The Harris County Precinct 5 deputy constable who murdered Ashley Barnes during a traffic stop in 2016 was the target of a civil rights complaint that the Supreme Court seemed inclined to grant on Wednesday.
The case was sent back to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit for additional scrutiny after the justices seemed inclined to give a narrow verdict in favor of Barnes’ mother and estate following about an hour and fifteen minutes of oral arguments. The Houston judge’s decision that Deputy Roberto Felix did not violate Barnes’ constitutional rights when he leaped onto the sill of Barnes’ moving car and shot him dead was earlier affirmed by the New Orleans-based court that oversees cases from Texas.
On behalf of the Barnes family, Nathaniel Zelinksyof Hogan Lovells contended that the Fifth Circuit’s interpretation was incorrect.
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The totality of the circumstances test did not sit well with Justice Scalia. According to Zelinksy, the retired justice who wrote the majority opinion in the court’s 2007 ruling, Justice Scalia made it clear in Scott that courts must navigate the fact-bound maze of reasonableness. In this instance, neither the Fifth Circuit nor the district court took that action.
As a type of legal amnesia that is inconsistent with precedent, goes against common law, and defies common sense, Zelinsky contended that the Fifth Circuit adopted what legal experts refer to as the moment of threat doctrine.
Ashtian Barnes, 24, was stopped by Deputy Felix on the afternoon of April 28, 2016, as he was traveling on Beltway 8 in west Houston.In dashcam footage of the encounter, the deputy can be seen approaching Barnes’ car and pulling him over. According to reports, Barnes was using his girlfriend’s rental car, which had unpaid tolls.
In the video, Barnes was seen parking his car on the left side of the Harris County toll road when Felix approached him and opened the driver’s side door.
Felix hopped onto the door sill and fired two rounds as Barnes started to drive away, killing him by hitting him in the head. After the Houston Police Department conducted an investigation, a grand jury in August 2016 opted not to indict Felix on any criminal charges.
When deciding whether Felix had used excessive force, U.S. District Judge Alfred Bennett stated in his March 2021 opinion that Fifth Circuit precedent precluded him from taking the circumstances surrounding the shooting into account.
Bennett clarified that his study was restricted to the two seconds before to Felix firing his first shot and the instant he felt a threat to himself or others. He concluded that threat materialized when Felix leaped upon the sill.
Bennett noted in his finding that Barnes’ prolonged operation of the car put Felix at risk of serious harm after Felix chose to jump onto the door sill, significantly intensifying the interaction. This court’s investigation starts and ends there as the Fifth Circuit has directed courts to consider this act and this act alone. Barnes’ use of lethal force was therefore not excessive because he constituted a real threat to Felix, and there can be no constitutional violation.
Bennett’s decision was sustained by a three-judge panel of the Federal Appeals Court. However, in a concurring opinion, Patrick Higginbotham, the judge who wrote the majority ruling, voiced concerns, claiming that the legal framework prevented him from looking into the entire occurrence.
Higginbotham, who was appointed by President Ronald Reagan, said that the moment of threat theory is an unacceptable gloss on Garner that prevents a thorough analysis of the Fourth Amendment’s protections for the American people.
The primary question on the court’s agenda is whether the Fifth Circuit and other appellate courts erred in examining claims of excessive force by concentrating solely on the instant an officer feels a threat and ignoring the larger context of a case.
A majority of the judges seemed to concur on Wednesday that the lower courts ought to take into account the circumstances surrounding the use of force when assessing whether the officers behaved in a reasonable manner. But rather than providing a more comprehensive directive, they were more concerned with rendering a limited decision that would permit the civil rights case to continue.
According to Justice Elena Kagan, who was chosen by President Barack Obama, “it seems like we should kick it back and let you guys fight it out as to the relevance of anything that happened beyond the prior two seconds.”
In a prior instance, the Supreme Court directed subordinate courts to consider all relevant factors while deciding whether an officer’s actions were legal. But, according to former police officer and University of South Carolina law professor Seth Stoughton, it failed to specify the pertinent time period.
Since then, several courts—including the Fifth Circuit—have taken a stance that only looks at the instant an officer uses force, according to Stoughton. In a friend-of-the-court brief, Stoughton criticized this approach and urged the Court to permanently reject the analysis.
In an interview, Stoughton stated that concentrating just on the threat moment ignores acts taken by officers that might have caused or contributed to a dangerous scenario, leaving them feeling forced to use lethal force.
Art Acevedo, the 2016–2021 Houston police chief, was one of the people who filed a separate friend-of-the-court brief urging the Court to reject the theory. Several requests for comment from him were not answered.
In his argument on Felix’s behalf, Charles McCloud of Williams & Connolly, a law firm located in Washington, D.C., disputed the assertion that the moment of threat doctrine forbids lower courts from taking into account the circumstances surrounding the use of force.
According to him, the Fifth Circuit has consistently maintained, like other courts, that earlier incidents are significant to the degree that they influence the officer’s assessment of the threat he faced.
Law enforcement organizations contend that a more thorough review of an officer’s behavior before to using force may cause hesitancy and put personnel at higher danger in high-stakes scenarios.
Larry James, a lawyer from Columbus, Ohio, who filed a friend-of-the-court brief on behalf of the National Fraternal Order of Police, claims that Felix did not use excessive force and thinks the conclusion would remain the same even if Felix’s pre-shooting activities were taken into account.
“This is not one of the many gray areas we deal with,” James stated.
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