Opinion ID: 6333813
Heading Depth: 3
Heading Rank: 1

Heading: The Standard on Summary Judgment

Text: “[T]he first step in assessing the constitutionality of [the officers’] actions is to determine the relevant facts.” Scott v. Harris, 550 U.S. 372, 378 (2007). Typically, when ruling on a motion for summary judgment, the district court is required to view the facts in the light most favorable to the nonmoving party—in this case, Hughes. Saucier v. Katz, 533 U.S. 194, 201 (2001). However, the district court, relying on the Supreme Court’s decision in Scott, viewed the facts in the light depicted by the officers’ bodycam footage. As explained below, the district court properly relied on the bodycam footage and audio to the extent they “blatantly contradicted” Hughes’s deposition testimony. Id. at 380. However, not all of Hughes’s testimony was blatantly contradicted. In Scott, the plaintiff brought an excessive force claim against a police officer after the police officer rammed his vehicle into the plaintiff’s vehicle during a high-speed chase. Id. at 375. The plaintiff testified that he was driving carefully, while the officer’s dashcam footage showed him HUGHES V. RODRIGUEZ 11 speeding, swerving, crossing the double-yellow line, and forcing cars off the road. Id. at 379–80. Justice Scalia, writing for the majority, stated that “[w]hen opposing parties tell two different stories, one of which is blatantly contradicted by the record, so that no reasonable jury could believe it, a court should not adopt that version of the facts for purposes of ruling on a motion for summary judgment.” Id. at 380. Thus, the district court in Scott erred when it denied the officer’s motion for summary judgment because instead of viewing the facts in the light most favorable to the plaintiff, it should have viewed the facts in the “light depicted in the videotape.” Id. at 381. While Scott involved dashcam video footage, courts have since applied its logic to other types of evidence capable of objectively disproving witness testimony. See Coble v. City of White House, 634 F.3d 865, 868–69 (6th Cir. 2011) (audio from dashcam footage); Curran v. Aleshire, 800 F.3d 656, 663 (5th Cir. 2015) (still photographs); McManemy v. Tierney, 970 F.3d 1034, 1038 (8th Cir. 2020) (taser log); White v. Georgia, 380 Fed. App’x 796, 797 (11th Cir. 2010) (uncontradicted medical testimony). As the Sixth Circuit concluded in Coble, there is “nothing in the Scott analysis that suggests that it should be restricted to cases involving videotapes. The Scott opinion does not focus on the characteristics of a videotape, but on the ‘record.’” Coble, 634 F.3d at 868–69. We agree with the Sixth Circuit and find that, for purposes of ruling on a motion for summary judgment, a district court may properly view the facts in the light depicted by bodycam footage and its accompanying audio, to the extent the footage and audio blatantly contradict testimonial evidence. 12 HUGHES V. RODRIGUEZ
However, in this case, the bodycam footage and audio do not blatantly contradict all of Hughes’s testimony. The parties dispute what happened at three key moments during the apprehension of Hughes: (1) whether Hughes shouted to officers that he would exit peacefully, (2) whether Hughes made a gesture of surrender to the officers before Officer Michael Rodriguez released Cain into the home, and (3) whether Officer Rodriguez punched Hughes in the head and face, and allowed Cain to bite Hughes, even though Hughes was handcuffed and subdued. As to the first two factual disputes, Hernandez v. Town of Gilbert, 989 F.3d 739 (9th Cir. 2021) is on point. In Hernandez, police officers attempted to extract a DUI suspect from his vehicle. Id. at 742. After the suspect refused several verbal warnings, officers deployed a dog. Id. The suspect sued for excessive force, claiming that he had “offered to surrender,” before officers released the dog. Id. at 746. But the bodycam footage did not show any attempts to surrender. Id. Relying on Scott, this Court affirmed the district court’s decision to disregard the suspect’s factual account and credit the objective bodycam footage. We reach the same conclusion here. Hughes’s testimony that he yelled to the officers that he was “Coming out!” and that he raised his hands in a gesture of surrender while making eye contact with the officers is blatantly contradicted by the objective bodycam footage and audio. Hughes testified that he yelled he was “Coming out!” when he was only ten feet away from the front door to the home, yet no audible reply to the officer’s warnings can be heard in the footage. The camera, aimed precisely where Hughes claims to have been standing with his hands up in a gesture of HUGHES V. RODRIGUEZ 13 surrender, shows an empty hallway. The district court properly discredited this testimony under Scott. However, the district court erred when it disregarded all of Hughes’s testimony even though only part was blatantly contradicted. 2 Hughes also testified that he was not resisting arrest, and that he was punched after he was handcuffed and subdued; Officer Michael Rodriguez testified that Hughes was resisting and that he punched Hughes before he was handcuffed because Hughes was grabbing his groin area, near the gun on his belt. Hughes testified that the beating lasted for “two minutes, if not more,” but no more than a single minute elapses between the moment the dog was released and the moment officers announced that Hughes was in custody and the scene goes quiet. But one bodycam, belonging to Officer Michael Rodriguez, had turned off when the alleged punches were thrown. Another officer’s bodycam was not pointed directly at the fray. Thus, while the bodycam footage did blatantly disprove Hughes’s claim regarding the duration of the beating, it did not blatantly disprove Hughes’s claim that he was punched after he was handcuffed. Instead, the defendant officers argue that the audio objectively disproves Hughes’s account. This remaining factual dispute makes this case like Coble. There, the defendant officer suspected the plaintiff of driving under the influence and followed him in his police car, which was equipped with a dashcam. Coble, 634 F.3d at 868–69. When the plaintiff pulled over and exited his 2 While the trier of fact may rely on the rule of falsus in uno, falsus in omnibus to decide that a witness who has lied about one material fact must be disbelieved as to all facts, see George Fisher, The Jury’s Rise As Lie Detector, 107 Yale L.J. 575, 654–55 (1997), this rule is not a binding mandate, and is certainly not to be applied by judges ruling on motions for summary judgment. 14 HUGHES V. RODRIGUEZ vehicle, the plaintiff and the officer got into a physical altercation, during which the plaintiff sustained a broken ankle before he was handcuffed. Id. These events were captured by the dashcam. But after the officer handcuffed the plaintiff, the two fell out of the camera’s frame. The plaintiff testified that the officer required him to walk for over thirty feet on his broken ankle, despite his screams of pain. Id. Because the plaintiff and the officer had moved out of frame, the court had only audio available to review. The Sixth Circuit held that Scott v. Harris applied to audio recorded by dashcams. Id. at 869. However, even though the plaintiff’s screams could not be heard in the recording, the court nevertheless held that the audio did not blatantly disprove the plaintiff’s testimony, as it was unclear whether the officer was aware of the broken ankle, or how far the plaintiff was made to walk. Id. at 869–70. Unlike the dissent, after numerous viewings, we are unable to hear the “transcendent, unmistakable whir of handcuffs snapping shut” at timestamp 2:37 in the bodycam footage. Even if we could, the chaos of the struggle and Hughes’s cries of pain render it impossible to hear individual punches and whether they were thrown before or after Hughes was in handcuffs. Furthermore, for several seconds after the timestamp, Hughes’s cries of pains are still audible, meaning that his claim that he was punched and bitten, for at least some span of time after the handcuffs went on, is somewhat supported. Thus, while we view the facts blatantly contradicted by the bodycam footage in the light depicted by the videotape and its audio to conclude that Hughes did not attempt to surrender to the officers, we must view all other facts, including the allegation of the post-handcuff beating, in the light most favorable to Hughes. HUGHES V. RODRIGUEZ 15