Excessive force claim will go to trial

The defendant police officers shot the plaintiff following a pursuit in the City of Albany. The plaintiff sued the officers for excessive force and false arrest. The district court denied the officers' motion for qualified immunity, so the case reaches the Court of Appeals, which splits the baby and issues a ruling for each side. This case once again shows how qualified immunity works in police misconduct cases.

The case is Williams v. City of Albany, a summary order issued on November 13. Officers can invoke qualified immunity if the law was not clearly established at the time of the incident. They get immunity if no prior case law with similar facts said the officers' conduct was likely unconstitutional. Under this generous standard, qualified immunity is granted quite frequently. This immunity is so favorable to law enforcement, and other government defendants, that if immunity is denied at the trial court level, the defendant can file an immediate appeal. Normally, you have to wait for the entire case to play out to take up an appeal on any issue in the case. The catch is that to pursue the appeal, the officer has to concede for purposes of the appeal that the plaintiff's version of events is true and that, based on those stipulated facts, the officer gets the benefit of the doubt and therefore immunity.

This excessive force claim does not lend itself to qualified immunity because the parties still disagree about basic facts, even on appeal, such as how far plaintiff was from the officers when they shot him, whether plaintiff was holding a weapon in his hands such that it would have been visible to the officers during the pursuit, and whether plaintiff ignored the officers' instructions to get on the ground and drop the weapon. The jury will have to resolve these disputed facts before the trial court can issue a definitive qualified immunity determination.

The false arrest claim, however, is dismissed on qualified immunity grounds. The Court of Appeals (Lohier, Nardini and Robinson) reverses the trial court in holding the officers have "arguable probable cause," which is the test in immunity cases in the false arrest context. The opinion is not clear on this but it appears plaintiff ran away when the officers tried to arrest him for brandishing a weapon in a commercial establishment. The officers had arguable probable cause because the parties agree on the following facts that allowed them to arrest plaintiff:

Here, it is undisputed that Appellants had knowledge of a 911 call in which a witness reported that a man wearing a “grey hoodie and dark faded jeans,” who had a gun, “was threatening people” outside of a store “and threw glass and water bottles at the front door” of the store. It is also undisputed that Williams matched the physical description of the suspect; that Williams was seen by the officers on a street corner near the store shortly after the 911 call; that Williams ran away when the officers approached him; that the officers later learned before arresting Williams that the store owner and another store employee each made a statement to police that the suspect flashed a gun and told the store owner that he would “put a burner in [him],” and that the store owner later identified Williams in a photo lineup as the suspect. 

These facts are enough to arrest plaintiff for criminal possession of a weapon in the fourth degree. The trial at the district court will therefore not have any claims for false arrest but will instead focus on the excessive force claim arising from the police officers' shooting plaintiff following the pursuit.