Posted on 04/03/2018 5:47:43 AM PDT by Kaslin
The Supreme Court has ruled in favor of a police officer who shot a woman outside of her home in Tucson, Arizona in May 2010. The officer, Andrew Kisela, shot Amy Hughes after she was seen acting "erratically," hacking at a tree with a knife and arguing with her roommate.
Kisela and another police officer, Alex Garcia, heard about the report on their patrol car radio and responded. A third police officer, Lindsay Kunz, arrived on the scene on her bicycle.
All three officers drew their guns. At least twice they told Hughes to drop the knife. Viewing the record in the light most favorable to Hughes, Chadwick said “take it easy” to both Hughes and the officers. Hughes appeared calm, but she did not acknowledge the officers’ presence or drop the knife. The top bar of the chain-link fence blocked Kisela’s line of fire, so he dropped to the ground and shot Hughes four times through the fence. Then the officers jumped the fence, handcuffed Hughes, and called paramedics, who transported her to a hospital. There she was treated for non-life-threatening injuries. Less than a minute had transpired from the moment the officers saw Chadwick to the moment Kisela fired shots.
Hughes, they later learned, had a history of mental illness. She and Chadwick were roommates and they apparently had a disagreement over $20.
Kisela, Garcia and Kunz defended Kisela's decision to shoot, noting they believed at the time that Hughes was a threat to Chadwick. Still, Hughes sued Kisela, alleging that he had used excessive force in violation of the Fourth Amendment.
In their ruling Monday, the Supreme Court cited several other court cases as precedent in their acquittal of the police officer. They cited Kisela’s qualified immunity, which protects public officials from damages for civil liability as long as they did not violate an individual's "clearly established" statutory or constitutional rights, Cornell explains.
Justice Sonia Sotomayor dissented, offering a different perspective of what transpired, concluding Officer Kisela acted hastily.
"Kisela did not wait for Hughes to register, much less respond to, the officers’ rushed commands," Sotomayor insisted. "Instead, Kisela immediately and unilaterally escalated the situation."
Furthermore, he gave no advance warning that he would shoot, and "attempted no less dangerous methods to deescalate the situation."
She also disagreed with her colleagues in terms of qualified immunity. An officer is not entitled to qualified immunity, she said, if “(1) they violated a federal statutory or constitutional right, and (2) the unlawfulness of their conduct was ‘clearly established at the time.’”
Hughes, Sotomayor noted, had not committed a crime. Furthermore, when the police officers arrived on the scene, reports indicate that Hughes was standing “composed and content” during her encounter with Chadwick. With the above context, the justice came to the following conclusion.
The majority today exacerbates that troubling asymmetry. Its decision is not just wrong on the law; it also sends an alarming signal to law enforcement officers and the public. It tells officers that they can shoot first and think later, and it tells the public that palpably unreasonable conduct will go unpunished. Because there is nothing right or just under the law about this, I respectfully dissent.
You can read the whole court ruling – and Sotomayor’s dissent – here.
Note the comments above. Avoiding force and using less harmful methods is great! There was the roommate & another bystander on the other side of the fence being threatened with officers unable to effectively deploy mace or taser through the fence. One lunge could have seriously injured a civilian and irrational people are often very fast & unpredictable.
“she did not acknowledge the officers’ presence or drop the knife.”
“Less than a minute had transpired from the moment the officers saw Chadwick to the moment Kisela fired shots.”
In a situation like this a “minute” can be an eternity.
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She walked towards the roommate with the knife in her hand and refused the police commands. I wasn’t there but I know situations can turn on a dime and that if the roommate had been stabbed the police would have been in the wrong. I think nothing that the police could see at the time suggested the situation wouldn’t have escalated and isolated on the other side of the fence their options to intervene were limited.
When I don’t know all the facts and the Supreme Court has had the chance to get the facts & statements I go with their summation.
You are wrong here.
There needs to be a different standard because there is a different standard of duty & responsibility. If a bystander is injured it’s not a lack in the private citizens. The police officer is responsible for public saftey and acts to protect the public. He/she is going to need to act differently.
He was responding to the threat to the roommate not himself. Pay attention to the facts. They do matter.
You seem to insist upon adjudicating the facts from that Minnesota case to the case that actually was before the Court. If the Minnesota cops shot the guy with a knife because they thought that he was a threat *to them*, and (i) he was sufficiently removed from the cops and (ii) it was too cold for the guy to have been able to wait out the cops and attack them, then I agree that the cops acted hastily in that case.
But that has *nothing to do* with the case before the Court. The cop didn’t shoot the loon with the knife because he thought that she was a threat to one of the cops, he shot her because he thought, in his reasonable judgment (and he was the one there, not you), that the loon was with the knife was a threat to her roommate. The cop didn’t shoot to kill, but to stop the woman from potentially stabbing her roommate, and the extent of the injuries to the woman are consistent with the cop’s intent. We gain nothing from Monday-morning quarterbacking when a police officer acts to protect civilian (or cops, for that matter).
