Fourth Amendment excessive force claim under 42 USC § 1983; Qualified immunity; Whether a police officer violated clearly established law when he used deadly force to stop gunfire at midnight on New Year’s Day; Reasonableness of the force used; Tennessee v Garner; Municipal liability under Monell v Department of Soc Servs

The court held that defendant-police officer (Huber) was properly denied qualified immunity in this § 1983 case arising from his fatal shooting of plaintiff’s decedent (Williams), who was firing celebratory gun shots into the air at midnight on New Year’s Day. It concluded that (1) “Huber violated the Fourth Amendment under the facts that a reasonable jury could find” and that (2) “all ‘reasonable’ officers would have recognized that they should not attempt to kill a nonthreatening (if reckless) New Year’s reveler.” Huber drove to the scene to investigate the gunfire and fatally shot Williams six times through a patio fence. Plaintiff brought an excessive-force claim against Huber under the Fourth Amendment. Huber moved for summary judgment based on qualified immunity. The district court denied the motion, ruling that fact questions remained, including whether “Williams had moved the rifle in Huber’s direction when Huber shot into the fence.” On appeal, the court, interpreting the evidence in the light most favorable to plaintiff, found that “a man’s reckless (but unfortunately common) decision to fire a rifle into the air just after midnight on New Year’s Day does not—without more—give officers the required probable cause to ‘shoot[] him dead.’” And Huber did not identify anything more when the court interpreted the record in the light most favorable to plaintiff. It agreed with the district court that there was a genuine dispute of material fact as to “whether Williams moved the rifle in a way that could have led Huber to perceive it turning toward him.” Thus, at this stage, the court had to interpret the facts in the light most favorable to plaintiff. “So Huber may not now rely on this factual justification—the one that he gave in testimony and in his interview with investigators—as the basis for shooting Williams. Rather, he must save this self-defense justification for the jury.” As to the “threat that Williams’s gunfire posed to others,” the court noted the city has treated Williams’ s purported “crime as a misdemeanor. And we know of no case that has given the police the right to shoot a suspect—without warning—to stop an ongoing misdemeanor without probable cause that the suspect’s conduct posed a threat to the officers or others.” As to the clearly established law qualified immunity prong, while “there are no cases like this one, this fact pattern is one of the rare ‘obvious’ ones in which Garner’s general test clearly establishes the violation.” Affirmed.