Opinion ID: 6328260
Heading Depth: 3
Heading Rank: 3

Heading: The majority’s rebuttal is unpersuasive.

Text: The majority opinion in Valenzuela offers two counterpoints to explain why the availability of a wrongful 20 VALENZUELA V. CITY OF ANAHEIM death remedy is not enough to bring California’s prohibition on post-death “hedonic” damages in line with federal law. Neither of these arguments are persuasive.
First, the majority argues that California’s wrongful death remedy is insufficient to deter police killings because “such a framework would still preclude recovery for the decedent who is penniless, without family, and killed immediately on the scene.” Valenzuela, 6 F.4th at 1103. But these are not the facts before us. Moreover, this argument was already foreclosed by Robertson, which, as discussed above, refused to toss aside state tort law merely because that law resulted in a zero-recovery outcome for that particular plaintiff, even if that plaintiff died with no family. Robertson is not alone among Supreme Court precedents in its rejection of the majority’s claim that police officers respond to their economic incentives when deciding to use deadly force. As the Court wrote in Whitley v. Albers, 475 U.S. 312, 320 (1986), police officers making decisions “in haste, under pressure, and frequently without the luxury of a second chance” do not stop and evaluate whether the victim in a fast-developing confrontation has family before using deadly force. In the words of Justice Holmes, “[d]etached reflection cannot be demanded in the presence of an uplifted knife.” Brown v. United States, 256 U.S. 335, 343 (1921). Yet the idea that police officers perform this “detached reflection” out of economic self-interest is the dubious assumption upon which Valenzuela’s holding rests. 8 8