McCall v. Williams, C/A No. 2:97-1798-18.

• Decision Date: 16 August 1999
• Docket Number: C/A No. 2:97-1798-18.
• Citation: 59 F.Supp.2d 556
• Parties: Eddie McCALL, Plaintiff, v. Lieutenant Dwight WILLIAMS, Sheriff Jack McCrea, and Williamsburg County Sheriff's Department, Defendants.
• Court: U.S. District Court — District of South Carolina

59 F.Supp.2d 556

Eddie McCALL, Plaintiff, v. Lieutenant Dwight WILLIAMS, Sheriff Jack McCrea, and Williamsburg County Sheriff's Department, Defendants.

C/A No. 2:97-1798-18.

United States District Court, D. South Carolina, Charleston Division.

August 16, 1999.

William J. Barr, Kingstree, SC, for plaintiff.

Robert King, Florence, SC, for defendant.

ORDER

NORTON, District Judge.

This action is before the court on Plaintiff's Motion for Reconsideration of this court's grant of summary judgment to Defendants.

A "motion for reconsideration" is not recognized by the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure. A motion denominated as such is treated as a motion to alter or amend a judgment pursuant to Rule 59(e). See Edward H. Bohlin Co. v. Banning Co., 6 F.3d 350, 353 (5th Cir.1993); 11 Charles Alan Wright, Arthur R. Miller & Mary Kay Kane, Federal Practice & Procedure § 2810.1 (1995). Rule 59(e) is an extraordinary remedy that permits the district court to correct its own errors, sparing the parties and the appellate courts the burden of unnecessary appellate litigation. See Pacific Ins. Co. v. American Nat'l Fire Ins. Co., 148 F.3d 396, 403 (4th Cir. 1998). A motion to alter or amend a judgment may be granted "(1) to accommodate an intervening change in controlling law; (2) to account for new evidence not available at trial; or (3) to correct a clear error of law or prevent manifest injustice." Hutchinson v. Staton, 994 F.2d 1076, 1081 (4th Cir.1993). Mere disagreement with how the law is applied does not support a Rule 59(e) motion. See id. at 1082.

A hearing on this matter will not be scheduled as the arguments are adequately presented in the materials submitted to the court and oral argument would not aid the decisional process. Because Plaintiff's motion addressed only the § 1983 claim against Lieutenant Williams in his individual capacity, this court will do the same. Plaintiff first claims that this court applied the wrong standard in evaluating the qualified immunity claim when it rejected the "objective reasonableness" standard. Plaintiff observes that "[t]he Court should have applied the objective reasonableness test as recognized by Rowland [v. Perry, 41 F.3d 167 (4th Cir. 1994) ], and Wilson [v. Layne, 526 U.S. 603, 119 S.Ct. 1692, 143 L.Ed.2d 818 (1999) ]." (Plaintiff's Memo. in Support of Motion for Reconsideration at 8) Plaintiff misunderstands the analysis this court performed in its previous Order. This court refused to apply the excessive force analysis for qualified immunity that involves a freestanding, reasonableness inquiry into the actions of the law enforcement officer and thus makes no distinction between an inquiry on the merits of an excessive force claim and an inquiry on the defense of qualified immunity. See, e.g., Rowland v. Perry, 41 F.3d 167 (4th Cir. 1994). For the reasons stated in its previous Order, this court continues to reject such an analysis because it differs from the traditional three-prong analysis reaffirmed recently by the Supreme Court, it is inconsistent with the analysis performed in a more recent excessive force case from the Fourth Circuit, and it equates the merits and qualified immunity defenses when the qualified immunity defense grants government officials greater protection than a simple defense on the merits. See Vathekan v. Prince George's County, 154 F.3d 173, 179-80 (4th Cir.1998) (applying the same three-pronged qualified immunity test in an excessive force case as this court did in its previous Order); Slattery v. Rizzo, 939 F.2d 213, 216 (4th Cir.1991) (recognizing the qualified immunity defense in excessive force cases and observing that such a defense "affords government officials greater protection than a simple defense on the merits"). Instead, this court applied the traditional three-pronged test of objective reasonableness, reaffirmed by the United States Supreme Court five days after this court issued its Order. See Wilson v. Layne, 526 U.S. 603, 119 S.Ct. 1692, 143 L.Ed.2d 818 (1999) (applying the traditional three-pronged analysis in a Fourth Amendment qualified immunity context).

