Opinion ID: 74409
Heading Depth: 1
Heading Rank: 7

Heading: excessive force principles

Text: We next examine Plaintiffs' claims based on excessive force. The Supreme Court has instructed that all claims that law enforcement officers have used excessive force—deadly or not—in the course of an arrest, investigatory stop, or other 'seizure' of a free citizen should be analyzed under the Fourth Amendment and its 'reasonableness' standard. Graham v. Connor, 490 U.S. 386. 395, 109 S.Ct. 1865, 104 L.Ed.2d 443 (1989). It is well established that the right to make an arrest or investigatory stop necessarily carries with it the right to use some degree of physical coercion or threat thereof to effect it. Id. at 396, 109 S.Ct. 1865. To determine whether the force used is reasonable under the Fourth Amendment requires a careful balancing of the nature and quality of the intrusion on the individual's Fourth Amendment interest against the countervailing governmental interests at stake. See Id.; Tennessee v. Garner, 471 U.S. 1, 8, 105 S.Ct. 1694, 85 L.Ed.2d 1 (1985); Crosby v. Paulk, 187 F.3d 1339, 1351 (11th Cir.1999). Because [t]he test of reasonableness under the Fourth Amendment is not capable of precise definition or mechanical application, Bell v. Wolfish, 441 U.S. 520, 559, 99 S.Ct. 1861, 60 L.Ed.2d 447 (1979), its proper application requires careful attention to the facts and circumstances of each particular case, including the severity of the crime at issue, whether the suspect poses an immediate threat to the safety of the officers or others, and whether [the suspect] is actively resisting arrest or attempting to evade arrest by flight. Graham, 490 U.S. at 396, 109 S.Ct. 1865. Therefore, [u]se of force must be judged on a case-by-case basis 'from the perspective of a reasonable officer on the scene, rather than with the 20/20 vision of hindsight.'  Post v. City of Fort Lauderdale, 7 F.3d 1552, 1559 (11th Cir.1993) (quoting Graham, 490 U.S. at 396, 109 S.Ct. 1865). The calculus of reasonableness must embody allowance for the fact that police officers are often forced to make split-second judgments—in circumstances that are tense, uncertain, and rapidly evolving—about the amount of force that is necessary in a particular situation. Graham, 490 U.S. at 396-97, 109 S.Ct. 1865. The reasonableness inquiry is also an objective one. [T]he question is whether the officers' actions are 18 'objectively reasonable' in light of the facts and circumstances confronting them, without regard to their underlying intent or motivation. Graham, 490 U.S. at 397, 109 S.Ct. 1865. An officer's evil intentions will not make a Fourth Amendment violation out of an objectively reasonable use of force; nor will an officer's good intentions make an objectively unreasonable use of force constitutional. Id. at 397, 109 S.Ct. 1865; see Scott v. United States, 436 U.S. 128, 138, 98 S.Ct. 1717, 56 L.Ed.2d 168 (1978). Furthermore, this Court has concluded that Fourth Amendment jurisprudence has staked no bright line for identifying force as excessive, that [t]he hazy border between permissible and forbidden force is marked by a multifactored, case-by-case balancing test, and [t]he test requires weighing of all the circumstances. Smith v. Mattox, 127 F.3d 1416, 1419 (11th Cir.1997).18 Utilizing these principles, we now examine Plaintiffs' two separate legal theories for their excessive force claims. Plaintiffs first contend that any force was excessive because the stop was illegal. Alternatively, Plaintiffs assert that even if the stop was legal, Defendants still used excessive force during that stop. We discuss each theory in turn.