Opinion ID: 6349389
Heading Depth: 4
Heading Rank: 1

Heading: Daniels’s Shooting

Text: Wade argues that Daniels violated his Fourth Amendment right to be free of excessive force when he shot him three times. When evaluating the reasonableness of a use of deadly force, we must weigh “the seriousness of the crime, whether the suspect poses an immediate danger to the officer or others, whether the suspect resisted or attempted to evade arrest, and the feasibility of providing a warning before employing deadly force.” Jean-Baptiste, 627 F.3d at 821. The second factor essentially asks “whether, given the circumstances, the suspect would have appeared to reasonable police officers to have been gravely dangerous.” Penley v. Eslinger, 605 F.3d 843, 851 (11th Cir. 2010) (alteration accepted). Wade claims that these factors show that Daniels’s use of deadly force was unreasonable. He argues that he was not resisting or trying to evade arrest, and he was not posing any immediate danger by pointing a shotgun at his own chin. He also asserts that the district court improperly applied Heck v. Humphrey, 512 U.S. USCA11 Case: 18-12371 Date Filed: 06/13/2022 Page: 8 of 58 8 Opinion of the Court 18-12371 477 (1994), 2 to hold that it was required to accept that Wade “swung the gun in the direction of” Jones “moments before” Daniels shot Wade. Wade claims that the district court should have accepted his version of the facts instead. We need not address the Heck issue because even accepting Wade’s version of the facts, and even assuming that Daniels’s use of deadly force was unreasonable, the unlawfulness of his conduct was not clearly established at the time. Wade cites only Mercado v. City of Orlando, 407 F.3d 1152, 1161 (11th Cir. 2005), to support his argument that Daniels violated a clearly established right, and that case is readily distinguishable. In Mercado, law enforcement officers responded to a call that a man was threatening suicide. Id. at 1154. When the police arrived on the scene, Mercado was crying on the kitchen floor. Id. He was holding a knife and pointing it towards his heart. Id. The officers directed Mercado to drop his knife at least twice, but he refused. Id. He made no threatening moves towards the officers, and the officers failed to warn him that they would use force if he did not drop the weapon. Id. But one of the officers hit Mercado with a Sage SL6 Launcher—a “less lethal munition”—twice to subdue him. Id. at 1154–55 (internal quotation mark omitted). Mercado suffered a fractured skull and disabling brain injuries. Id. at 1155. We concluded that the officer who fired the weapon was not 2 Heck bars a § 1983 claim if success on the claim would render a conviction invalid. 512 U.S. at 486–87. USCA11 Case: 18-12371 Date Filed: 06/13/2022 Page: 9 of 58 18-12371 Opinion of the Court 9 entitled to qualified immunity on Mercado’s excessive force claim. Id. at 1157–61. There are several notable differences between Mercado and this case. First, Mercado was not suspected of any crime, whereas Wade was wanted for a grave crime: the murder of an 18-monthold child. Second, there was no indication in Mercado that anyone felt threatened by Mercado, whereas the investigators here had heard Belk say that she was afraid. And most importantly, the weapon in Mercado was a knife, not a gun. As we have recognized, “a person standing six feet away from an officer with a knife may present a different threat than a person six feet away with a gun.” See Perez v. Suszczynski, 809 F.3d 1213, 1220 (11th Cir. 2016). Given these material differences, Mercado did not clearly establish that an officer uses excessive force by shooting a suicidal individual who is holding a gun. Daniels is thus entitled to qualified immunity on Wade’s excessive force claim against him.