An Explanation of Summary Judgment and Qualified Immunity

 

By: Dr. Peter A. Barone Esq.

Ø Whenever there is a lawsuit based upon an allegation that an officer has committed a Constitutional Violation such as excessive force as an unreasonable seizure of the person under the 4th Amendment, two legal strategies are used to defend the officer and have the case thrown out before it ever gets to trial.

Ø The first strategy is Summary Judgment. In a summary judgment motion, the attorney for the officer asserts that even if the court takes the story of the person suing the officer as true, [though the officer may not agree with that story], the officer did not do anything unconstitutional and the officer is entitled to summary judgment. I sometimes refer to summary judgment as a green light as it is the court’s agreement that the officer’s actions were constitutional.

Ø In some cases, a court will disagree and say that the officer’s actions under plaintiff’s story would be unconstitutional. The officer’s lawyer then proceeds to the second strategy, Qualified Immunity. Essentially, qualified immunity means that even if the officer’s actions are unconstitutional no court that has jurisdiction over the officer has considered a similar case and therefore the law was not clearly established, thus an officer would not know that he or she was acting unconstitutionally. In cases where the law is not clearly established, the officer gets Qualified Immunity and the case against the officer is dismissed.

Ø In some cases, the courts skip the first question (Summary Judgment) and do not decide whether the officer’s actions were constitutional or not. The court simply proceeds to the second question and determines that the law is not clearly established and dismisses the constitutional claim brought against the officer.

          Qualified Immunity Defense

•      Courts have often grappled with whether a defense of qualified immunity is available to officers confronted with making a split-second decision as to whether or not to use deadly force in response to what reasonably appears to them at the time to be a deadly threat from a moving vehicle. 

•      In a case involving the roadside killing of a man by an Alaska State trooper while investigating a suspicious car parked along a highway, a federal appeals court ruled that acting with deliberate indifference is not an adequate standard to constitute conduct "shocking to the conscience" for purposes of stripping the trooper of the defense of qualified immunity on due process claims by the decedent's family. Porter v. Osborn(9th Cir. 2008). 

•      Instead, the court stated, it must be shown that the trooper acted for the purpose of causing harm, which is unrelated to law enforcement objectives. 

•      The officers found the decedent asleep inside what they thought was an abandoned vehicle, and woke him with demands that he exit the vehicle, pepper spraying him, in response to which he reacted in pain, driving his vehicle slowly towards the patrol vehicle, whereupon a trooper fired five shots and killed him. 

•      Because the trial court, in denying a motion for qualified immunity, used the deliberate indifference standard rather than the more demanding measure of culpability of whether the trooper "acted with a purpose to harm" the man "without regard to legitimate law enforcement objectives," further proceedings were required.      

•      In Green v. Taylor(Unpub. 6th Cir.), the court reasoned that if a vehicle had come to a stop with the engine running, and suspects in the car had their hands in the air or on the steering wheel when officers approached, then an officer who shot and killed a 16-year-old in the vehicle would not have acted reasonably. 

•      If, on the other hand, as the officer claimed, the car was backing up, and threatened the safety of the officers or others, the result could be different. Genuine issues of disputed material fact, therefore, barred qualified immunity for the officers.