Court Opinion

ID: 9378805
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-03-13 17:01:32.370144+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T17:16:01.933320
License: Public Domain

USCA11 Case: 22-10033     Document: 41-1      Date Filed: 03/13/2023   Page: 1 of 16

                                                               [PUBLISH]
                                     In the
                 United States Court of Appeals
                          For the Eleventh Circuit

                            ____________________

                                 No. 22-10033
                            ____________________

        IWOINAKEE GEBRAY HARRIS-BILLUPS,
        Surviving Children of Decedent on behalf of
        Quamere Jadon Harris
        on behalf of Quamillieon Jaden Daniel
        as administrator of the estate of Quintas Deshun Harris,
                                                       Plaintiff-Appellant,
        versus
        MILELE ANDERSON,
                                                      Defendant-Appellee.

                            ____________________

                  Appeal from the United States District Court
                     for the Northern District of Georgia
                      D.C. Docket No. 1:19-cv-03984-SCJ
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        22-10033               Opinion of the Court                         2

                             ____________________

        Before NEWSOM, LUCK, and TJOFLAT, Circuit Judges.
        NEWSOM, Circuit Judge:
               This is a tragic case, from beginning to end. It’s tragic for
        Quintas Deshun Harris, a Navy veteran who, having fired on
        several police officers who sought to question him, was then killed
        in a hail of 58 bullets. It’s tragic for Mr. Harris’s grieving family—
        his mother and two children, who lost a son and father. And it’s
        tragic for Milele Anderson—the officer who discharged the fatal
        shot and who now lives with the memories of Mr. Harris holding
        a gun to her head, the images of him shooting at one of her
        colleagues, and the reality that she took a life.
                Out of the tragedy arises a legal issue that requires our
        decision: When Officer Anderson fired the bullet that killed Mr.
        Harris, did she effect an “unreasonable . . . seizure[]” within the
        meaning of the Fourth Amendment? We hold that she did not.
        Having reviewed the record—and, most importantly, having
        repeatedly reviewed the bodycam footage of the incident—we
        hold, to the contrary, that she acted reasonably. In the moments
        leading up to Officer Anderson’s decision to take the final shot, Mr.
        Harris had accosted her and held a gun to her head, separately
        pointed his gun at her and her colleagues, barricaded himself in his
        car, and exchanged fire with the officers. Finally, in (literally) the
        split second before Officer Anderson pulled the trigger for the last
        time, Mr. Harris, who had been hit four times and had fallen to the
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        22-10033              Opinion of the Court                       3

        pavement, lurched violently. Particularly given all that had
        preceded it, a prudent officer witnessing Mr. Harris’s lurch could
        well have thought that he was gearing up for yet another attack.
        In those circumstances, it was reasonable—and thus lawful—for
        Officer Anderson to shoot when she did. The Constitution didn’t
        require her to wait.
                                         I
               If a picture is worth a thousand words, the video footage of
        the incident underlying this case is worth ten thousand. Officer
        Anderson’s chest-mounted camera captured the moments that
        immediately preceded the shot that killed Mr. Harris. And we’ll
        get there soon enough. First, though, we recount the events that
        occurred before Officer Anderson activated her bodycam.
              Around midnight on August 2, 2017, Officer Anderson
        pulled into an apartment complex in DeKalb County, Georgia,
        responding to a noise complaint. Almost immediately, Mr.
        Harris—who was suffering psychosis and stammering about
        “death or dying”—accosted Officer Anderson and put a gun to her
        head. Officer Anderson drew her sidearm and Mr. Harris backed
        off—only to point his gun at her partner.
               Weapons drawn all around, a standoff ensued. The officers
        ordered Mr. Harris to drop his gun. But he kept it trained on them
        and a third officer who had arrived to provide backup. Mr. Harris
        warned that he would kill them all—and he even put the gun to his
        own head, threatening to kill himself. Several tense moments
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        22-10033               Opinion of the Court                        4

