In Jones v. LVMPD, published October 20, 2017, the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals reversed in part and affirmed in part summary judgment granted to the defendant police officers. One of the officers stopped the vehicle the decedent was driving. The officer ordered the decedent out of the car to be patted down. The decedent started to comply, then turned toward the officer. The decedent was much larger than the officer. The officer drew his firearm and ordered the decedent to turn back around. The decedent ran from the officer. The officer fired his taser twice. The decedent's body locked up and he fell to the ground with his hands beneath him. The officer knelt on the decedent's back and tried to handcuff him. The officer kept his taser pressed to the decedent's thigh and repeatedly pulled the trigger. Four officers arrived as backup. The defendant officer continued to tase the decedent, and another defendant officer tased the decedent's back. The decedent was tased continuously for ninety seconds by the first officer, and tased intermittently by the other defendant officer for ten of those seconds. The decedent died. The coroner concluded that police restraint techniques, including the tasing, contributed to the death. The district court granted the officers summary judgment on a procedural error in naming the decedent's estate and his father as plaintiffs, instead of naming the father as the estate's administrator as plaintiff.
The majority of the 9th Circuit panel ruled that the district court abused its discretion in declining to allow the plaintiffs to cure the procedural defect. The full panel then addressed the qualified immunity grounds for summary judgment on the merits. The court concluded that, viewing the facts in the light most favorable to the plaintiffs, applying a taser continuously for 90 seconds to a prone suspect who posed no immediate threat violated the Fourth Amendment, and that the law on the subject was sufficiently clearly established that no reasonable officer would have believed the use of force to be reasonable. The court affirmed the summary judgment granted on the father's Fourteenth Amendment claim, because the claim required that the officers act for a purpose other than legitimate law enforcement and there was no evidence of any such purpose. One judge dissented from the majority's conclusion on the procedural plaintiff-naming issue, but concurred with the majority on the qualified immunity issues.
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