The Supreme Court is being asked to “rein in” reckless police who are escalating ordinary encounters with citizens to the point they kill someone.
It is the Rutherford Institute that has filed a friend-of-the-court brief in a pending case on the topic.
The institute explains, “For instance, an Illinois sheriff’s deputy was charged with first-degree murder for shooting and killing Sonya Massey after she called 9-1-1 for help at her home. A year earlier in Ohio, a pregnant mother was killed by a police officer in a grocery-store parking lot.
“Some federal courts analyze such events under the ‘moment-of-threat doctrine,’ which has contributed to a climate in which police unnecessarily escalate situations over relatively minor crimes and then respond to the perceived danger with deadly force,” the organization said.
In the case Barnes v. Felix, the institute is calling on the justices “to overturn the ‘moment-of-threat doctrine,’ warning that it encourages police to act recklessly with impunity.”
That ideology, the briefing argues, actually is in violation of established Fourth Amendment precedents for determining what constitutes reasonable use of force.
“In an age when police are increasingly militarized, weaponized and protected by the courts, run-of-the mill encounters between police and citizens are now inherently dangerous for any individual unlucky enough to be in a situation where police are inclined to respond to unsubstantiated fears for their safety and perceived challenges to their ‘authority’ by drawing and using their weapons,” said constitutional attorney John W. Whitehead, president of The Rutherford Institute.
He’s also the author of “Battlefield America: The War on the American People.”
“Unfortunately, this mindset that any challenge to police authority is a threat that needs to be ‘neutralized’ is a dangerous one that is part of a greater nationwide trend that sets law enforcement officers beyond the reach of the Fourth Amendment. Equally problematic is the trend in the courts that acquits officers involved in such shootings, letting them off with barely a slap to the wrists,” he continued.
The current dispute developed this way, the institute reported:
In the afternoon of April 28, 2016, Harris County Texas Officer Roberto Felix initiated a traffic stop of Ashtian Barnes due to a report by the Toll Road Authority that the license plate number on his vehicle had outstanding toll violations. When asked for proof of insurance, Barnes explained that the car had been rented a week earlier by his girlfriend and the documentation might be in the trunk. The officer claimed he smelled marijuana and ordered Barnes to open the trunk. A few seconds after Barnes opened the trunk, the car’s blinker toward the side of the Tollway to which Barnes pulled over turned off for about ten seconds. Once the same blinker turned back on, Felix shouted at Barnes not to move, stepped onto the door sill where the driver-side door was open, and shoved his gun into Barnes’s head. At that point, the car started to move, and Felix fired two shots into the car, killing Barnes.
When Barnes’s parents sued, contending that Barnes did not pose a threat justifying deadly force, especially because Felix jumped onto the vehicle, the trial court dismissed it.
That ruling claimed Felix’s decision to shoot and kill the driver was “presumptively reasonable” because he feared for his safety.
The 5th Circuit Appeals court affirmed under that now-challenged “moment-of-threat” ideology.
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