POLICE

Brosseau v. Haugen

Police officers are sometimes accused of using excessive force in carrying out their duties. A person who has been injured by a police officer may sue the officer for damages using the federal civil rights statute 42 U.S.C.A. §1983, alleging that the excessive force violated the person's Fourth Amendment rights. The U.S. Supreme Court, aware that police officers must make quick decisions, has crafted a qualified immunity test that frees officers from liability under certain circumstances. The Court, in Brosseau v. Haugen, __U.S. __, 125 S.Ct. 596, __ L.Ed.2d __ (2004), ruled that a police officer's use of deadly force did not violate the Fourth Amendment and that the case must be dismissed.

Rochelle Brosseau, an officer with the Puyallup, Washington Police Department, was told by Glen Tamburello that Kenneth Haugen, his former partner in crime, had stolen some of his tools. Brosseau determined that a warrant was out for Haugen on a drug offense. The following day, Tamburello and an acquaintance tracked Haugen down at his mother's house. A fight ensued, and a neighbor called the police. Brosseau heard the call, arrived at the scene, and found Haugen running through the neighborhood. She called for backup, and for the next 30 minutes, pursued Haugen. He returned to his mother's yard and jumped into a vehicle. Brosseau pointed her gun at Haugen and demanded he get out of the vehicle. He ignored her commands, leading Haugen to break the driver's side window with her gun. She struck Haugen on the head with the butt of her gun, but Haugen started the vehicle and began to drive off. Brosseau fired one shot and hit Haugen in the back. He stopped the car a block later, suffering from a collapsed lung. He pleaded guilty to eluding police but then filed a §1983 lawsuit against Brosseau, alleging that the use of deadly force was excessive under the Fourth Amendment.

A federal district court dismissed the lawsuit after finding that Brosseau was entitled to qualified immunity. To assess whether an officer qualifies for immunity, a court must ask whether the facts alleged by the plaintiff show that the officer's conduct violated a constitutional right. When deadly force is alleged, the Supreme Court has mandated that an "objective reasonableness standard" be used. Under this standard, the reasonableness of the officer's conduct must be judged according to the law at the time of the conduct. If the law did not clearly establish that the officer's conduct violated the Constitution, the officer should be granted immunity. The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit reversed the grant of immunity, finding that the use of deadly force violated Haugen's Fourth Amendment rights and that the violation had been clearly established.

The Supreme Court, in an 8-1 decision, overturned the Ninth Circuit's decision. In a per curiam opinion (i.e., an opinion not signed by any of the justices), the Court concluded that the law was not clearly established. The Court emphasized that the inquiry "must be undertaken in light of the specific context of the case, not as a broad general proposition." The "contours of the right" must be so clear that a reasonable officer would understand that "what he is doing violates that right" in the particular situation. The Ninth Circuit had erred by applying previous case precedents that were "cast at a high level of generality."

In this case, the Court found that the law was not clearly established. Examining a number of cases where an officer had shot a fleeing suspect who presented a risk to others, the Court noted that none of the courts found these to be Fourth Amendment violations. Haugen had shown that he was determined to avoid capture and that he posed a danger to police officers who were on the street a short distance away. In a similar case, a court found the officer's use of deadly force to have been reasonable. Although this case favored Brosseau's immunity claim, the Court also ruled that the circumstances in this and two other deadly-force cases were different enough to ensure that the law was not clearly established. Therefore, Brosseau was entitled to immunity.

Justice John Paul Stevens, in a dissenting opinion, argued that it was had been objectively unreasonable under the Fourth Amendment to use deadly force against Haugen. He believed that immunity should not have been given and that the reasonableness of the officer's actions should have been determined by a jury. In this case, the suspect had not threatened anyone with a weapon, had not committed a violent crime, and had not demonstrated that he intended to hurt anyone. Without these traditional justifications for using deadly force, it seemed necessary for a jury to assess whether Brosseau's split-second decision had been justified.