I think that the standard that would be imposed by you and Justice Sotomayor is nowhere to be found in the U.S. Constitution and would result in death and injury to many more civilians and police officers.
It’s too bad they can’t come up with some sort of non lethal device to stop a woman from trying to cut down a tree with a steak knife
Strange as it is to find myself agreeing with Sotomayor, in this case I do. We are giving police free rein to shoot first. That should be the last possible course of action.
I tend to agree, though I’m sure it’s a case by case situation. How is this different than the FBI being allowed to breach the constitutional rights of their targets, in non-life threatening situations?
“A fence separated them but he was scared and had to shoot her anyway????”
How about reading the article before doing the liberal knee-jerk reaction of blaming and mocking the police first? It was said that she was thought to still be a risk to her roommate.
In this case, I agree with the dissent. Soto is awful but I agree with her. Normally Thomas would side with the individual?
The police get by with murder all the time. Being scared justifies it.
The problem with the story is we are only hearing the dissent. And she is the only dissenter. We should read the full majority opinion before having a knee-jerk reaction.
It seems that many conservatives also rush to judgment to blame police officers. I know if I was one or any of my family was, I would want them to quit. It is a lose lose job. You have to make decisions in a second, ones that are analyzed and overanalyzed by people calmly sitting in recliners.
I don’t remember cop shootings being in the news as often as they are now. It’s likely one more step in the Alinsky method, to turn people against law-enforcement. Where were all the new stories in the 50s? We are being set up for the riots to start. And for the police to be emasculated. And for even conservatives to turn against them.
SCOTUS was clear; the only way to breech qualified immunity for officers is a case so egregious there would be no question that the officer had breached immunity, and pointed to the 9th’s own decision in the execution of a man with a sword in Sacramento in pointing out a similar case which found in favor of the officers.
You or I shoot, we know we go to jail. An officer shoots, he knows he doesn't go to jail. The problem isn't with the courts, it is in our legislatures not putting in rational limitations on qualified immunity and dialing back the police forces.
SCOTUS keeping to precedent and finding in the officer's favor keeps the status quo. And I agree with the majority in that this wasn't entirely irrational. The ire many feel shouldn't be directed at the courts but at their legislatures for NOT putting in controls for peace officers and deputies.
Mind you, if you look at the history of decisions in the 9th, they've also found 4 officers opening fire and shooting a vehicle traveling down the street at a slow speed with it's headlights off and blinkers on with no directions nor orders nor lights also doesn't violate the 4th because the vehicle COULD have held an ex police officer who had previously shot at police, then there's a massive wall for any case to breach qualified immunity.
That breach really needs to come from the legislatures, as the legislatures AND the courts have effectively given (for more than two decades) a near universal permit to use deadly force at the officer's discretion. And they're not going to backtrack on it unless the legislatures do first.
A second option for legislative action comes from the citizen initiative in California, and honestly, I'm shocked it's not been done already considering they passed one to require porn actors to wear condoms. Guess the powerful government unions in the state don't want their immunity breached either, as of course, officer qualified immunity is the same as the qualified immunity offered to every government employee in performing their duties.
And for even conservatives to turn against them.
...
Good point about reading the decision. It is here:
https://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/17pdf/17-467_bqm1.pdf
Libertarians have been running anti-cop stories on FR for many years and they do have a loyal following.
Hughes was “hacking a tree” with a knife. Perhaps the cop was worried about potential blow-back from the local #TreeLivesMatter chapter and was between a psychological rock and a hard place.
So you think all the conservative justices are wrong and all but one liberal justice is wrong?
Have you read the majority opinion or are just agreeing with a liberal story that only quotes the minority-of-one opinion?
I’m buying more ammo. Have plenty of guns. When law enforcement is rendered ineffective because of knee-jerk liberal reactions like is now pervasive even in conservative forums, the next step is for government enforcement. This is exactly what Hitler did and how he kept control.
Keep your powder dry and be ready. And hope your split-second decisions are better than those you criticize.
Not breaking the law?
One can argue about the police response, but in Arizona, the person with the knife was apparently guilty of felony disorderly conduct because she was wielding a weapon in conjunction with her disorderly behavior. That could be good for up to a year in prison.
ontap: We have eight members of the court agreeing including liberal justices and one dissenter....I'm guess the dissenter might be a little off on this one!!!
The inadequate Townhall article omits mentioning Ginsburg's concurrence with Sotomayor's [ill-considered] dissent--the vote to reverse was 7-2, not 8-1: see Kisela v. Hughes, pp.9-23.
Id be willing to bet the cops had a very different version from your story, since they were on site and your version is hearsay. Maybe I’m wrong, were you there?
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