        passed as the officers repeatedly implored Mr. Harris to stand
        down. Their pleas went unheeded.
               Still armed, Mr. Harris got into his parked car. As he did, a
        gun fell to the ground. Thinking that Mr. Harris was then
        unarmed, one of the officers holstered his weapon and announced
        that Harris had dropped his gun. But the peace was false: Mr.
        Harris promptly drew a second gun, and the standoff resumed.
               It was at this point that Officer Anderson activated her
        bodycam. The footage it captured is key to this case and is
        accessible     here.           See      Video,        Doc.      23-4
        (https://www.ca11.uscourts.gov/media-sources). Readers would
        do well to stop and watch it. Here, in brief, is what it shows:
               0:00–1:10. As the camera begins to roll, Officer Anderson
        narrates, clearly on edge: “Ass should have been fuckin’ shot,” she
        snaps. Id. at 0:06–0:21. She and her partners sternly—and
        repeatedly—order Mr. Harris to “put the weapon down!” Id.
        Officer Anderson repositions herself to avoid crossfire and instructs
        the others to do likewise: “Watch the crossfire!” she commands.
        Id. at 0:45; see also id. at 0:26–0:38. She moves in front of Mr.
        Harris’s car, eyeing him through the windshield.
                1:11–1:20. The dam breaks. At the 1:11 mark, Mr. Harris
        opens fire on the officers. They respond relentlessly, unleashing a
        five-second barrage of 54 bullets. Id. at 1:12–1:17. Mr. Harris
        emerges from the car, and Officer Anderson fires three more times.
        Id. at 1:17–1:20. (Of these 57 bullets, four hit Mr. Harris—one each
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        22-10033                   Opinion of the Court                            5

        in his abs, back, forearm, and calf.)             Mr. Harris falls to the
        pavement.
               1:21–1:24. At this point, Mr. Harris appears to have been
        disarmed—his first gun remains where he dropped it, several feet
        from where he lies, and the second is just next to it. See id. at 1:39. 1
        Even so, the situation remains extremely volatile. One officer cries
        out that he’s been “shot in the hand, shot in the hand!” Id. at 1:21–
        1:24. (The bullet fragment, as it turns out, was from his own
        weapon.) Officer Anderson keeps her gun trained on Mr. Harris,
        who is writhing on the pavement, in the fetal position, atop shards
        of glass. Id. at 1:20–1:24.
                This case turns on what happens during the next second.
                1:25–1:26. At the 1:25 mark, Harris lurches—violently. Id.
        at 1:25. His legs kick outward, his chest jumps off the ground, and
        his arms swing down to his torso. 2 Immediately, Officer Anderson
        takes one more shot. Id. This bullet, the 58th fired at Mr. Harris,
        kills him.
                                                 II
              Acting as his estate’s administrator and on behalf of his two
        sons, Mr. Harris’s mother, Ms. Iwoinakee Harris-Billups, filed suit

        1 This freeze-frame image comes from the moment just after the 58th and final

        shot, but depicts the guns’ locations.
        2 The lurch lasts only a split second. To see it more clearly, viewers should
        reduce the video’s speed and turn up their screen’s brightness.
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        22-10033                   Opinion of the Court                                6

        against Officer Anderson. Ms. Harris-Billups principally sought
        damages under 42 U.S.C. § 1983, 3 alleging that Officer Anderson
        had used constitutionally excessive force—and had thereby
        “unreasonabl[y] . . . seiz[ed]” Mr. Harris in violation of the Fourth
        Amendment—when she fired the 58th and fatal bullet. She also
        appended two Georgia-law claims: one for assault and battery, see
        Ga. Code Ann. §§ 51-1-13, 51-1-14 (West 2022), and another for
        wrongful death, see id. § 51-4-2.
              Officer Anderson moved for summary judgment. She
        argued that qualified immunity shielded her from suit on the § 1983
        claim and that official immunity protected her from the state-law
        claims.
               The district court granted Officer Anderson’s motion. It first
        agreed that qualified immunity knocked out Ms. Harris-Billups’s §
        1983 claim. In particular, it held that Officer Anderson’s “split-
        second” decision to fire the fatal bullet didn’t violate the Fourth
        Amendment: It was “objectively reasonable,” the court concluded,
        “for [Officer Anderson] to believe that [Mr. Harris] still posed a
        threat at the time of the final shot.” Because that holding alone
        warranted granting Officer Anderson summary judgment, the

