Opinion ID: 693398
Heading Depth: 2
Heading Rank: 1

Heading: Fourth Amendment Deadly Force Jury Instruction

Text: 20 Officer Redmond and the Village assert that the district court erred in giving Jury Instruction No. 5, and in failing to give Defendants' Proposed Jury Instruction No. 7, both of which addressed the objective reasonableness of Officer Redmond's use of deadly force. See supra n. 10. The defendants note that the instruction given failed to explain that a police officer's subjective intentions or motivations, good or evil, should not be considered in determining whether [the officer] acted in an objectively reasonable manner or to explain that police officers may have to make split second judgments under tense, uncertain, and rapidly evolving circumstances. See Graham v. Connor, 490 U.S. 386, 397, 109 S.Ct. 1865, 1872, 104 L.Ed.2d 443 (1989). The defendants contend that these omissions rendered the given instruction insufficient as a matter of law. We disagree. 21 Excessive force claims, including deadly force claims, 11 resulting from any seizure are analyzed under the Fourth Amendment's objective reasonableness standard. Jones v. Webb, 45 F.3d 178, 183 (7th Cir.1995); Ford v. Childers, 855 F.2d 1271, 1275 (7th Cir.1988) (en banc ). The objective reasonableness of a police officer's actions depends upon the information [the officer] possessed immediately prior to and at the very moment [she] fired the fatal shot. Sherrod v. Berry, 856 F.2d 802, 805 (7th Cir.1988) (en banc ); see also Graham, 490 U.S. at 396, 109 S.Ct. at 1872 ([t]he 'reasonableness' of a particular use of force must be judged from the perspective of a reasonable officer on the scene, rather than with the 20/20 vision of hindsight). Relevant factors include the severity of the crime at issue, whether the suspect poses an immediate threat to the safety of the officers or others, and whether he is actively resisting arrest or attempting to evade arrest by flight. Graham, 490 U.S. at 396, 109 S.Ct. at 1872. A police officer's subjective intentions are irrelevant; evil intentions will not make a Fourth Amendment violation out of an objectively reasonable use of force; nor will ... good intentions make an objectively unreasonable use of force constitutional. Id. at 397, 109 S.Ct. at 1872-73. Moreover, [t]he calculus of reasonableness must embody allowance for the fact that police officers are often forced to make split-second judgments--in circumstances that are tense, uncertain, and rapidly evolving--about the amount of force that is necessary in a particular situation. Id. at 396-97, 109 S.Ct. at 1872; see also Sherrod, 856 F.2d at 805 (determination of propriety of police officer's use of deadly force requires analysis of the knowledge, facts and circumstances known to the officer at the time [she] exercised [her] split-second judgment as to whether the use of deadly force was warranted). 22 We believe, in part considering our limited review of jury instructions, that the instruction the court gave was adequate. It was objective. The jury was instructed to consider all the facts and circumstances with which Mary Lu Redmond was confronted. This was to be judged from the perspective of a reasonable police officer who was confronted with the circumstances presented to Mary Lu Redmond at the moment the force was used. It then emphasized whether a reasonable officer in her place would have believed that the force was necessary to prevent the death, etc. We believe that the instruction was adequate and permitted both the parties to argue their theories of the case about times and other circumstances. It could have been amplified, but we need not adopt for an instruction the language various courts use in particular cases. 12