Saucier v. Katz (June 18, 2001)
* Court: United States Supreme Court
* Jurisdiction: Presidio Arm Base
* Plaintiff's Job Class: military police
* Trial Court: against police officer
* Ninth Circuit Decision: against police officer
* Supreme Court: in favor of police officer
* Issues: qualified immunity, excessive force, Fourth amendment
*
Eliot Katz was president of In Defense of Animals and was against
using animals for medical experiments.
*
In 1994, then vice president Gore was scheduled to speak at the
Presidio Army Base concerning its conversion to a national park.
*
Protesters were not permitted on the Presidio, and Katz knew this.
Nonetheless, when Gore started to speak, Katz moved to the
front of the audience and started to unfurl a concealed banner. Katz wore a visible, knee-high leg brace.
* Military police officer Donald Saucier saw
Katz and his sergeant grabbed Katz and half-walked, half-dragged him
to a nearby van.
* The facts are in dispute as to whether Katz was shoved or thrown into
the van.
* Katz sued on the grounds that excessive force in violation of the
Fourth Amendment had been used against him.
* The district court granted qualified immunity to all defendants except
Saucier.
* The Ninth Circuit affirmed, noting that the issue for qualified
immunity and the issue on the merits, i.e., whether the force was
reasonable, were identical, and so both issues should go to a jury.
* The Supreme Court reversed.
Saucier
Analysis
*
The Ninth Circuit had applied its standard qualified immunity test:
first, was the law applicable to Saucier’s conduct clearly
established or not; and
second, if yes, would a reasonable officer have thought what
Saucier did was lawful.
* The Supreme Court held that the Ninth Circuit, not for the first time,
had got it wrong, but, as the concurring justices observed, the
majority’s test was none too clear either.
*
The Supreme Court, like the Ninth Circuit, agreed that two steps are
needed:
did plaintiff’s alleged facts constitute a constitutional
violation by the officer, and
assuming a violation is established, can it be specifically
shown that the right was clearly established?
“The relevant, dispositive inquiry in determining whether a
right is clearly established is whether it would be clear to a
reasonable officer that his conduct was unlawful in the situation he
confronted.”
* The Supreme Court stressed, happily enough, that qualified
immunity defenses should be decided early and not at trial.
*
Katz, as well as the concurring justices, agreed with the Ninth
Circuit. They thought that in excessive force cases the case on the
merits involved the same issues as the qualified immunity defense,
namely, objective reasonableness.
It seems that way to me too.
*
The Supreme Court, while drawing a less than clear distinction between
excessive force on the merits and a qualified immunity defense in an
excessive force case, did say a lot of good things about officer
leeway:
In
Graham [a 1989 case], we held that claims of excessive force in the
context of arrests or investigatory stops should be analyzed under the
Fourth Amendment’s “objective reasonableness standard,” not
under substantive due process principles. . . .Because “police
officers are often forced to make split-second judgments – in
circumstances that are tense, uncertain, and rapidly
evolving – about the amount of force that is necessary in a
particular situation,”. . .the reasonableness of the
officer’s belief as to the appropriate level of force should be
judged from that on-scene perspective. . . .We set out a
test that cautioned against the “20/20 vision of
hindsight” in favor of deference to the judgment of reasonable
officers on the scene. . . .Graham sets forth a list of factors
relevant to the merits of the constitutional excessive force claim,
“requir[ing] careful attention to the facts and circumstances of each
particular case, including the severity of the crime at issue, whether the
suspect poses an immediate threat to the safety of the officers or
others, and whether he is
actively resisting arrest or attempting to evade arrest by flight.”.
. .If an officer reasonably, but mistakenly, believed that a suspect
was likely to fight back, for instance, the officer would be justified
in using more force than in fact was needed.
The qualified immunity inquiry, on the
other hand, has a further dimension.
The concern of the immunity inquiry is to acknowledge that
reasonable mistakes can be made as to the legal constraints on
particular police conduct. It is sometimes difficult for an officer to determine how the
relevant legal doctrine, here excessive force, will apply to the
factual situation the officer confronts.
An officer might correctly perceive all of the relevant facts
but have a mistaken understanding as to whether a particular amount of
force is legal in those circumstances.
If the officer’s mistake as to what the law requires is
reasonable, however, the officer is entitled to the immunity defense.
* Looking to the facts of this case, the court held that a reasonable
officer would have concluded that “legitimate justification”
existed for Saucier to use the force he did.
* The vice president was present.
* There was no time to see what kind of threat Katz posed.
* There was no time to see if Katz was working with others.
* “In the circumstances presented to this officer,
which included the duty to protect the safety and security of the Vice
President of the United Sates from persons unknown in number, neither
respondent nor the Court of Appeals has identified any case
demonstrating a clearly established rule prohibiting the officer from
acting as he did, nor are we aware of any such rule.”