        3In relevant part: “Every person who, under color of any statute, ordinance,
        regulation, custom, or usage, of any State or Territory or the District of
        Columbia, subjects, or causes to be subjected, any citizen of the United States
        or other person within the jurisdiction thereof to the deprivation of any rights,
        privileges, or immunities secured by the Constitution and laws, shall be liable
        to the party injured in an action at law . . . .” 42 U.S.C. § 1983.
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        22-10033                   Opinion of the Court                                7

        court found no need to assess the second prong of the qualified-
        immunity analysis: whether Officer Anderson’s actions had
        violated “clearly established” law.
                Having rejected Ms. Harris-Billups’s federal constitutional
        claim, the district court refused to consider her state-law claims.
        For support, the court cited 28 U.S.C. § 1367(c), which permits a
        district court to “decline to exercise supplemental jurisdiction over
        a claim” if it has “dismissed all claims over which it has original
        jurisdiction.” 28 U.S.C. § 1367(c)(3).
                This is Ms. Harris-Billups’s appeal. 4
                                               III
               A government official exercising discretionary authority—as
        all agree Officer Anderson was—is entitled to qualified immunity
        on a plaintiff’s § 1983 claim unless (1) she “violated one or more
        constitutional rights” and (2) “it was clearly established at the time
        that [her] specific actions did so.” Powell v. Snook, 25 F.4th 912,
        920 (11th Cir. 2022). Like the district court, we conclude that this
        case can be decided at the first step of the qualified-immunity
        analysis. For reasons we will explain, we hold that Officer

        4We review de novo whether the district court was correct to award Officer
        Anderson qualified immunity, see Dukes v. Deaton, 852 F.3d 1035, 1041 (11th
        Cir. 2017), and we review for abuse of discretion the court’s decision to decline
        supplemental jurisdiction, see Raney v. Allstate Ins., 370 F.3d 1086, 1088–89
        (11th Cir. 2004).
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        22-10033                Opinion of the Court                         8

        Anderson did not violate the Fourth Amendment when she shot
        and killed Mr. Harris.
                                          A
                The Fourth Amendment forbids law-enforcement officers
        from making “unreasonable . . . seizures.” U.S. Const. amend. IV.
        “[T]here can be no question that apprehension [of a suspect] by the
        use of deadly force is a seizure . . . .” Tennessee v. Garner, 471 U.S.
        1, 7 (1985). So Officer Anderson’s conduct here—shooting and
        killing Mr. Harris—is “subject to the reasonableness requirement
        of the Fourth Amendment.” Id.
               In many cases, a claim that a seizure was unreasonable
        would force us to “slosh our way through the factbound morass
        of” the “reasonableness” analysis. Scott v. Harris, 550 U.S. 372, 383
        (2007). Here, though, a bright(ish) line emerges: “[A]n officer may
        use deadly force when [s]he ‘has probable cause to believe that the
        suspect poses a threat of serious physical harm, either to the officer
        or to others’ . . . . ” Powell, 25 F.4th at 922 (internal punctuation
        omitted) (quoting Vaughan v. Cox, 343 F.3d 1323, 1329–30 (11th
        Cir. 2003)). Probable cause, in turn, exists when the “facts and
        circumstances [are] sufficient to warrant a prudent” officer in
        reaching that conclusion. Black v. Wigington, 811 F.3d 1259, 1267
        (11th Cir. 2016) (defining “probable cause”). And to be clear, the
        inquiry is an objective one—the question isn’t whether Officer
        Anderson herself actually believed that the circumstances justified
        the use of deadly force, but rather whether a reasonable officer in
        her position could have so concluded. See Graham v. Connor, 490
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        22-10033                Opinion of the Court                         9

