Court Opinion

ID: 9478107
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-05 06:40:10.228721+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T17:46:14.595006
License: Public Domain

CUDAHY, Circuit Judge,
with whom CUMMINGS, Circuit Judge, joins, concurring:
The view reflected in the first footnote to the majority opinion (and elsewhere) that this case is somehow comparable with Sherrod v. Berry (and, specifically, that the panel opinion in this case “potentially conflicted” with the panel opinion in Sher-rod ) is specious and disingenuous. In fact, the only possible reason for subjecting this routine case to en banc review is to lend some sort of credibility to the rehearing of the strikingly different Sherrod case.
This case involves a lawman shooting at a masked and apparently armed bank robber fleeing the scene of the crime — a classic setting for gun play and one where deadly force is clearly permitted under Gamer. Sherrod, on the other hand, involves what a jury presumably found to be a wanton killing of the young driver of a car stopped on the street. There the unarmed victim, shot in the head at point blank range, had committed no crime and couldn’t even reasonably be suspected of having committed one.
In Sherrod, the jury awarded the victim’s father $1.5 million in damages, a verdict which this court en banc has nullified on a virtual technicality. The miscarriage of justice that I respectfully believe to be the outcome in Sherrod is not made more palatable by sophistical comparisons with this case, a routine and wholly unexceptionable use of deadly force by a peace officer.