Opinion ID: 2787500
Heading Depth: 5
Heading Rank: 1

Heading: The initial tasering of Mr. Nall

Text: There is no clearly established right for a suspect who “actively resists” and refuses to be handcuffed to be free from a Taser application. Hagans, 695 F.3d at 509. Whether Mr. Nall had a clearly established right not to be tasered after refusing to step out of his apartment hinges on whether this refusal and his subsequent return to his living room constituted “active resistance,” or was merely “noncompliance” or no resistance at all. Eldridge, 533 F. App’x at 534-35. The cases discussed above under the third Graham factor, Mr. Nall’s resistance, are instructive. In Eldridge, we determined that “[i]f there is a common thread to be found in our caselaw on this issue, it is that noncompliance alone does not indicate active resistance; there must be something more.” Id. at 535. Eldridge turned to the facts of earlier cases to identify what constitutes active resistance. It articulated the principle that “a verbal showing of hostility” can indicate active resistance in situations such as where it was “the final straw in a series of consciously-resistive acts, one of which included a statement that the suspect would ‘fight the officers so that they would have a reason to kill him.’” Eldridge, 533 F. App’x at 534-35 (quoting Caie v. West Bloomfield Twp., 485 F. App’x 92, 94 (6th Cir. 2012)). Eldridge also noted that a “deliberate act of defiance” using one’s body can constitute active resistance, such as where a suspect resisted arrest by “laying down on the pavement and deliberately locking his arms together tightly under his body while kicking and screaming.” Eldridge, 533 F. App’x at 534-35 (citing Hagans, 695 F.3d at 507). Eldridge itself concerned a diabetic driver found in a vehicle on the lawn of a condominium complex who officers suspected of being drunk. 533 F. App’x at 530. The officers approached the driver, removed his car keys from the ignition, and repeatedly ordered him out of the car. Id. at 530-31. The driver repeatedly responded, “I’m fine,” until, following several warnings, one of the officers used a Taser. Id. at 531. The court determined that excessive force was a jury question based on the clearly established (as of June 2009) “right of a suspect to be free of physical force when he is not resisting police efforts to apprehend him.” Id. at 535. No. 14-3120 Goodwin v. City of Painesville, et al. Page 14 The Officers, looking to Eldridge, argue that Mr. Nall’s statement that he did not have to come outside constituted “verbal belligerence” sufficient to constitute resisting arrest, and that his withdrawal into the living room was “physical defiance” sufficient to constitute the same. But these actions were more akin to the suspect’s refusal to exit his car in Eldridge than to the continued resistance and hostility present in the active resistance cases, such as Caie, that Eldridge distinguishes. Under the facts here, moreover, there is no evidence that Mr. Nall even had reason to be aware he was being detained, as Ms. Nall heard Officer Soto merely ask Mr. Nall to step outside. We have found that by mid-2005, “[t]he general consensus among our cases is that officers cannot use force . . . on a detainee who has been subdued, is not told he is under arrest, or is not resisting arrest.” Grawey v. Drury, 567 F.3d 302, 314 (6th Cir. 2009). The Officers urge the court to follow Cockrell v. City of Cincinnati, which found no clearly established constitutional violation for the tasering of a person who jaywalked and then fled from a pursuing officer, despite the officer’s failure to order the suspect to stop or state that he was under arrest. 468 F. App’x 491, 498 (6th Cir. 2012). But Cockrell is distinguishable. There, the suspect’s flight and the officer’s subsequent pursuit made it clear to the suspect before the Taser was fired that the officer intended to apprehend him. Here, absent a statement that he was under arrest or an order to get on the ground or something similar, it was not objectively apparent that the Officers intended to take Mr. Nall into custody, or that he was not free to remain in his own home. More importantly, because the “physical entry of the home is the chief evil against which the wording of the Fourth Amendment is directed,” Payton v. New York, 445 U.S. 573, 585-86 (1980), the setting of Mr. Nall’s arrest renders Cockrell inapposite. To arrest a person in his home, police officers need both probable cause and either a warrant or exigent circumstances. A holding that a simple refusal to exit one’s own home—and surrender the heightened Fourth Amendment protections it provides—constituted active resistance of an officer’s command sufficient to justify a tasering would undermine a central purpose of the Fourth Amendment.