        U.S. 386, 397 (1989). “Probable cause,” the Supreme Court has
        emphasized, “is not a high bar.” District of Columbia v. Wesby,
        138 S. Ct. 577, 586 (2018).
               Several important facts would have justified a reasonable
        officer in believing that Mr. Harris posed a lethal threat at the time
        Officer Anderson fired the fatal shot. First, Mr. Harris had access
        to at least two guns. True, they weren’t within his immediate
        reach, but they weren’t far beyond it. See Video at 1:39. With a
        quick lunge, he probably could have reached them. And
        remember, just minutes earlier, Mr. Harris, having dropped one
        gun, had surprised the officers with a second. Accordingly, Officer
        Anderson could reasonably have feared that he had yet another
        gun at the ready. In any event, Mr. Harris’s access to deadly
        weapons supports a reasonable conclusion that he posed a deadly
        threat. Cf. Davis v. Waller, 44 F.4th 1305, 1314 (11th Cir. 2022)
        (“[W]e have consistently said that it is reasonable for an officer to
        believe that a suspect poses an ‘immediate risk of serious harm to
        [him]’ when the suspect is armed.”); Powell, 25 F.4th at 922
        (“[W]hen a suspect’s gun is available for ready use—even when the
        suspect has not drawn his gun—an officer is not required to wait
        and hope for the best.”) (internal quotations omitted).
                Second, Mr. Harris had proven his willingness to use those
        guns against the officers. By the time Officer Anderson fired the
        final shot, Mr. Harris had (1) held a gun to Officer Anderson’s head,
        (2) pointed a gun at other officers, (3) ignored the officers’ repeated
        orders to “put the weapon down,” and, finally, (4) engaged in an
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        22-10033                Opinion of the Court                        10

        active firefight. Lest there be any doubt, anyone who uses or
        threatens to use a deadly weapon in the way that Mr. Harris did
        “poses a threat of serious physical harm.” Powell, 25 F.4th at 922;
        see also Davis, 44 F.4th at 1314 (canvassing decisions authorizing
        police officers’ use of deadly force against drivers who use or
        threaten to use their cars as weapons).
               Third, Mr. Harris was acting erratically and displaying a
        frighteningly “unstable frame of mind.” Long v. Slaton, 508 F.3d
        576, 581–82 (11th Cir. 2007) (confirming that a suspect’s “unstable
        frame of mind” can support probable cause to use deadly force).
        Not only had he committed dangerous “criminal act[s],” he had
        also “energetic[ally] eva[ded]” the officers by barricading himself in
        his car and ignoring more than a dozen orders to surrender. Id.
               Against that backdrop, a reasonable officer could certainly
        have interpreted Mr. Harris’s sudden lurch as the commencement
        of yet another attack. As we have explained—and as the bodycam
        video confirms—Mr. Harris’s lurch was not the staggering, slow-
        to-get-up tossing of a dazed or injured athlete. It was the jolt of one
        jarred awake or springing into sudden, urgent action. In the blink
        of an eye, Mr. Harris’s upper body rose off the ground, his legs
        kicked, and his arms swooped down toward his torso. Could he
        have been working up the momentum to stand or slide toward one
        of the guns on the ground? Might he have been reaching for a third
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        22-10033                   Opinion of the Court                              11

        gun in his pants? Or was he instead just writhing in pain? 5 We can’t
        be sure what Mr. Harris was doing. And that is precisely the point:
        “[A]n officer is not required to wait until an armed and dangerous
        felon has drawn a bead on [her] or others before using deadly
        force.” Montoute v. Carr, 114 F.3d 181, 185 (11th Cir. 1997); cf.
        also Long, 508 F.3d at 581–82 (upholding as reasonable an officer’s
        use of deadly force against a mentally unstable individual who had
        stolen a police cruiser, even though he hadn’t yet driven it
        dangerously); Mullenix v. Luna, 577 U.S. 7, 17–18 (2015) (endorsing
        Long).
                                            * * *
               Bottom line: Officer Anderson was facing down a man who
        had been threatening to kill her for several minutes straight. He
        had held a gun to her head, separately pointed his gun at her and
        her partners, spurned repeated orders to drop his weapons and
        surrender, barricaded himself in his car, and, finally, opened fire.
        This man knew how to conceal guns; he was suicidal, dogged, and
        erratic; and he had shown no signs of backing down. And with the

