Scott, Timothy v. Harris, Victor (04/30/2007)

Questions presented: Whether a law enforcement officer's conduct is "objectively reasonable" under the 4th Amendment when the officer makes a split-second decision to terminate a high-speed pursuit by bumping the fleeing suspect's vehicle with his push bumper, because the suspect had demonstrated that he would continue to drive in a reckless and dangerous manner that put the lives of innocent persons at serious risk of death.

BY CATHERINE CRANE, MEDILL NEWS SERVICE

When a 19-year-old kid becomes paralyzed, it can fundamentally alter the lives of everyone around him.

But when a 19-year-old kid becomes paralyzed at the end of a high-speed police car chase, it can fundamentally alter law enforcement procedure across the nation.

On the night of March 29, 2001, a police officer in Coweta County, Georgia, clocked Victor Harris' Cadillac going 73 mph in a 55 mph zone. The officer started pursuing Harris and flashing his lights at him, but Harris refused to stop. During the pursuit, Harris drove at speeds reaching 90 mph, ran several red lights and crossed over double yellow traffic lines to pass other drivers.

When Harris was about to cross into Fayette County, another officer, Timothy Scott, heard about the chase on his dispatch radio and decided to join the chase. Scott did not know why the officer was chasing Harris, or that Harris's primary offense was speeding.

After Harris turned onto a highway, Scott became the lead vehicle in the chase. Scott then decided to call his supervisor, Sergeant Mark Fenninger, for permission to perform a Precision Invention Technique – PIT – maneuver on Harris's car.

Scott wanted to execute a technique designed to stop a fleeing car by hitting the suspect's vehicle at a specific point. When an officer performs the procedure correctly, the impact of the hit throws the fleeing car into a spin before eventually bringing it to a stop.

After listening to his request, Scott's supervisor then granted him permission for a PIT maneuver, despite not knowing how the pursuit began or how dangerously Harris was driving. His exact words to Scott were to "[g]o ahead and take him out."

But at that time, neither Scott, nor any other police officer in Coweta County, had been trained on how to execute a PIT maneuver. Yet Scott did know enough about the technique to realize that he could not initiate the procedure at his currently escalated speed.

So instead of performing the PIT maneuver, Scott waited until he thought no other motorists were in the area then ran his front bumper into Harris's car.

Harris, who was not wearing a seatbelt, then lost control of his car and crashed off the roadway, becoming paralyzed from the neck down. Aside from Harris, no one else was hurt in the police chase.

After the incident, Harris filed a federal suit against Coweta County, Timothy Scott and Mark Fenninger.

Harris claimed that Scott had violated his 4th Amendment protections against an unreasonable seizure when Scott used his car as "excessive force" against him during the pursuit. He also argued that Fenninger had violated those same rights by authorizing Scott to use that force.

The U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Georgia ruled in favor of Harris, determining that both Scott and Fenninger had violated his 4th Amendment rights.

But on Dec. 23, 2005, the 11th Circuit Court of Appeals reversed the decision against Fenninger.

The court decided that because the force Scott used – ramming his car into Harris's – was not the force Fenninger authorized – performing a safe PIT maneuver – Fenninger could not be held responsible for violating Harris's 4th Amendment rights.

As for the case against Scott, however, the court applied the Saucier v. Katz (2001) qualified immunity test to show that Scott did not deserve the same protections granted to Fenninger that had insulated him, and most police officers in general, from personal liability litigation.

According to Saucier, an officer can be stripped of qualified immunity protections only if (a) his conduct violated a constitutional right and (b) every reasonable law enforcement official would have known that, at the time of the incident, his actions were violating clearly established law.

To satisfy the first requirement, the 11th Circuit began by citing Brower v. County of Inyo (1989) to show that using a car to stop a fleeing suspect fit into the 4th Amendment's definition of a seizure.

The appeals court then supported Brower's findings with Tennessee v. Garner (1985).

In that case, the court determined that an officer may not use deadly force to seize a suspect "unless it is necessary to prevent the [suspect's] escape and if the officer has probable cause to believe that the suspect poses a significant threat of death or serious physical injury to the officer or others."

