Hagans v. Franklin Cnty. Sheriff's Office

• Decision Date: 28 September 2012
• Docket Number: No. 11–3648.,11–3648.
• Citation: 695 F.3d 505
• Parties: Patricia HAGANS, Administratrix of the Estate of Patrick Hagans, Deceased, Plaintiff–Appellee, v. FRANKLIN COUNTY SHERIFF'S OFFICE, Franklin County Hall of Justice; James A. Karnes, In His Capacity as Sheriff of Franklin County, Ohio, Franklin County Hall of Justice; Jason Ratcliff, Individually and In His Capacity As a Franklin County Deputy Sheriff, c/o Franklin County Sheriff's Office, Franklin County Hall of Justice, Defendants–Appellants.
• Court: U.S. Court of Appeals — Sixth Circuit

695 F.3d 505

Patricia HAGANS, Administratrix of the Estate of Patrick Hagans, Deceased, Plaintiff–Appellee,

v.FRANKLIN COUNTY SHERIFF'S OFFICE, Franklin County Hall of Justice; James A. Karnes, In His Capacity as Sheriff of Franklin County, Ohio, Franklin County Hall of Justice; Jason Ratcliff, Individually and In His Capacity As a Franklin County Deputy Sheriff, c/o Franklin County Sheriff's Office, Franklin County Hall of Justice, Defendants–Appellants.

No. 11–3648.

United States Court of Appeals, Sixth Circuit.

Argued: July 17, 2012.

Decided and Filed: Aug. 23, 2012.

Rehearing and Rehearing En Banc Denied Sept. 28, 2012.

ARGUED:Mary Jane Martin, Assistant Prosecuting Attorney, Columbus, Ohio, for Appellants. Thomas Joseph O'Connell, Columbus, Ohio, for Appellee. ON BRIEF:Mary Jane Martin, Arnold Paul Thies, Assistant Prosecuting Attorney, Columbus, Ohio, for Appellants. Thomas Joseph O'Connell, Columbus, Ohio, for Appellee.

Before: SUTTON and GRIFFIN, Circuit Judges; DOWD, District Judge. ^*

OPINION

SUTTON, Circuit Judge.

Invented by a NASA scientist more than fifty years ago, the taser has become an ever-present tool of law enforcement. The device allows officers to incapacitate resistant suspects for a brief period of time with relatively few risks. Relatively few though those risks may be, they are not non-existent, as this case illustrates. A police officer in Columbus, Ohio, used a taser to subdue Patrick Hagans, a middle-aged man undone by cocaine and unwilling as a result to allow officers to detain him. Hagans died three days after the incident. Because the officer did not violate clearly established law by using the taser in this setting, qualified immunity protects him from this lawsuit. We reverse the district court's contrary decision.

I.

Patrick Hagans spent the early morning hours of May 13, 2007, smoking crack cocaine with his girlfriend. Around 5:30 a.m., Hagans became paranoid and locked himself in the bathroom, telling his girlfriend that “people were after him.” R. at 32. Hagans broke the bathroom window, climbed outside and began running around his yard screaming. The commotion woke up Hagans' next door neighbor, Robert Bogard, who saw Hagans kicking chairs around his deck and jumping on top of cars in his driveway. Having “never seen another human in such a rage in [his] entire life,” Bogard called the police around 5:35 a.m. Id. at 2. The dispatcher informed officers in the area that there was an “unknown disturbance” at Hagans' address.

Officer Nelson Frantz arrived first, around 5:42 a.m., and a shirtless Hagans came running toward him. Frantz ordered Hagans to stop, but Hagans bolted for the backyard, and Frantz gave chase. Frantz shot pepper spray at Hagans, but it hit Hagans' backside, to no effect. Hagans raced back to the front of the house, where he encountered Officer Troy Hughes, who had just arrived. Hagans ran to Hughes' cruiser and began yanking on the locked driver's side door handle. Hagans did not obey Hughes' command to stop, prompting Hughes to grab him by the waist and wrestle him to the pavement. Officer Frantz soon joined the scuffle and tried to subdue Hagans as well. Hagans refused to be handcuffed. He lay down on the pavement and locked his arms tightly under his body, kicking his feet and continuing to scream.

While Officers Hughes and Frantz continued to struggle with Hagans on the ground, a third officer, Jason Ratcliff, approached. Seeing that Hagans was still actively resisting, Ratcliff unholstered his taser and applied it in drive-stun mode, pressing the taser directly against Hagans' upper back. The shock apparently did not faze Hagans, as he reached back and tried to grab the taser. Ratcliff tased Hagans a second time, again to no effect and again prompting Hagans to grab for the device. At this point, Ratcliff tried to use the taser in dart mode, firing two electric probes at Hagans from a distance, but the probes missed (how, from such a short distance, is not clear). Ratcliff tased Hagans two to four more times in drive-stun mode. Realizing that the shocks were not working, Ratcliff joined the other two officers in trying to subdue Hagans by hand. After struggling for twenty or thirty seconds, the three officers finally secured Hagans' wrists with handcuffs and put shackles on his legs to keep him from kicking or running.