        5 Ms. Harris-Billups insists that, viewing the evidence in the light most
        favorable to her and drawing all reasonable inferences in her favor—as we
        must on summary judgment—we have to assume that Mr. Harris’s lurch was
        “due to the pain that he [wa]s experiencing.” Br. of Appellant at 21. The point,
        though, as explained in text, is that the actual reason for Mr. Harris’s lurch—
        whether he meant to fight, stand up, or grab a gun, or was instead just
        experiencing pain—doesn’t control our analysis; rather, what matters is that a
        reasonable officer couldn’t have excluded any of these possibilities, and thus
        could have viewed Mr. Harris’s lurch as threatening.
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        22-10033                Opinion of the Court                        12

        lurch, he seemed to be springing back into action. We have little
        trouble concluding that, in those circumstances, Officer Anderson
        could reasonably have believed that he posed a lethal threat. Her
        decision to neutralize that threat was “[ ]reasonable” and therefore
        constitutional.
                                          B
              Ms. Harris-Billups raises several counterarguments. With
        respect, none persuades us.
                First, Ms. Harris-Billups asserts that a comparison of two
        freeze-frame photos from the beginning and end of Mr. Harris’s
        lurch proves that the movement couldn’t “reasonably be construed
        as potentially threatening,” Br. of Appellant at 28—because, she
        says, the two stills “show[ ] that Mr. Harris’s only movement at this
        time was going from laying on his right shoulder and right leg with
        his legs curled and left leg bent in the air and hands to his head to a
        new position in which his right shoulder remained on the ground,
        his right leg remained on the ground, his head became raised and
        his arms were curled with his hands near his abdominal area,” id.
        at 8. But policing doesn’t occur in freeze-frames. It’s not just the
        positioning of Mr. Harris’s body parts that would have justified a
        reasonable officer in thinking his lurch threatening, but also the
        suddenness with which he began to shift from a prone,
        unmenacing posture to a potentially violent one. The video
        captures that suddenness in a way the freeze-frame images miss.
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        22-10033                  Opinion of the Court                              13

               Second, Ms. Harris-Billups asserts that Officer Anderson’s
        failure to take cover between the initial 57-bullet blast and Mr.
        Harris’s lurch proves that she no longer viewed him as a threat.
        We disagree for two reasons. As an initial matter, Officer
        Anderson’s private, subjective thoughts are irrelevant. The
        “reasonableness inquiry in an excessive force case is an objective
        one” that doesn’t turn on an individual officer’s “underlying intent
        or motivation.” Graham, 490 U.S. at 397 (internal quotation
        omitted). 6 Moreover, and in any event, the fact that Officer
        Anderson felt comfortable not taking cover before Mr. Harris
        suddenly lurched says little about how she (or a reasonable officer)
        would have felt after he did so. A reasonable officer could very well
        have thought that the lurch fundamentally altered the complexion
        of the situation.
               Third, Ms. Harris-Billups asserts (quoting her expert) that
        Officer Anderson had no cause to shoot Mr. Harris because she had
        plenty of “time to fully assess the fact that the threat was alleviated
        and Mr. Harris was ‘defeated by gunfire, had no weapon in his
        hand, [was] wounded and laying huddled on the ground.’” Br. of
        Appellant at 30 (quoting Doc. 26-4 at 9). That was all true—right
        up until it wasn’t. Indeed, Officer Anderson presumably did