Based on that decision, and the fact that the roads were mostly empty during Harris's pursuit, the 11th Circuit concluded that Harris' speeding and traffic violations alone did not qualify as the type of "significant threat of death" to the public that could legally permit an officer to use deadly force.

Additionally, the court decided that because both Brower and Garner were established law by the time of Harris's incident in 2001, Scott should have known that his behavior would have violate Harris' rights. Consequently, the 11th Circuit upheld the district court's ruling against Scott.

Scott petitioned the U.S. Supreme Court to decide if his behavior was reasonable and if the law regarding the use of deadly force was "clearly established" when the police chase occurred.

The certiorari petition argued that the case deserved review because it contradicted similar rulings from the 6th and 8th circuits, as well as rulings from the Supreme Court itself.

On Oct. 27, 2006, the Court agreed to hear the case.

Philip Savrin, Scott's attorney, said a ruling against Scott would severely handicap every police officer's ability to pursue fleeing suspects.

He added that a ruling for Harris would actually cause more harm to the public because it would force officers to wait until someone got hurt before they could stop escaping suspects.

"The problem with [Harris's] argument [is that Harris] had shown that he was going to continue to be a danger on the road," Savrin said. "Simply because nobody was about to be run over does not mean that the officer cannot use certain measures, such as the use of force…to stop a dangerous driver."

But Andrew Clarke, an attorney for Harris, said that kind of reasoning was ridiculous.

"If that's the standard…we're going back to the time before Tennessee v. Garner where [police officers] could shoot anybody even if [they] didn't know why they were running," Clarke said. "We don't allow the use of deadly force based on hunches."

Yet some legal experts said Clarke might have a hard time proving his case to this particular Supreme Court. Northwestern University Law Professor Albert Alschuler said that even though he sympathized with Harris' argument, he questioned how the new Roberts-led Court would rule on this divisive issue.

"One worries that our very conservative Supreme Court took the case because it's inclined to reverse the lower court's ruling in the motorist's favor," Alschuler said. "That would be a mistake [because] an officer who deliberately rams a traffic offender's car at a high speed is not acting in reasonable good faith."

On April 30, 2007, the Supreme Court ruled 8-1 that Scott acted "reasonably" under the 4th Amendment.

"A police officer's attempt to terminate a dangerous high-speed car chase that threatens the lives of innocent bystanders does not violate the Fourth Amendment, even when it places the fleeing motorist at risk of serious injury or death," wrote Justice Antonin Scalia in the majority opinion.

Scalia said the justices based their decision on a 15-minute video of the chase, which the court – in an unusual move -- provided a link to on its Web site.

After viewing the footage, Scalia argued that Scott's decision to force Harris off the road was "reasonable" so as to protect pedestrians and other motorists from "a Hollywood-style car chase of the most frightening sort."

Scalia added that the appeals court should have viewed the video more carefully rather than accepting Harris' version of events, which the justice noted, seemed to suggest that he was merely "attempting to pass his driving test."

But Jessica Silbey, an assistant professor at Suffolk University Law School, decried the majority's decision to base its holding on video footage.

"It may be the first time…that the Supreme Court has disregarded all other evidence and anointed the film version of the disputed events as the truth," she wrote in a May 13 op-ed in the Baltimore Sun. "In the Scott case, eight justices failed to exercise the kind of scrutiny and independence one expects of professionals tasked with evaluating complex evidence and law. They viewed the police film as incontrovertible evidence of reasonable force against a fleeing suspect."

In his concurrence, Justice Stephen Breyer cautioned that the new standard set forth in this case was "too absolute," arguing that the application of the 4th Amendment rule should depend on a case-by-case evaluation. And in a separate concurrence, Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg made clear that she did not "read today's decision as articulating a mechanical, per se rule."

In dissent, Justice John Paul Stevens accused the majority of exceeding the Court's authority, contending: "Whether a person's actions have risen to a level warranting deadly force is a question of fact best reserved for a jury."

Referring to "colleagues on the jury," Stevens argues that Harris' actions did not amount to "a capital offense, or even an offense that justified the use of deadly force rather than an abandonment of the chase."