That just happened to be the way I set it up – it's useful context for understanding the facts of the case and why lower courts ruled the way that they did, and fits squarely as background information for the meat of the article (the opinion of the Supreme Court, in most cases). But certainly the structure of SCOTUS case articles varies quite a bit depending on what made the case most significant/notable and so forth. Best, Kevin (aka L235 · t · c) 00:09, 28 April 2020 (UTC)
On further thought both seem to make some sense, but I think the current approach is correct. As a story—a set of facts which involve a lawsuit at the end—the prior case law is somewhat ancillary, and relevant only in the context of the lawsuit. But as {{u|L235} points out, when it comes to the state of the law and the history of its progression, this section is more important than the specific facts of what happened. Given that the notability of this article depends on the latter, that's probably the way to go here. --Usernameunique (talk) 21:52, 28 May 2020 (UTC)
Facts of the case

There's plenty of further information about this online. Is the decision to rely on the Court's summary intentional? From a precedential perspective that makes some sense, although there's also some value in seeing how the Court interpreted the facts.
Again, this is my first time writing an article about a U.S. Supreme Court case, so I'm not sure. It's true that I relied primarily on the Court's summary of the facts; I did this because I trusted that the Court presented the facts of the case that were most salient to their opinion. Mz7 (talk) 18:47, 27 April 2020 (UTC)
Similarly, I think it depends on perspective—whether the facts are seen as merely the record on appeal, or whether the facts and the lawsuit are seen as existing on separate planes that happen to intersect. I think there's some room to supplement the former approach—Allen seems to be consistently described in media sources as Rickard's girlfriend, for example—but I think the section is generally good.
"'roughly the size of a head or basketball'" — Whose words?
The lieutenant's words. I added according to him to make this clearer. Mz7 (talk) 18:47, 27 April 2020 (UTC)
According to a video of the car chase — Is this video public and in the public domain?
When I was writing the article, I vaguely remember trying to find a video, but I guess I gave up halfway through. I took a second look, and the video seems to exist in a few sources CNN, random YouTube channels [1][2][3]. It's not 100% clear whether the video is in the public domain—according to WP:PD#US government works, all federal government works are PD, but not necessarily state and local governments. I agree it would be a great addition to the article if we could clarify this and get a more reliable source for the video. Mz7 (talk) 18:47, 27 April 2020 (UTC)
It might depend on the state-specific (or police-department-specific) approach to public records. You might try asking for input at the copyright help desk.
Lower court proceedings