        6 That settled legal principle likewise defeats Ms. Harris-Billups’s accusation
        that Officer Anderson “offered an excuse” for shooting Mr. Harris “that is not
        supported by the facts.” Br. of Appellant at 31–32. Again, all that matters—at
        least for Fourth Amendment purposes—is that a reasonable officer in Officer
        Anderson’s shoes could have believed that the use of deadly force was
        justified.
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        22-10033                   Opinion of the Court                              14

        conclude that Mr. Harris wasn’t dangerous when he was “lying
        huddled on the ground.” And that likely explains why she didn’t
        shoot him while he was lying huddled on the ground. In any event,
        we needn’t address whether Officer Anderson would have been
        justified in firing once more had Mr. Harris not suddenly lurched.
        Because he did. And that lurch changed things. At the very least,
        having witnessed Mr. Harris lurch, a reasonable officer could have
        concluded that he was once again on the move, and once again
        posed a threat.
               Fourth, Ms. Harris-Billups emphasizes that Officer
        Anderson was the only officer who shot Mr. Harris when he
        lurched; that fact, she says, shows “that Mr. Harris was no longer a
        threat.” Id. At most, though, this suggests that Officer Anderson’s
        colleagues didn’t themselves believe that Mr. Harris posed a threat.
        But even indulging that assumption, those officers’ subjective
        opinions wouldn’t render a third officer’s contrary judgment—
        especially one formed in (literally) a split second—disqualifyingly
        unreasonable. See Davis, 44 F.4th at 1318 (observing that “other
        officers’ decision not to shoot does not render [the defendant
        officer’s] choice [to shoot] unreasonable” because “[m]ore than one
        course of action can be reasonable”). 7

        7 In any event, as this Court recently explained in another case, the assumption

        that underlies Ms. Harris-Billups’s contention is dubious. Just because other
        officers held their fire doesn’t mean they thought Mr. Harris was benign. One
        of them had been shot in the hand and might have been unable to discharge
        his weapon. And another was on the other side of Mr. Harris’s car and might
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        22-10033                    Opinion of the Court                                15

                Finally, Ms. Harris-Billups contends that Officer Anderson is
        just like the policeman to whom we denied qualified immunity in
        Hunter v. City of Leeds, 941 F.3d 1265 (11th Cir. 2019). We
        disagree. The officer there had fired “seven additional shots against
        a suspect who . . . had dropped his weapon” in compliance with
        police directives “and was apparently no longer resisting.” Id. at
        1280. That’s not this case. Officer Anderson wasn’t contending
        with a defenseless man who had surrendered. She was up against
        a man who (or so a reasonable officer could have concluded) bore
        the means, and the ability, and the demonstrated intent to shoot
        her, a man who was acting erratically and violently, and who had
        shown no sign of giving up. Quite unlike the suspect in Hunter,
        Mr. Harris posed a real and immediate threat of grave harm.
                                             * * *
               For all these reasons, we hold that in firing the shot that
        tragically killed Mr. Harris, Officer Anderson did not violate the
        Fourth Amendment. Accordingly, she is entitled to qualified
        immunity on Ms. Harris-Billups’s § 1983 claim.
                                                V
             Once it had dismissed the § 1983 claim—the sole claim over
        which it had original jurisdiction—the district court was well

        not have seen the lurch. See Davis, 44 F.4th at 1318 (noting that “other
        officers’ decision not to shoot” is “especially” weak evidence that it was
        unreasonable to shoot if the various officers are in “dissimilar positions . . . on
        the scene”).
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        22-10033                Opinion of the Court                        16

        within its discretion to decline to exercise supplemental jurisdiction
        over Ms. Harris-Billups’s state-law claims. Indeed, a federal statute
        authorizes district courts to do just that. See 28 U.S.C. § 1367(c)(3).
        And we have gone even further, “encourag[ing]” district courts to
        “dismiss any remaining state claims when, as here, the federal
        claims have been dismissed prior to trial.” Raney, 370 F.3d at 1088–
        89. A district court doesn’t abuse its discretion by heeding our
        advice.
               AFFIRMED.