Eberhardinger v. City of York
| Decision Date | 05 August 2019 |
| Docket Number | No. 18-3310,18-3310 |
| Parties | ERIKA EBERHARDINGER v. CITY OF YORK; BENJAMIN SMITH; MATTHEW FOSTER; STATE FARM MUTUAL AUTOMOBILE INSURANCE COMPANY; STATE FARM FIRE AND CASUALTY COMPANY; STATE FARM INSURANCE COMPANY; STATE FARM COMPANIES; STATE FARM; STATE FARM INSURANCE BENJAMIN SMITH, Appellant |
| Court | U.S. Court of Appeals — Third Circuit |
NOT PRECEDENTIAL
On Appeal from the United States District Court for the Middle District of Pennsylvania
Submitted Under Third Circuit LAR 34.1(a)
July 9, 2019
Before: SHWARTZ, KRAUSE, and FUENTES, Circuit Judges
This case concerns a police chase that ended with Defendant-Appellant Officer Benjamin Smith shooting and wounding Plaintiff-Appellee Erika Eberhardinger. Eberhardinger sued Smith for use of excessive force in violation of her Fourth Amendment rights, and Officer Smith moved for summary judgment on qualified immunity grounds, which the District Court denied.
On appeal, Officer Smith argues that his actions did not violate "clearly established" Fourth Amendment law and that, therefore, he is entitled to qualified immunity. Mullenix v. Luna, 136 S. Ct. 305, 308 (2015). Because we conclude under our prior decision in Abraham v. Raso, 183 F.3d 279 (3d Cir. 1999), that there are genuine issues of material fact for a jury to decide and the conduct alleged, if proven at trial, would violate clearly established law, we will affirm.
This case centers on a police chase that began when, around 2:00 am, Officer Benjamin Praster spotted a car running a stop sign. In the car were Matthew Foster (the driver), Erika Eberhardinger (sitting in the front passenger seat), and Mason Millen (sitting in the back seat). Officer Praster started tailing the car after it ran the stop sign,which apparently rattled Foster and prompted him to speed up. When Foster's speed increased, Officer Praster flipped on his lights and siren and attempted to pull the car over. Foster had been drinking and did not have a valid driver's license, and he did not pull over. Instead he accelerated in an effort to evade Officer Praster, who continued to follow the fleeing car and radioed for backup.
A nearby officer, Benjamin Smith, then joined the pursuit. Officer Smith proceeded toward the action in his cruiser, tracking updates from Officer Praster to discern the chase's location. In a matter of minutes, Officer Smith spotted the fleeing car when he turned onto West Gay Street—a narrow one-way street with a guardrail on one side and a line of parked cars on the other—where he found himself facing Foster's vehicle driving toward him, with Officer Praster trailing behind it. Officer Smith quickly came to a stop, obstructing Foster's path. When Foster noticed Officer Smith's cruiser ahead of him, blocking his exit from the narrow street, Foster stopped his car, put it in reverse, and began driving backward. Officer Smith immediately exited his vehicle, ran toward Foster's car, drew his firearm, and shouted commands at Foster to get out of his car.
At this point, the parties disagree about the details of what unfolded. It is undisputed that, as Foster continued in reverse, he struck a telephone pole behind him and, after crashing into the pole, he switched directions again and started driving in the general direction of Officer Smith, who was on foot. But the parties dispute how suddenly the car started moving, how fast Foster was driving, and whether Officer Smith was standing in the car's path, or rather, safely to the side of the car's course. Central tothe issue on appeal, the parties also dispute precisely when, as the car moved toward Smith, he began shooting his gun at Foster's vehicle, which he fired four times in rapid succession, hitting Eberhardinger twice.
According to Eberhardinger, Officer Smith fired all four shots while "standing to the left of the slow-moving vehicle and out of harm's way . . . as the vehicle was passing him or had completely passed him." Appellee's Br. 6. Officer Smith, by contrast, contends that he began firing while still in front of the car as he was "running [out of the way] to avoid the approaching vehicle" and stopped firing as soon as "the vehicle passed him completely." Appellant's Br. 9.
Eberhardinger sued Officer Smith pursuant to 42 U.S.C. § 1983 for use of excessive force in violation of her Fourth Amendment rights. After discovery, Officer Smith moved for summary judgment on qualified immunity grounds, which the District Court denied. The District Court concluded, based primarily on video footage of the shooting and other evidence relating to the angle of the gunshots, that "[v]iewing the facts . . . in a light most favorable to Eberhardinger," Eberhardinger v. City of York, 341 F. Supp. 3d 420, 432 (M.D. Pa. 2018), did not support entry of summary judgment on the basis of qualified immunity. Looking at the facts in that light, the District Court determined that a reasonable jury could find that "[a]fter striking the telephone pole . . . Foster . . . began moving forward at a slow rate of speed down West Gay Street"; that "Officer Smith moved out of the middle of the street and took up a position several feet to the left of the vehicle a few seconds before the vehicle reached him"; that the "forward-moving vehicle was not pointed in Officer Smith's direction when he beganfiring"; and that "Officer Smith—standing to the left of the slow-moving vehicle and out of harm's way—fired four shots at the driver as the vehicle was passing him or had completely passed him." Id. at 433.
