Charles Oakley wins his appeal against Madison Square Garden in excessive force case

The Court of Appeals has reinstated a lawsuit filed by a former basketball player who was removed from Madison Square Garden while attending a Knicks game as a spectator. The claim was for assault and battery.

The case is Oakley v. MSG Networks, a summary order issued on May 5. It all happened on February 8, 2017. The case was dismissed on a summary judgment motion. The Court of Appeals finds that jury may in fact find that Charles Oakley was subjected to excessive force. When the Second Circuit first ruled on this case in 2020, in reversing the Rule 12 motion to dismiss, it stated that “[b]ecause of its intensely factual nature, the question of whether the use of force was reasonable under the circumstances is generally best left for a jury to decide.” That principle holds true in the summary judgment posture, as well, the Court (Wesley, Robinson and Calabresi) holds. 

MSG submitted video recordings of the incident. The trial judge (who now sits on the Court of Appeals) said the video footage conclusively shows there was no excessive force. The Supreme Court has said that video footage can yield that result on summary judgment motions, but only if the footage proves beyond any doubt that the plaintiff has no case. That case was Scott v. Harris, 550 U.S. 372 (2007). There were multiple videos in this case, which leads the Court to find that the evidence is too murky to prevent a jury trial on this issue. The following passage from the ruling gives you a flavor of what's going on here.

Oakley testifies that immediately after he stood, he was grabbed and pulled backward by the security guards. Once he was let go, he felt a security guard push him from behind. The district court determined that the “initial” fall that Oakley was presumably describing was depicted in Exhibit 4 (hereinafter “Fan Video”) at 0:13–0:14.

But a separate video records Oakley standing up while surrounded by security guards and falling to the side in a way that is not blatantly inconsistent with the description in his declaration. See Exhibit 2.b (hereinafter “Stadium Video”) at 8:16–8:23. This excerpt from the Stadium Video apparently depicts events that occurred before the Fan Video begins. Viewing the record in the light most favorable to Oakley, and giving him the benefit of all reasonable inferences, the record does not unequivocally support the conclusion that the incident

Oakley described in his declaration was that depicted in the Fan Video at 0:13. So a dispute of material fact exists on that question.

Moreover, if Oakley’s declaration describes the incident depicted on the Stadium Video at 8:16-8:23, then the record does not, as the district court suggested, reflect as a matter of law that the security guards only resorted to force after Oakley physically escalated the situation. 

Additionally, the Stadium Video, which is the only video that captures the initial encounter between Oakley and the MSG security guards, has a low frame rate and, as a result, produces a choppy and degraded video quality that does not depict a continuous flow of activity. Nor does it include sound. As a consequence, it does not record the initial conversation between Oakley and the MSG security guards, and it is difficult to see clearly what happened.

Plus, the video record shows Oakley falling two other times after that initial encounter. See Fan Video at 0:13–0:14 and at 1:10; Stadium Video at 8:41– 8:42 and at 9:36–9:40. None of these videos clearly show Oakley’s feet and lower legs, and thus do not unequivocally establish that Oakley merely lost his footing.

This is what happens when multiple videos exist in the same case. There are many ways to view an incident. The jury is going to have to sort through all of this. As the Second Circuit holds, "once a jury sorts out what exactly happened, it must make a determination as to whether the force used to eject Oakley was reasonable."