The Supreme Court Unanimously Rejects a ‘Very Narrow Approach’ to Deadly Force by Police
During a routine traffic stop near Houston in 2016, a police officer killed Ashtian Barnes by blindly firing two shots into his car after jumping onto the doorsill as Barnes began to drive away. Last year, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 5th Circuit ruled that the shooting was justified by the threat that the officer, Harris County Constable Roberto Felix Jr., faced when he shot Barnes. Last Thursday, the U.S. Supreme Court unanimously rejected the logic of that decision, which focused on “the moment of the threat” rather than “the totality of the circumstances”—the standard that the Court has said should be applied in use-of-force cases.
“We reject [the 5th Circuit’s] approach as improperly narrowing the requisite Fourth Amendment analysis,” Justice Elena Kagan writes in Barnes v. Felix. “To assess whether an officer acted reasonably in using force, a court must consider all the relevant circumstances, including facts and events leading up to the climactic moment.”
The Court’s decision “echoes the common law’s historical protection of human life, which restricted the use of deadly force by officers—particularly in cases of flight from minor offenses,” says Mike Fox, a legal fellow at the Cato Institute, which submitted a brief supporting the civil rights lawsuit that Barnes’ parents filed against Felix. “Deadly force was traditionally reserved for instances of forceful resistance against an officer.”
This case did not involve “forceful resistance,” and it arose from offenses that were about as minor as one can imagine. Felix stopped Barnes on the Sam Houston Tollway because the Toyota Corolla he was driving, which his girlfriend had rented, was linked to toll violations racked up by a previous customer. Felix parked behind Barnes and approached the driver’s side window. When Felix asked for Barnes’ driver’s license and proof of insurance, the 5th Circuit noted, “Barnes replied that he did not have the documentation and that the car had been rented a week earlier in his girlfriend’s name.”
Seeing Barnes “digging around” in the car, Felix told him to stop. Claiming to smell marijuana (which a subsequent search did not find), Felix asked if Barnes had anything illegal in the car, at which point Barnes “turned off the vehicle, placing his keys near the gear shift.” Barnes “told Officer Felix that he ‘might’ have the requested documentation in the trunk of the car.”
Dash camera video showed what happened next. Felix ordered Barnes to pop the trunk, which he did. Felix asked Barnes to get out of the car, and Barnes opened the driver’s side door. But then Barnes restarted the car, prompting Felix to draw his gun, point it at Barnes, and say “don’t fucking move.” As the car began moving, Felix “stepped onto the car with his weapon drawn and pointed at Barnes,” “‘shoved’ his gun into Barnes’s head, pushing his head hard to the right,” and fired two shots.
Felix had “no visibility into the car” because “his head was above the roof,” Kagan notes. “All told, about five seconds elapsed between when the car started moving and when it stopped. And within that period, two seconds passed between t
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