Opinion ID: 3026437
Heading Depth: 2
Heading Rank: 2

Heading: The Focus Should Have Been on the Threshold

Text: Question Where the District Court did go astray was in assuming that a constitutional violation had occurred and then applying its efforts to answering the question of immunity. The Court’s confusion appears to have been the product both of 15 Given that Curley acknowledged pointing the gun in the direction of the Camry and that Klem was standing next to the car, it is not fanciful to believe that the jury could have interpreted the question as described. 31 language in our Curley I opinion and of the intertwined questions of objective reasonableness posed by the two prongs of the Saucier test when applied to this case. The panel in Curley I addressed the question of whether Klem’s conduct violated Curley’s constitutional rights in the summary judgment context, and thus “consider[ed] only the facts alleged by Curley, taken in the light most favorable to him.” Curley I, 298 F.3d at 280. In determining that, under Curley’s version of the facts, he had established a violation of his constitutional rights, we said: [T]hese facts, viewed in the light most favorable to Curley, are sufficient to support the claim that Klem’s shooting of Curley constituted an unreasonable seizure, violative of Curley’s rights under the Fourth Amendment. ... [W]e find that under Curley’s account of events, it was unreasonable for Klem to fire at Curley based on his unfounded, mistaken conclusion that Curley was the suspect in question. Id. at 280 (emphasis added). The District Court apparently read our opinion as establishing that Curley’s constitutional rights were violated. In its ruling on post-trial motions, the District Court stated that “there was a constitutional violation in that Officer Curley had a right not to be shot by Trooper Klem.” 2006 WL 414093, at  1. That, however, is an oversimplification and a misreading of Curley I. Whether Klem committed a constitutional tort turns not on the simple fact that he shot the wrong man. That would end the inquiry 32 before it began. The question is whether Klem’s use of force, even though mistakenly directed, was objectively reasonable in light of the totality of the circumstances. That question had yet to be answered when Curley I was decided, since a trial was required. There is no substitute for “slosh[ing one’s] way through the factbound morass of ‘reasonableness.’” Scott, 127 S. Ct. at 1778. Thus, our earlier opinion was not a decision on whether, under all of the facts and circumstances of the case, Klem’s conduct violated Curley’s constitutional rights. The jury was not bound at trial, and the District Court was not bound post-trial, by our earlier statements involving a hypothetical set of facts favoring Curley, since the facts and inferences actually found by the jury were clearly different than those which we were required to posit in Curley I when considering the summary judgment order.16 16 The procedural posture of Curley I provides another key reason why we cannot agree with the dissent. Our colleague takes as a given that Curley I established alternative theories of liability based on a “simple syllogism,” post at 13-14, but Curley I was in a procedural posture that required every inference to be drawn for Curley. It thus did not present an opportunity to frame a set of factual questions to constrain the jury’s fresh look at the evidence. The jury was not constrained by the Curley I opinion’s necessarily biased view of the facts, and the jury was therefore free to consider the entire set of facts facing Klem when determining whether Klem’s conduct violated Curley’s constitutional rights. 33 Confusion between the threshold constitutional inquiry and the immunity inquiry is also understandable given the difficulty courts have had in elucidating the difference between those two analytical steps.17 At the risk of understating the challenges inherent in a qualified immunity analysis, we think the most helpful approach is to consider the constitutional question as being whether the officer made a reasonable mistake of fact, while the qualified immunity question is whether the officer was reasonably mistaken about the state of the law. With that in mind, we turn to the questions presented to the jury in this case. The constitutional liability question posed to the jury, Question Two on the verdict sheet, was “Did Trooper Ron Klem act in an objectively reasonable manner in shooting Officer Curley during the confrontation?” Question Three, designed as the immunity question, was posed as, “Was Trooper Ron Klem’s mistake in firing his weapon objectively reasonable?” The difference between those two questions is essentially semantic, the only difference being that Question Three makes explicit what was 17 The Saucier opinion itself was generated by the confusion inherent in such conceptually close questions. See Saucier, 533 U.S. at 197 (“The matter we address is whether the requisite analysis to determine qualified immunity is so intertwined with the question whether the officer used excessive force in making the arrest that qualified immunity and constitutional violation issues should be treated as one question, to be decided by the trier of fact.”). 34 already obvious and conceded in the case: that the shooting was a mistake. For practical purposes, then, the analysis of objective reasonableness that the District Court undertook under the rubric of an immunity question actually applies better to the preliminary constitutional question. The immunity step of the Saucier test is typically focused on established legal standards and requires a review of relevant case law, a review a jury simply cannot undertake. See Saucier, 533 U.S. at 205 (“The concern of the immunity inquiry is to acknowledge that reasonable mistakes can be made as to the legal constraints on particular police conduct.”). However, the constitutional analysis focuses on the factual circumstances of the incident and asks whether the officer made a reasonable mistake of fact. Question Three did exactly that. It asked not whether Trooper Klem made a mistake of law – wrongly believing that it was legal to shoot the wrong person – but whether it was reasonable for him to make the factual mistake of believing Officer Curley was the armed and dangerous Bailey. Therefore, if the jury properly determined that Klem made an objectively reasonable mistake when he shot Curley, then it found that there was no constitutional violation, and the District Court did not err in entering a verdict in favor of 35 Trooper Klem.18 We turn now to that question of the sufficiency of the evidence.