The Supreme Court on Thursday rejected a legal theory that put tight limits on lawsuits seeking to hold police officers accountable for using deadly force.
The case arose, an appeals court judge wrote, from a commonplace occurrence. “A routine traffic stop,” the judge wrote, “has again ended in the death of an unarmed Black man.”
The question for the justices was how closely courts should confine their consideration of whether deadly force was justified to “the moment of threat” — the seconds preceding a police shooting — rather than the larger context of the encounter.
Justice Elena Kagan, writing for a unanimous court, said that considering only the moment of threat was too limited. “To assess whether an officer acted reasonably in using force,” she wrote, “a court must consider all the relevant circumstances, including facts and events leading up to the climactic moment.”
The case started on an April afternoon in 2016, when Ashtian Barnes, 24, was driving on a highway outside Houston in a car his girlfriend had rented. He was on his way to pick up her daughter from day care.
Though Mr. Barnes did not know it, the car’s license plate was linked to unpaid tolls that had been incurred by another driver. Officer Roberto Felix Jr. of the Harris County Constable’s Office pulled the car over based on those unpaid tolls.
When Mr. Barnes could not immediately locate his license and the car’s registration, the officer asked him to step out of the car. Instead, Mr. Barnes began to pull away, with the car door still open. Officer Felix drew his gun, jumped onto the moving car’s door sill and twice shot Mr. Barnes, as recorded on dash cam footage.
Mr. Barnes’s mother, Janice Hughes Barnes, sued, saying the officer’s use of force was unreasonable, violating the Fourth Amendment.
A unanimous three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit ruled last year in favor of the officer on what it said was a narrow question. “We may only ask whether Officer Felix was in danger ‘at the moment of the threat’ that caused him to use deadly force against Barnes,” Judge Patrick E. Higginbotham wrote.
Judge Higginbotham added a concurring opinion, writing only for himself. Had he been allowed to consider all of the circumstances surrounding the stop, he wrote, he could have ruled the other way.
“Given the rapid sequence of events and Officer Felix’s role in drawing his weapon and jumping on the running board,” the judge wrote, “the totality of the circumstances merits finding that Officer Felix violated Barnes’s Fourth Amendment right to be free from excessive force.”
The Supreme Court returned the case, Barnes v. Felix, No. 23-1239, to the lower courts for a fresh look under the right standard.
In a concurring opinion, Justice Brett M. Kavanaugh suggested that Officer Felix might still prevail under that broader standard. Justices Clarence Thomas, Samuel A. Alito Jr. and Amy Coney Barrett joined Justice Kavanaugh’s opinion.
“The key point is a common-sense one,” Justice Kavanaugh wrote. “A driver who speeds away from a traffic stop can pose significant dangers to both the officer and the surrounding community.”
Adam Liptak covers the Supreme Court and writes Sidebar, a column on legal developments. A graduate of Yale Law School, he practiced law for 14 years before joining The Times in 2002.
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