Thus, the District Court concluded that a reasonable jury could find Officer Smith "used deadly force to stop the fleeing suspect rather than out of fear of immediate personal harm," id., which violated clearly established Fourth Amendment law. In the District Court's view, this scenario presented the "'obvious case' where general excessive force principles" found in Graham v. Connor, 490 U.S. 386 (1989), and Tennessee v. Garner, 471 U.S. 1 (1985), gave "'fair and clear warning' that Officer Smith's conduct," viewed in the light most favorable to Eberhardinger, "violated federal law." Eberhardinger, 341 F. Supp. 3d at 433 (quoting Kisela v. Hughes, 138 S. Ct. 1148, 1153 (2018)). This interlocutory appeal followed.
Qualified immunity shields police officers from claims for money damages brought pursuant to § 1983 "so long as their conduct 'does not violate clearly established statutory or constitutional rights of which a reasonable person would have known.'" Bland v. City of Newark, 900 F.3d 77, 83 (3d Cir. 2018) (quoting Mullenix, 136 S. Ct. at 308). The Supreme Court has articulated "general tests" to determine what conduct constitutes excessive force under the Fourth Amendment, but, where there is otherwiseno "body of relevant case law" that establishes an officer's conduct is unlawful, courts may not rely on those tests to "'clearly establish' the answer" except in an "obvious case." Brosseau v. Haugen, 543 U.S. 194, 199 (2004).
Here, Officer Smith argues on appeal that, contrary to the District Court's reasoning, this is not an "obvious case," and, as primary support for that argument, posits that the evidence does not support the District Court's account of the facts. That argument suffers from two critical flaws: (A) because this is an interlocutory appeal from a summary judgment order denying qualified immunity, whether the District Court's construction of the facts finds adequate support in the record is beyond our jurisdiction, see Johnson v. Jones, 515 U.S. 304, 313 (1995), and (B) accepting the District Court's rendition of the facts, even assuming that this is not an "obvious case," our prior decision in Abraham v. Raso, 183 F.3d 279 (3d Cir. 1999), where we confronted very similar factual circumstances, clearly established that Officer Smith's conduct, as alleged by Eberhardinger, violated her Fourth Amendment rights.2
In an interlocutory appeal from a denial of summary judgment on the basis of qualified immunity, this Court lacks jurisdiction to review questions of "'evidence sufficiency,' i.e., which facts a party may, or may not, be able to prove at trial." Johnson, 515 U.S. at 313. Put differently, we may not "consider whether the district court correctly identified the set of facts that the summary judgment record is sufficient to prove," Bland, 900 F.3d at 82 (quoting Dougherty v. Sch. Dist. of Phila., 772 F.3d 979, 986 (3d Cir. 2014)), and therefore "must accept the District Court's set of facts as given," Walker v. Horn, 286 F.3d 705, 707 (3d Cir. 2002).
Officer Smith acknowledges this but nevertheless urges us to disregard the District Court's version of the facts in light of the camera footage showing the shooting and the moments leading up to it. It is true that video evidence sometimes enables an appellate court to disregard a district court's construction of the facts on interlocutory appeal. See Scott v. Harris, 550 U.S. 372, 379-80 (2007). But that is only the case where a videotape "blatantly contradict[s]" the District Court's account. Blaylock v. City of Philadelphia, 504 F.3d 405, 414 (3d Cir. 2007) (quoting Scott, 550 U.S. at 380).
Here, the video evidence falls short of showing that the District Court'sdetermination that material facts are subject to "reasonable dispute [was] blatantly and demonstrably false." Id. In particular, and of primary importance to this appeal, the footage does not unequivocally corroborate Officer Smith's assertion that he "was in front of the vehicle and not safely out of the way at the time he began discharging his firearm." Appellant's Supp. Br. 2. In the moments before the sounds of gunfire, Officer Smith can be seen in the path of Foster's vehicle, then moving to the side and out of the vehicle's path, and ultimately standing to the left of Foster's car as it...
To continue reading
Request your trial
-
Irwin v. Santiago
...the pedestrian-officer was not in the path of the fleeing suspect's slow-moving vehicle. See, e.g., Eberhardinger v. City of York, 782 F. App'x 180, 182, 185-86 (3d Cir. 2019) (unpublished) (concluding that because a factual dispute existed as to whether the defendant-officer stood to the l......