42 USC § 1983 action; Fourth Amendment excessive force claim; “Seizure”; Brendlin v California; Torres v Madrid; Lack of intent to restrain; Stewart v City of Middletown (Unpub 6th Cir); Kilnapp v City of Cleveland; “Actual control”; Failure to rule on a sanctions motion based on alleged evidentiary misconduct; Harmless error

[This appeal was from the WD-MI.] Holding that plaintiff-Arthur was not subjected to a Fourth Amendment “seizure,” and that any error by the district court in failing to rule on her sanctions motion before granting defendants summary judgment was harmless, the court affirmed. Plaintiff, a prison employee, was injured while participating in a prison hostage training exercise. Defendants-VanderWeele and Wemple were corrections officers who also participated in it. The only claim at issue on appeal was plaintiff’s § 1983 claim for excessive force in violation of the Fourth Amendment. Her primary argument was “that she was seized by force when she was collaterally injured during Defendants’ attempt to subdue” the deputy warden who was playing her mock hostage taker. The court rejected this claim on the basis that defendants “lacked the necessary intent to restrain. The dispositive fact” (which distinguished this case from unintended-target cases) was that their “use of force occurred during a training exercise rather than during an actual law-enforcement operation.” While the court had never issued a published decision squarely addressing this issue, it addressed it in an unpublished case, Stewart. There, it rejected the injured officer’s excessive force claim on the ground that the action that resulted in his injuries “was not ‘intentional[.]’” While that decision predated “Brendlin and Torres, it applied the same intent-to-restrain analysis[.]” And more recently, in a published decision, Kilnapp, the court “endorsed Stewart’s rationale under that framework, albeit in dicta.” The court also noted that other “circuits have reached similar conclusions.” Thus, it held that plaintiff “was not seized within the meaning of the Fourth Amendment because Defendants did not act with the necessary intent to restrain.” As to her motion for sanctions for alleged evidentiary misconduct, her request to strike VanderWeele’s pleadings and for a default judgment failed “because such a sanction would be grossly disproportionate to the alleged misconduct at issue[.]” And even if the district court had granted her adverse inference request, “the summary-judgment analysis would remain unchanged.”