A medical squad arrived. Alert at the time, Hagans lost consciousness and stopped breathing about ten minutes later. Paramedics administered CPR in the ambulance on the way to the hospital, restoring Hagans' pulse and respiration. Yet Hagans never regained consciousness, and he died three days later. The coroner found cocaine in Hagans' system and listed his cause of death as “bronchopneumonia due to anoxic encephalopathy due to cocaine intoxication,” R. 51–7 at 6—which is to say, the cocaine starved his brain of oxygen, leading to fatal respiratory complications. The coroner's report also listed “[c]oronary atherosclerosis”—hardening of the arteries in the heart—as “a contributing factor.” Id.

In August 2008, Hagans' estate filed this lawsuit in Ohio state court against the Franklin County Sheriff's Department and Officer Ratcliff. Hagans alleges that Ratcliff used excessive force by tasing him repeatedly in violation of the Fourth (and Fourteenth) Amendment and in violation of Ohio's assault and battery laws. The defendants removed the case to federal court. Following discovery, Officer Ratcliff moved for summary judgment on the basis of qualified immunity. The district court denied Ratcliff's motion, and Ratcliff filed this interlocutory appeal. See28 U.S.C. § 1291; Mitchell v. Forsyth, 472 U.S. 511, 530, 105 S.Ct. 2806, 86 L.Ed.2d 411 (1985).

II.

This qualified-immunity case, like all qualified-immunity cases, presents two questions: (1) whether the officer (Ratcliff) violated the claimant's (Hagans') constitutional (Fourth Amendment) rights (by repeatedly tasing him after he actively resisted arrest); and, if so, (2) whether that constitutional right was clearly established at the time of the incident (in May 2007, when the tasing occurred). The first question raises some complications. The second one does not. We opt to answer the easier of the two questions, saving the harder one for another day. See Pearson v. Callahan, 555 U.S. 223, 236, 129 S.Ct. 808, 172 L.Ed.2d 565 (2009).

Qualified immunity spares Ratcliff from money-damages claims for his law-enforcement work so long as he did not violate the clearly established constitutional rights of Hagans at the time of the encounter. Reichle v. Howards, 566 U.S. ––––, 132 S.Ct. 2088, 2093, 182 L.Ed.2d 985 (2012). It is one thing to overturn a conviction based on judicial interpretations of a constitutional guarantee reached after officers make an arrest; it is quite another to expose officers to the time, expense and risk of money-damages actions based on interpretations not yet clearly established.

In deciding whether a right has been clearly established, the Supreme Court has “repeatedly” warned lower courts not to define the right at “a high level of generality.” Ashcroft v. al-Kidd, 563 U.S. ––––, 131 S.Ct. 2074, 2084, 179 L.Ed.2d 1149 (2011). Hagans proposes a lofty definition of the right (“the right to be free from excessive force,” R. 63 at 9), one floor down from the words of the Fourth Amendment itself (“the right to be free of ‘unreasonable ... seizures' ”) and two floors down from the highest level of generality possible (“the right to be free from a constitutional violation”). Yet these types of inquiries do little to answer the question. “The general proposition” that the Fourth Amendment prohibits police officers from using excessive force “is of little help in determining whether the violative nature of [Ratcliff's] particular conduct [was] clearly established.” al-Kidd, 131 S.Ct. at 2084. It is sometimes worse than that: If a court does not carefully define the right, it risks collapsing the two qualified-immunity inquiries into one, permitting the constitutional-violation inquiry always to answer the clearly established inquiry. Precedent demands instead that we go down the stairs of abstraction to a concrete, particularized description of the right. Though not too far down: just as a court can generalize too much, it can generalize too little. If it defeats the qualified-immunityanalysis to define the right too broadly (as the right to be free of excessive force), it defeats the purpose of § 1983 to define the right too narrowly (as the right to be free of needless assaults by left-handed police officers during Tuesday siestas).

Examples abound of an appropriate middle ground. In an excessive-force case, that might mean asking whether “a disturbed felon, set on avoiding capture through vehicular flight [that placed] persons in the immediate area ... at risk” had a clearly established right not to be shot. Brosseau v. Haugen, 543 U.S. 194, 200, 125 S.Ct. 596, 160 L.Ed.2d 583 (2004) (per curiam). Or, closer to today's case, it might mean asking “whether a misdemeanant, fleeing from the scene of a non-violent misdemeanor, but offering no other resistance and disobeying no official command, had a clearly established right not to be tased.” Cockrell v. City of Cincinnati, 468 Fed.Appx. 491, 495 (6th Cir.2012).

Defined at the appropriate level of generality—a reasonably particularized one—the question at hand is whether it was clearly established in May 2007 that using a taser repeatedly on a suspect actively resisting arrest and refusing to be handcuffed amounted to excessive force. The answer is no. Cases from this circuit and others, before and after May 2007, adhere to this line: If a suspect actively resists arrest and refuses to be handcuffed, officers do not violate the Fourth Amendment by using a taser to subdue him. Consider cases from this circuit first. In Williams v. Sandel, 433 Fed.Appx. 353 (6th Cir.2011), officers confronted a suspect...