WASHINGTON, DC – Following today’s decision at the Supreme Court in Barnes v. Felix, a case in which the Court was considering whether a police officer’s use of deadly force should be judged in light of all the circumstances of the incident, or whether courts should ignore unreasonable officer conduct that leads to the “moment of threat” in which force was used, CAC Douglas T. Kendall Fellow Nargis Aslami issued this reaction:

By rejecting the moment-of-threat rule, the Court’s decision today reinforces the Fourth Amendment’s protections against unreasonable seizures and rejects the notion that law enforcement officers possess a privileged status over that of ordinary civilians. The moment-of-threat rule is entirely unsupported by the Constitution’s text and history, frustrating the aims of the Fourth and Fourteenth Amendments—both written as safeguards against discretionary policing and police abuse. The Court’s decision makes clear that law enforcement officers should be held accountable for their unreasonable conduct and does not permit courts to impose arbitrarily time-constrained limits on what can be considered in determining whether an officer’s conduct was reasonable.

CAC Chief Counsel Brianne Gorod added this reaction:

As we discussed in our amicus brief, law enforcement officers today possess a staggering amount of discretion to stop and arrest that far exceeds what the Founders envisioned when the Fourth Amendment was ratified. It is thus critically important that courts not artificially constrain the protections provided by both the Fourth Amendment and the Fourteenth Amendment, which was drafted and ratified partially in response to police officers abusing their arrest powers to justify baseless and often violent seizures of Black Americans. The moment-of-threat doctrine was just such an artificial constraint, and the Court was right today to unanimously reject it. In doing so, the Court took a small but important step toward greater accountability for police officers who violate the Fourth Amendment by inflicting unnecessary violence during their encounters with the public.