Opinion ID: 4035366
Heading Depth: 2
Heading Rank: 2

Heading: Excessive Force by Harris

Text: Zimmerman next alleges that Officer Harris violated his Fourth Amendment rights by exercising excessive force in carrying out Zimmerman’s arrest. Harris is entitled to qualified immunity on the excessive force claim only if, viewing the evidence in the light most favorable to Zimmerman and 1 Zimmerman was, in fact, arrested for a Class A misdemeanor, Evading Arrest or Detention, and not the Class C misdemeanors of which he was suspected. 8 drawing reasonable inferences therefrom in his favor, Zimmerman has failed to raise a dispute of material fact as to: (1) whether Harris violated Zimmerman’s constitutional right not to be subjected to excessive force; or (2) whether such right was clearly established at the time of the challenged conduct. See Tolan, 134 S. Ct. at 1865-66. The parties, like the district court, focus on the second prong of the qualified immunity analysis—whether it was “clearly established” in February 2012 that deploying a Taser to stop a person reasonably suspected of a misdemeanor violated the Fourth Amendment. A right is “clearly established” if “the contours of the right [are] sufficiently clear that a reasonable official would understand that what he is doing violates that right.” Anderson v. Creighton, 483 U.S. 635, 640 (1987). Zimmerman acknowledges that we have not previously been presented with a closely analogous set of facts, but maintains that existing precedent placed the constitutional question beyond debate. Zimmerman is mistaken; he points to no case, and we have uncovered none, making clear to a reasonable officer in 2012 that the one-time use of a Taser on a person reasonably suspected of a misdemeanor amounts to excessive force. Zimmerman relies heavily on two cases from other circuits to support his position, but neither involved the one-time application of a Taser to an activelyfleeing or actively-resisting suspect. In Goodwin v. City of Painesville, 781 F.3d 314 (6th Cir. 2015), the Sixth Circuit denied qualified immunity to police officers who had entered the plaintiff’s home, where they gratuitously and repeatedly applied a Taser after all resistance had ceased. In Brown v. City of Golden Valley, 574 F.3d 491, 494 (8th Cir. 2009), a police officer used a Taser on the plaintiff because she had disobeyed two orders to end her call with a 911 operator while sitting in the passenger seat of a car the officers had pulled over. 9 The Eighth Circuit affirmed the denial of summary judgment based on qualified immunity. Id. at 501. In both cases, the courts denied qualified immunity largely because the defendant officers had used Tasers on plaintiffs who were neither fleeing nor actively resisting arrest. See id. at 499; Goodwin, 781 F.3d at 324. The relevant facts of the instant case sharply contrast with the key facts in Goodwin and Golden Valley. Here, Harris reasonably suspected Zimmerman of committing several offenses and reasonably concluded that Zimmerman was fleeing to avoid an investigatory stop by Harris. Moreover, Zimmerman was on a public street and received only a single shock from Harris’s Taser. Neither Golden Valley nor Goodwin is precedent that tends to clearly establish that Harris’s conduct was unlawful. Zimmerman correctly notes that a constitutional violation can be “clearly established” even when there is no materially similar precedent. See Hope, 536 U.S. at 741. He does not, however, argue that this case involves the kind of extreme or egregious conduct that has been held to be a clearly established violation of a more general constitutional right. See, e.g., id. at 738 (officials handcuffed prisoner to hitching post for seven hours in the mid-day heat); Cole v. Carson, 802 F.3d 752, 773-74 (5th Cir. 2015) (officer intentionally fabricated evidence to frame plaintiffs for a felony they did not commit); Wilkerson v. Goodwin, 774 F.3d 845, 858 (5th Cir. 2014) (officials held plaintiff in solitary confinement for nearly forty years). Moreover, there is factually analogous caselaw that would undercut such an argument. For example, in McKenney v. Harrison, 635 F.3d 354 (8th Cir. 2011), the Eighth Circuit affirmed qualified immunity for an officer who had deployed a Taser on a fleeing misdemeanant, even though use of the Taser had led to the suspect’s death. There, two officers entered James Barnes’s grandfather’s possibly abandoned house to execute misdemeanor warrants for Barnes’s 10 arrest. Id. at 356-57. When the officers found Barnes in a second-story bedroom, Barnes lunged toward a window to make an escape. Id. at 357. One of the officers shot him once with her Taser before Barnes reached the window, but Barnes continued through the window and onto the roof of the story below, from which he fell to his death. Id. at 357-58. Because one effect of a Taser shot is to paralyze large muscles, Barnes’s incapacitation may have contributed to his lethal fall. The court ruled that “[w]hen Barnes made a sudden movement toward the window, which the officers reasonably interpreted as an active attempt to evade arrest by flight, the officers were entitled to use force to prevent Barnes’s escape and effect the arrest.” Id. at 360. The court acknowledged that the charges against Barnes were “limited to misdemeanors,” but stated that the officers “were not required to let Barnes run free.” Id. In concluding that the officer’s actions were reasonable, the court stressed that the Taser was deployed only once and noted that “[t]he alternative of attempting to subdue Barnes by tackling him posed a risk to the safety of the officer and did not ensure a successful arrest.” Id. Some of the facts that the Eighth Circuit found most compelling in affirming qualified immunity are present in this case. Similarly, the Sixth Circuit held in an unpublished opinion written around the same time of the events at issue that “a misdemeanant, fleeing from the scene of a non-violent misdemeanor, but offering no other resistance and disobeying no official command,” did not have a clearly established right not to be shot with a Taser. Cockrell v. City of Cincinnati, 468 F. App’x 491, 495 (6th Cir. 2012). In Cockrell, an officer witnessed the plaintiff jaywalk and then run away when the officer approached. Id. at 491-92. Without issuing a warning or an order to halt, the officer deployed a Taser, causing the plaintiff “to crash headlong into the pavement.” Id. at 492. The court summarized: “in no case 11 where courts denied qualified immunity was the plaintiff fleeing, and in at least some of these cases, the court specifically referred to the fact of nonflight.” Id. at 496-97 (collecting authorities). 2 The court therefore held that not every reasonable officer would have understood that using a Taser on a non-violent, fleeing misdemeanant violated the Fourth Amendment. Id. at 498. Like the officers in McKenney and Cockrell, Harris used a single Taser shot to stop a fleeing person reasonably suspected of a misdemeanor. Although the crimes Zimmerman was suspected of committing were relatively minor, “Fourth Amendment jurisprudence has long recognized that the right to make an arrest or investigatory stop necessarily carries with it the right to use some degree of physical coercion or threat thereof to effect it.” Graham, 490 U.S. at 396 (listing as one factor in the excessive force analysis “whether [the suspect] is . . . attempting to evade arrest by flight”); see also McKenney, 635 F.3d at 360 (stating that officers were not required to let a fleeing misdemeanant escape). We conclude that at the time of Zimmerman’s arrest it was not clearly established (so as to give Harris notice) that a single shot or use of a Taser to halt a fleeing misdemeanor suspect would amount to excessive force.