Opinion ID: 152878
Heading Depth: 2
Heading Rank: 4

Heading: Clearly Established Unlawfulness of Price's Conduct

Text: Having determined that McAllister has come forward with evidence sufficient to create a genuine issue of material fact as to whether Price violated his Fourth Amendment right against unreasonable search or seizure, we must determine whether the right at issue was clearly established. That is, the contours of the right must be sufficiently clear that a reasonable official would understand that what he is doing violates the right. This is not to say that an official action is protected by qualified immunity unless the very action in question has previously been held unlawful, but it is to say that in the light of pre-existing law the unlawfulness must be apparent. Anderson v. Creighton, 483 U.S. 635, 640, 107 S.Ct. 3034, 97 L.Ed.2d 523 (1987) (citation omitted). McAllister cites several cases from which, he argues, Price could have inferred that his conduct was illegal. For example, in Herzog v. Village of Winnetka, 309 F.3d 1041 (7th Cir.2002), we denied summary judgment on the basis of qualified immunity where an officer pushed a woman he suspected to be driving while intoxicated, causing some scratches, cracked her tooth as he forcefully administered a breathalyzer test, and tightly handcuffed her and brought her to the police station despite the fact that the test revealed a blood-alcohol level of 0.0. Id. at 1043-44. In Abdullahi v. City of Madison, 423 F.3d 763 (7th Cir.2005), we rejected a claim of qualified immunity by an officer who knelt on the back of a resisting suspect who was in a prone position, resulting in the suspect's death. Id. at 771. In Levi v. Wilts, No. 08-3042, 2009 WL 2905927 (C.D.Ill.2009), a district court denied qualified immunity to an officer who allegedly applied handcuffs too tightly, causing painful swelling in the plaintiff's wrists and hands. While none of these cases involve the same scenario at issue herethe use of force against a diabetic following a car accident resulting from hypoglycemic shockthey do suggest that Price should have been on notice that elements of his conduct could violate McAllister's constitutional rights. Price, on the other hand, argues that his conduct is so similar to the conduct of the officers in Smith v. Ball State, supra , that he cannot be held liable. In Smith, the plaintiff lapsed into a diabetic shock while driving on campus, ending up on a sidewalk and narrowly missing several pedestrians. Two officers responded to the incident, which was reported as possibly involving an intoxicated driver. The officers asked Smith to exit his vehicle but Smith was unresponsive. At that point, one of the officers began to use a straight arm bar to lift Smith out of the vehicle. A third officer happened upon the scene and mistakenly concluded that the other officers were engaged in a struggle. As a result, the third officer jumped across the hood of the car and attempted to apply a knee strike to the plaintiff's leg. Instead, he slipped and tackled all three of the individuals. 295 F.3d at 766-67. Smith differs from the present case in two important respects. First, as discussed in Part II.B of this opinion, there was no evidence that the officers in Smith should have been aware of Smith's diabetic condition. [2] Here, McAllister has introduced evidence from eyewitnesses to suggest that McAllister did not appear intoxicated but was rather convulsing and appeared to be in need of medical attention. Second, the degree of force the officers intended to apply in Smith was significantly less than the force allegedly used by Price here. In Smith, the two officers who initially responded did not slam Smith into the ground with the force necessary to cause injury, but rather attempted to use a straight arm bar to pull Smith from the car to the ground. Indeed, even after Smith was mistakenly tackled (because of the reasonable belief of the third officer that Smith was struggling with the other police officers), he suffered only a bump on the head. Here, there is evidence to suggest that as a result of the intentional, rather than accidental, use of force, McAllister suffered a broken hip and a bruised lung. Smith, which upheld the use of minimal force to extract an unresponsive driver from a vehicle, would not suggest to a reasonable officer that he may slam an unresponsive, convulsing driver into the ground with force sufficient to break the driver's hip and place his knee on the driver's back with enough force to bruise his lung. Such conduct goes beyond the bounds of the plaintiff's clearly established Fourth Amendment rights and thus deprives the defendant of qualified immunity.