Police shooting case fails on qualified immunity grounds

Here are the facts in this police misconduct case: a driver was fleeing the police in a high-speed chase in New York City. When the driver stopped his car, he ignored police directives to exit the car and instead rammed his car into another vehicle that was occupied by a woman and her 2 year old child, causing that car to crash into another vehicle. The police then shot the driver, killing him. The driver's estate brings a wrongful death case, arguing there was no reason to shoot the driver since the police were surrounding his vehicle and he was no threat to anyone. Can the driver's estate bring a lawsuit?

The case is Martinez v. Hasper, a summary order issued on July 10. The estate cannot bring a case because qualified immunity protects the officer who fired the shot. This immunity attaches when the law was not clearly established at the time of the incident. 

To avoid qualified immunity, it is not enough to argue that the Fourth Amendment prohibits the shooting death of someone who poses no risk to anyone. You have to argue that prior cases make it clear that your facts give rise to a case. That is not easy to do. The estate has to show that shooting a fleeing motorist endeavoring to evade capture during a car chase that endangered officers and pedestrians nearby amounted to excessive force. The immunity inquiry is that narrow in these cases. 

Framing the issue that way, the Second Circuit grants the defendant officer qualified immunity because there is no precedential case quite like this one on the books. The Supreme Court has said that it has never "found the use of deadly force in connection with a dangerous car chase to violate the Fourth Amendment, let alone to be a basis for denying qualified immunity." Prevailing law in the Second Circuit also supports immunity. While the estate's lawyers cite cases showing that the police cannot shoot someone whom they could have apprehended without the use of deadly force, those cases are not like this one, where the decedent "had no ability to stop Ortiz from trying, once again, to ram his way through traffice and drive away from pursuing police officers."

One added point: the police department guidelines "prohibit[] officers from firing at 'moving vehicle[s] unless deadly physical force is being used against [a] member of the service or another person present, by means other than a moving vehicle.'” The Court of Appeals says this language, while well-intentioned and possibly even wise in New York City, a heavily-populated area, it does not defeat qualified immunity. "While police policies are relevant to the Fourth Amendment inquiry, they do not define what is reasonable under the Fourth Amendment."