Whitne Rickard, Rickard's minor daughter, filed a legal action under 42 U.S.C. §1983 against Plumhoff — When?
So, I tried pretty hard to find this, but I don't have access to legal research websites like Westlaw, so I'm not able to dive too deeply into all of the lower court filings of this case. The best open-access source I found was this file on Justia that contains the Sixth Circuit's opinion affirming the district court—the opinion, which was filed on October 9, 2012, indicates that the district court order was made on January 20, 2011. Mz7 (talk) 04:45, 8 May 2020 (UTC)
Taking a brief look, it seems fairly convoluted. At least two lawsuits were filed—on behalf of the driver and passenger—which were consolidated on August 7, 2009. The Allen case (2:05-cv-02489) was filed on July 11, 2005. The first docket entry for the Rickard case (2:05-cv-02585) is dated August 12, 2005, and states "NOTICE OF REMOVAL by all defendants from Circuit Court, case number CT-003805-05." That may be a reference to the Arkansas Circuit Courts, so perhaps this was filed in state court and then removed to federal. Unfortunately 2005 is too early to readily find the documents online, but this article can perhaps be used to say that the lawsuit was filed in July 2005. --Usernameunique (talk) 21:52, 18 May 2020 (UTC)
@Usernameunique: Sorry for the delayed response. Thanks so much for taking a look! Given the convoluted nature of the lower court filings, I'm not 100% convinced it's necessary for the reader's understanding of the topic to go this deep into the details—at least not for the good article criteria's "broadness" criterion. As far as lower court proceedings go, I think the most salient points are (1) the denial of summary judgment on the basis of qualified immunity and (2) the court of appeals' judgment affirming the denial of summary judgment, and the section currently hits upon both (perhaps I could expand the section with a longer summary of the judgment of the court of appeals, but I feel the "broadness" criterion may already be fulfilled here). I'm slightly concerned that if we include that the lawsuit was filed in July 2005, it would lead to more confusion than benefit (it seems like there was an initial lawsuit filed in state court in July 2005, but the 42 U.S.C. § 1983 federal action which led to the Supreme Court review was not filed until much later). Mz7 (talk) 19:22, 22 May 2020 (UTC)
Fair enough. As to this and the below comment, much as it would be nice to have more information on the lower-court proceedings, I'm not even fully sure this would be required under the featured-article criteria—and given the legwork required, there might be some OR issues. --Usernameunique (talk) 22:07, 28 May 2020 (UTC)
This section could use some citations to the lower-court opinions and/or filings.
See above—I am neither a lawyer nor in law school, so it wasn't very easy for me to find lower-court filings in open-access sources. Outside of 509 Fed. Appx. 388 (CA6 2012), which was cited in the Supreme Court's opinion, the best I could find was this Justia file with the Sixth Circuit decision, and it contains a Westlaw citation to the district court decision: Estate of Allen, et al. v. City of West Memphis, et al., Nos. 05-2489/2585, 2011 WL 197426, at *3 (W.D. Tenn. Jan. 20, 2011) (citations omitted) (unpublished). I've added both of these to the article. Mz7 (talk) 04:45, 8 May 2020 (UTC)
Looks good. You seem to have omitted the case name from the citation, by the way. --Usernameunique (talk) 22:07, 28 May 2020 (UTC)
Oops,  Done now. Mz7 (talk) 22:51, 29 May 2020 (UTC)
had violated the Fourth and Fourteenth Amendments by using excessive force against her father and his passenger. — Looking below ("Opinion of the Court") it seems that the question was specifically about whether they violated Rickard's Fourth and Fourteenth Amendment rights.
Good point. So, it would appear that originally, the estate of Kelly Allen was among the plaintiffs in the case against the police officers, but the district court dismissed Allen's case, and the court of appeals "dismissed sua sponte" Allen's appeal—see footnote 1 of the Justia page. I've added a new explanatory footnote that describes this. Mz7 (talk) 05:27, 8 May 2020 (UTC)
It looks like 509 F. App'x 388 and the Justia document are the same thing (despite the "not recommended for full-text publication" at the top of the latter). The citation can be rendered along the lines of: "Estate of Allen v. City of West Memphis, 509 F. App'x 388, 389 (6th Cir. 2012)" --Usernameunique (talk) 22:45, 28 May 2020 (UTC)
 Done, thanks! Mz7 (talk) 22:54, 29 May 2020 (UTC)
Opinion of the Court

Anything that can be cited for footnote [c]?
I did not really pull from any particular source for this footnote. I included it because I thought the term "interlocutory" was too esoteric for the average Wikipedia reader. I found Legal Information Institute as a possible source, though its more a dictionary definition. Mz7 (talk) 02:11, 29 April 2020 (UTC)
Moving onto the legal questions — So the part about interlocutory appeals didn't involve any legal questions?
Ah good point. The distinction I wanted to make was between the jurisdictional questions and the more substantive questions raised in the petition—I've changed it to Moving onto the constitutional questions, but I'm open to further tweaking if this is still awkward. Mz7 (talk) 02:05, 29 April 2020 (UTC)
I changed it to To begin his constitutional analysis of the case Mz7 (talk) 19:59, 2 May 2020 (UTC)
Alito first explained that he was beginning his analysis of whether the officers' violated "clearly established law" by answering whether the officers' actually violated the Fourth Amendment ... Examining the facts of the case "from the perspective 'of a reasonable officer on the scene, rather than with 20/20 vision of hindsight'", Alito concluded that the officers had acted reasonably and had not violated the Fourth Amendment. — This seems to skip over Alito's reaffirmation of the "objective reasonableness" standard.
Ah, good point! I mentioned the standard in the "prior case law" section, so it must've just slipped my mind to include it in the opinion section. I updated the section by mentioning the standard. Mz7 (talk) 21:13, 2 May 2020 (UTC)
Similarly, Alito's conclusion could be expanded a bit. This sentence seems to explain the thinking some more: Under the circumstances at the moment when the shots were fired, all that a reasonable police officer could have concluded was that Rickard was intent on resuming his flight and that, if he was allowed to do so, he would once again pose a deadly threat for others on the road.
Yeah, the conclusion was definitely a little thin. I added the quote you mentioned as a blockquote. Mz7 (talk) 21:13, 2 May 2020 (UTC)
Finally, Alito wrote that even if the officers' conduct had violated the Fourth Amendment, they "would still be entitled to summary judgment based on qualified immunity". — Why? Generally speaking, it strikes me that discussion of what it means for a law to be "clearly established" is lacking in this article.
Ah, excellent point. I've expanded the section with more excerpts from Alito's opinion. Mz7 (talk) 21:13, 2 May 2020 (UTC)
Implications