Plaintiff maintains that his right to be free from the application of handcuffs which were too tight was clearly established on the date of the incident. In his Memorandum in Support of his Motion for Reconsideration, Plaintiff argues that "[u]nder this Court's analysis, an arrestee would be barred from the halls of federal justice if he could not find a case to establish that his type of case had already been decided or established by rule of law." (Plaintiff's Memo. in Support of his Motion for Reconsideration at 6) This is simply not correct. Even Plaintiff admits at another point in his memorandum that this court's previous Order acknowledged that "`clearly established' include[s] the rights that are already `specifically adjudicated,' and those rights `manifestly included within more general applications of the core constitutional principle invoked.'" (Order, dated May 19, 1999) (quoting Pritchett v. Alford, 973 F.2d 307, 314 (4th Cir.1992)).

The problem with Plaintiff's argument is that he merely states, in a conclusory manner, that "the right to be free from the unreasonable use of handcuffs by officers during an arrest is manifestly included within the more general applications of the core constitutional principle to be free from unreasonable seizure." (Plaintiff's Memo. in Support of his Motion for Reconsideration at 5) Plaintiff cites no case law from which a law enforcement officer could draw by analogy and thus determine that the application of handcuffs that were too tight was manifestly included within the Fourth Amendment right to be free from excessive force. Indeed, Plaintiff does not explain why the application of handcuffs in this manner is any different to any other use of excessive force. The only way Plaintiff's argument could prevail is if this court were to accept that all use of excessive force is manifestly included within the core constitutional principle that a person has a right to be free from unreasonable seizure. Such a rule would serve to eradicate the need for the particular right to be fact-specific, because the plaintiff could always make the bald assertion that the right at issue is "manifestly included" within the more general right. Because such a rule would violate the fundamental precepts of the qualified immunity doctrine, this court will decline to adopt it.

Although Plaintiff did not address this issue in his Motion for Reconsideration, this court is constrained to note that Wilson clarified the methodology of qualified immunity and thereby highlighted an error in this court's prior Order. In Wilson, the Supreme Court ruled that a district court must first evaluate the merits of a plaintiff's claim to determine if his constitutional rights were violated, before it proceeds to determine whether the right that was violated was clearly established at the time of the incident. See Wilson, 526 U.S. at ___-___, 119 S.Ct. at 1697-99.¹ This court did not take the first step in that analysis. Instead of addressing the merits of Plaintiff's case to determine whether his constitutional rights had been violated, this court assumed, for purposes of the qualified immunity analysis, that Plaintiff could prove that Lieutenant Williams had used excessive force in handcuffing his wrists too tightly. Thus, this court did not evaluate whether the force used was excessive. Although such a failure is now demonstrably legal error, it has no effect on the outcome of this case. Just as the Supreme Court found that the officials in Wilson had violated the plaintiff's Fourth Amendment rights, yet they were entitled to qualified immunity because the specific right had not been clearly established at the time of the incident, this court finds that Lieutenant Williams is entitled to qualified immunity, even though, taking the evidence in the light most favorable to Plaintiff, Lieutenant Williams violated Plaintiff's Fourth Amendment right to be free from the use of excessive force.

Nevertheless, this court will engage in an analysis of the merits of Plaintiff's excessive force claim in order to comply with the Supreme Court's mandate. "[A]ll claims that law enforcement officers have used excessive force — deadly or not — in the course of an arrest, investigatory stop, or other `seizure' of a free citizen should be analyzed under the Fourth Amendment and its `reasonableness' standard." Graham v. Connor, 490 U.S. 386, 396, 109 S.Ct. 1865, 104 L.Ed.2d 443 (1989). The Supreme Court's "Fourth Amendment jurisprudence has long recognized that the right to make an arrest or investigatory stop necessarily carries with it the right to use some degree of physical coercion or threat thereof to effect it." Id. at 396, 109 S.Ct. 1865. "Determining whether the force used to effect a particular seizure is `reasonable' under the Fourth Amendment requires a careful balancing of `the nature and quality of the intrusion on the individual's Fourth Amendment interests' against the countervailing government interests at stake." Id. (quoting Tennessee v. Garner, 471 U.S. 1, 8, 105 S.Ct. 1694, 85 L.Ed.2d 1 (1985)). Such a balancing involves "careful attention to the facts and circumstances of each particular case, including the severity of the crime at issue, whether the suspect poses an immediate threat to the safety of the officers or others, and whether he is actively resisting arrest or attempting to evade arrest by flight."² Id. Importantly, the "`reasonableness' of a particular use of force must be judged from the perspective of a reasonable officer on the scene, rather than with the 20/20 vision of hindsight." Id. In other words, "[t]he calculus of reasonableness must embody allowance for the fact that police officers are often forced to make split-second judgments — in circumstances that are tense, uncertain, and rapidly evolving — about the amount of force...