The Supreme Court says a former LAPD officer could be charged with excessive force in a street shooting
WASHINGTON — The Supreme Court on Monday declined to block the excessive force charge against a former Los Angeles Police Department officer who shot and killed a knife-wielding man in his truck that crashed into several cars near downtown Los Angeles.
The court rejected an appeal from the Los Angeles city attorney’s office, over the dissent of Justices Clarence Thomas and Samuel A. Alito Jr.
The trial of the six-second shooting incident has been extended for six years.
A federal jury in California agreed that Officer Toni McBride was justified in shooting a suspect four times in April 2020 but not the last two shots that killed him.
Daniel Hernandez is suspected to have taken methamphetamine when he got out of his truck and went to the police. He repeatedly ordered, “Drop the knife,” as it approached.
But the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals, by a vote of 6-5, last year ruled that a jury could decide that the officer acted excessively when he fired the last two shots after the suspect fell to the ground.
The majority opined that in the one-second interval between the fourth and fifth shots, McBride “could and should have begun to reassess the situation” and possibly concluded that the suspect was no longer a danger.
That decision would be appealed to the court.
But the Los Angeles city attorney’s office appealed to the Supreme Court in October and urged the justices to review and overturn the 9th Circuit’s decision.
Lawyers for the city said the appeals court failed to consider “the totality of the circumstances from the perspective of a reasonable officer at the scene” and its decision refused to “allow for logical errors in quick and life-threatening conversations.”
UC Berkeley law professor Erwin Chemerinsky filed a response for the Hernandez family. He urged the court to stand aside and let the judge decide whether the officer’s actions were reasonable.
“The 9th Circuit simply said that it should be up to the jury to resolve the factual dispute as to what happened,” he said.
Jurors had been considering the decision since late February before rejecting it without comment on Monday.
The Supreme Court has repeatedly ruled that police officers may be sued for unreasonable searches and seizures only if they are shown to have intentionally violated a clearly stated law.
However, the doctrine of “qualifying immunity” has divided judges on whether a particular rule or limitation is expressly stated.
A majority of the 9th Circuit said that shooting a fallen suspect crossed the line.
“For more than a decade it has been clearly established that when a police officer shoots and injures a suspect, and he falls to the ground, the officer cannot continue to shoot him, without proof that he presents a continuing threat,” wrote Judge Jacqueline H. Nguyen.
“A fallen or injured suspect armed only with a barbed wire does not present a continuing threat simply because he makes a non-threatening movement. … Under such circumstances, a judge could reasonably find that he used force beyond the constitutional limit. If so, he is not entitled to due process,” he said.
The five abusers said the police officer made a reasonable decision.
Judge Ryan Nelson said McBride “was justified in shooting Daniel Hernandez in order to reduce the risk he posed when he approached him while armed and ignored commands to stop. … He could not reasonably have been expected or required to check his shooting within a split second during a tense and dangerous situation in which Hernandez was on his feet and did not stop moving.”
Judge Patrick Bumatay agreed with this.
“Judges review police shootings in retrospect. We review police tapes years after they happened. We can rewind, pause, move forward – we analyze the situation frame by frame. Although the emergence of police camera videos has been a welcome change, we cannot ignore that real life is not moving,” he said.
