Opinion ID: 2682680
Heading Depth: 2
Heading Rank: 3

Heading: Harper Falls from the Tree

Text: Harper peered through the woods to see police flashlights sparkling in his backyard. At that moment Harper scaled the tree where he had stashed his rifle. “I was hoping if they shined the light out there [in the woods] and didn’t see me, that they would just take a statement and leave,” Harper explained at his deposition. But onward the officers marched. When Harper saw a dog leading the search party, he “eased up on some little bitty limbs that was on there and I kind of—I kind of just squeezed myself to that tree.” Meanwhile Gourley and Davis tailed the bloodhound, moving ahead of Courson and Perkins as they went. They passed some trash and an old shed, then the dog lifted its head and “winded.” That meant the target was nearby. Harper, seeing the bloodhound sniffing near the base of his tree, “knew [that he] was caught.” “Hey, I’m up here,” he called to the officers, and Perkins, who was standing just below Harper’s perch, said “He’s up in the tree.” Gourley and Davis doubled back and trained their flashlights on the suspect. They had unwittingly passed by Harper as they tracked. “Let me see your hands. Let me see your hands. Come down out the tree,” the officers hollered. Harper looked at the officers and said, “My hands is out,” 7 Case: 13-13190 Date Filed: 07/11/2014 Page: 8 of 19 but they kept yelling for Harper to show his hands and descend. Then Harper pushed himself back off the branch and cussed, “What the fuck you want me to do? I can’t do both. My hands is out.” At that moment, Harper remembered the rifle lodged upright in the tree fork near his feet. Fearing the police would kill him when they saw his gun, Harper alerted Perkins—who was still directly below him—“There’s a gun down there at the tree.” Perkins shined his flashlight on the rifle and back on Harper, then shouted, “He’s got the fucking gun up in the tree with him.” 3 That instant, Gourley shot his electronic control device—or Taser—at Harper’s bare abdomen. The Taser probes struck just below Harper’s bottom left rib but failed to transmit a clean electric shock. As Harper fell back against the tree and slapped the malfunctioning wires from Gourley’s Taser, Davis reholstered his handgun and drew his own Taser. Davis fired his device at Harper, and this time the probes made a sound connection. Harper’s body, seized with electricity, fell from the eight foot-high branch and torpedoed headlong to the earth. The fall left Harper a paraplegic. 3 The location of Harper’s rifle is hotly disputed. In his deposition, Harper indicated that the gun remained stashed in the fork below him, somewhere near his feet, when he was tasered. This account seems to jibe with a statement Davis made for an internal investigation completed a day after Harper’s fall. Officer Courson, on the other hand, said Davis reported after the incident that Gourley saw Harper reaching for the rifle. Finally, both Davis and Gourley testified in their depositions that they saw Harper holding the rifle just before he was tasered. Clearly not all of these accounts are true. For the purposes of summary judgment, however, we credit Harper’s version of the facts, i.e., that the rifle remained below him before the fall. See Morton, 707 F.3d at 1280. 8 Case: 13-13190 Date Filed: 07/11/2014 Page: 9 of 19 The entire exchange—from when Harper saw the officers tromping through the woods to the moment Harper hit the ground—lasted little more than a minute.