The Supreme Court seemed poised on Wednesday to reject a legal theory that puts tight limits on lawsuits seeking to hold police officers accountable for using deadly force by only considering “the moment of threat” to the officer rather rather than the larger context of the encounter, the New York Times reports. At Wednesday’s argument in the case, Barnes v. Felix, some justices expressed concerns about second-guessing police officers’ split-second judgments. “An officer does not get the time we’ve spent here today to make the decision,” Justice Brett M. Kavanaugh said. But most of the justices seemed inclined to allow the court to consider more than the seconds before force is used.
The case started on an April afternoon in 2016, when Ashtian Barnes, 24, was driving on a highway outside Houston in a car his girlfriend had rented. He was on his way to pick up her daughter from day care. Though Barnes did not know it, the car’s license plate was linked to unpaid tolls that had been incurred by another driver. Officer Roberto Felix Jr. of the Harris County Constable’s Office pulled the car over based on those unpaid tolls. When Barnes could not immediately locate his license and the car’s registration, the officer asked him to step out of the car. Instead, Barnes began to pull away, with the car door still open. Officer Felix drew his gun, jumped onto the moving car’s door sill and twice shot Mr. Barnes, as recorded on dash cam footage. A unanimous three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit ruled last year in favor of the officer on what it said was a narrow question. “We may only ask whether Officer Felix was in danger ‘at the moment of the threat’ that caused him to use deadly force against Barnes,” Judge Patrick E. Higginbotham wrote. Judge Higginbotham added a concurring opinion, writing only for himself. Had he been allowed to consider all of the circumstances surrounding the stop, he wrote, he could have ruled the other way. “Given the rapid sequence of events and Officer Felix’s role in drawing his weapon and jumping on the running board,” the judge wrote, “the totality of the circumstances merits finding that Officer Felix violated Barnes’s Fourth Amendment right to be free from excessive force.”
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