Surely there's more than one article discussing this case? A very brief search turned up another that discussed Plumhoff in the context of police department policies: John P. Gross, Qualified Immunity and the Use of Force: Making the Reckless into the Reasonable, 8 Ala. C.R. & C.L.L. Rev. 67, 88–89 (2017) ("Collectively, Garner, Graham, Saucier, Scott, Plumhoff, and Mullenix, give little guidance to law enforcement agencies attempting to develop use of force policies. ... The decisions in Plumhoff and Mullenix are especially problematic since the Court approved of shooting into a car in an effort to stop a fleeing suspect despite the fact that the vast majority of law enforcement agencies instruct officers to never fire into a moving car. The Court appears to be more willing to permit the use of deadly force then the executive officers charged with protecting public safety.")
I have expanded the section with this source that you found, as well as a few additional articles I found on Nexis Uni. I think there is definitely more we could say in this section, but I tried to cover the broad strokes here. Mz7 (talk) 07:08, 8 May 2020 (UTC)
* Watch out for quotations with italics: does Barry really not use italics when saying "Tolan and Plumhoff as it did because in Tolan, the evidence was purely testimonial, while in Plumhoff"? What about Smith with "While the Plumhoff Court"? --Usernameunique (talk) 21:01, 29 May 2020 (UTC)
Barry does indeed use italics; the missing italics was my fault for when I put the text in. Fixed now. Mz7 (talk) 23:08, 29 May 2020 (UTC)
Reactions and criticism

Same comment as above that it would be nice to see more sources discussing the decision.
The cited articles criticize the decision, but are there any sources that approve of it, or at least make sense of it? That the decision was unanimous(ish) would seem to suggest that the Court didn't find its holdings particularly controversial.
I added another source which speculated that the decision in the case (granting qualified immunity to the officers) was so straightforward in light of Scott that the Court was thinking about reversing the court of appeals summarily. Mz7 (talk) 07:08, 8 May 2020 (UTC)
"weakened accountability by ruling that a local government can be held liable only if it is proved that the city’s or county’s own policy violated the Constitution" — What was it about the decision led to this comment?
Oh good catch. Plumhoff was never about liability of local governments; after reviewing the source, this sentences was in reference to a different case, Connick v. Thompson. I removed this quote that you highlighted. Mz7 (talk) 07:12, 8 May 2020 (UTC)
Scheidegger speculated that the reason Plumhoff was distributed for conference numerous times — This off-handed reference to something that happened in the procedural history but is not mentioned until the final sentence of the article took me by surprise. It's an interesting point though; I think you can add a brief mention under "Supreme Court" along the lines of "The officers filed a petition for a writ of certiorari with the Supreme Court. The petition was distributed for conference six times before the Court granted certiorari on November 15, 2013..." with cites to the blog and the docket. --Usernameunique (talk) 20:20, 29 May 2020 (UTC)
I like it! The docket confused me for a few minutes because it has two duplicate entries of "DISTRIBUTED for Conference of September 30, 2013", and the Scheidegger source appears to erroneously state it was only distributed five times. I'm assuming the Supreme Court docket is authoritative here. Mz7 (talk) 03:43, 30 May 2020 (UTC)
Good point, I missed that. Not sure what's going on there—I suppose it would be technically correct to say it was distributed seven times, but substantively, the number six is more important, and that's the number of times it was apparently actively discussed at. It looks as if there was some further discussion too, given that there were various requests (for a response, and twice for the record) that took place before, or long after, conferences. But none of that needs to be added. --Usernameunique (talk) 15:10, 30 May 2020 (UTC)
Citations

Any reason for not using sfn footnotes?
It betrays my relative inexperience, but I actually didn't realize {{sfn}} existed! I will see to updating this now. Mz7 (talk) 04:19, 30 May 2020 (UTC)
 Done Mz7 (talk) 05:20, 30 May 2020 (UTC)
10: Left a note above about the formatting.
Fixed, I think. See above. Mz7 (talk) 04:19, 30 May 2020 (UTC)
11: Ditto
Fixed, I think. See above. Mz7 (talk) 04:19, 30 May 2020 (UTC)
Not all of the law review articles have their full page ranges.
Fixed. Mz7 (talk) 04:19, 30 May 2020 (UTC)
Why do you include Gross in "Sources", but the others (e.g., Fairley) only in "Citations"? It's not a huge deal, but I would think it would make sense to put any work that a) has a range of pages, and b) you only cite to part of that range, into "Sources", and include a short page cite in "Citations".
I agree with this suggestion. Originally, I had these articles pulled up out of an online database, and it was not clear what the page numbers were since the article was in HTML format in one large page. Now that you have provided links to PDF documents with authoritative page numbers (thank you so much!), I've made this change. Mz7 (talk) 04:19, 30 May 2020 (UTC)
Sources

Gross 2017: A link to here can be added.
 Done Great find! Thanks, Mz7 (talk) 05:26, 30 May 2020 (UTC)
Given that Plumhoff is now published in the United States Reports, why is the slip opinion cited throughout?
The reason for this is because when I wrote the article, I only had the PDF of the slip opinion readily on hand, and that's what I used for the page numbers when writing the article. The slip opinion and the United States Reports version are not indistinguishable. For example, I did a cursory check, and it looks like the mention of the indentation, “‘roughly the size of a head or a basketball’” occurs on page 2 of the slip op., but on page 768 of the U.S. Reports version (the full opinion begins on page 768, but the headnote/syllabus begins on page 765). I suspect I'm going to need to go through and check each citation one by one to update the page numbers. I may do this eventually, but I don't see it as a big deal right now. Mz7 (talk) 04:03, 30 May 2020 (UTC)
Overall

Interesting article, Mz7. Comments above. --Usernameunique (talk) 04:29, 26 April 2020 (UTC)
@Usernameunique: Wow, thanks for the quick and thorough review! It looks like you've pointed out a lot of great points. I just wanted to quickly acknowledge that I have seen this, and I will try to respond as soon as I get the time. Mz7 (talk) 06:12, 26 April 2020 (UTC)
@Usernameunique: Quick status update. You caught me on a rather busy week, and some of your comments involve a bit more time and research than I have at the moment. I will have more time over the weekend and next week to work on this article, so I apologize for the delay. Mz7 (talk) 20:58, 29 April 2020 (UTC)
No worries, Mz7—no rush on my end. --Usernameunique (talk) 21:29, 29 April 2020 (UTC)
@Usernameunique: I think I have addressed or at least responded to most of the points you brought up—I'm interested in hearing your thoughts. Thanks again! Mz7 (talk) 07:13, 8 May 2020 (UTC)
Hi Usernameunique. I just wanted to gently bump this. This was a challenging article to write, so I'd be happy to hear if you have any additional thoughts on how it can be improved. Thanks! Mz7 (talk) 21:38, 28 May 2020 (UTC)
Mz7, sorry for the delay in getting back to this. The article looks good; nice work in particular adding to "Analysis and reception", which looks a lot more comprehensive and balanced now. A few minor comments above—and note that I've added comments on the referneces—but nothing that won't be easy to handle. --Usernameunique (talk) 21:01, 29 May 2020 (UTC)
@Usernameunique: Thanks so much for your thoughtful comments as always.  I tweaked some of the content and referencing per your follow-up suggestions and left a few responses above. Mz7 (talk) 05:29, 30 May 2020 (UTC)
Thanks, Mz7. Good work on this. Passing now. --Usernameunique (talk) 15:10, 30 May 2020 (UTC)