U.S. Supreme Court Judge Samuel A. Alito Jr. this week denounced the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals for handling the California State Police shooting case, calling for a lower court’s decision to grant damages to the victim’s widow and child.
“The court below has badly covered this basic doctrine of the qualifying immunity doctrine,” Alito wrote that his reliance on a 2022 appeal decision to rule police officers was not protected from liability in the 2017 shooting.
Jacob Dominguez was unarmed and therefore adhered to the directions of officers when he was a San Jose Police Sergeant. Michael Pina shot and killed him during a traffic stop in 2017. His head, shoulders and left arm were above the driver’s door frame when he was shot. Civil court records show that police were trying to arrest him for robbing a gas station, but there was no evidence of him being armed during the incident.
Dominguez’s widow sued Pina and the department and won $1 million in damages in 2023 after a federal civil ju apprentice discovered that officers were using excessive force.
Pina’s lawyers argued that he and the San Jose Police Department are protected under a qualified immunity, a legal principle that protects government officials from most civil lawsuits.
However, US District Judge Beth Raboson Freeman, responding to a 911 call, opposed the partial portrayal from the 9th Circuit ruling in Peck v. Montoya, in which lawmakers shot and killed a belligerent blind man.
According to Alito, the problem is that the case was decided five years after the Pina Shot Dominguez.
“The Peck was decided after the events that occurred in our case, but the 9th Circuit’s analysis of what was clearly established at the time of Peck’s issue is useful,” Freeman wrote, claiming that Peck’s decision supported the Cruz v. City of Anaheim precedent.
The Court of Appeal also cited Peck in an unpublished decision in favor of Freeman’s last year.
“A reasonable ju umpire may have discovered that Dominguez appears to have not reached for a weapon when Officer Pina shot him,” the appeals group wrote in May. “In such circumstances, lethal force is not justified.”
The officer’s attorney did not reply to requests for comment.
A Supreme Court judge exploited the appeals group in his dissent, calling the work “hamfist,” and cited the judge as “secretly” “distanced” for his qualifying immunity and justification for control over the footnotes of the decision.
“To overcome qualified immunity, parties must show that officials have violated their federal rights of “clearly established.” [the] Alleged misconduct,” Alito wrote. “This requirement ensures that officials are not liable for their conduct without notice that they are not subject to the burden of lawsuits or that such conduct is illegal.”
In other words, Pina couldn’t know that killing Dominguez would put him in civil lawsuits. That responsibility has not yet been established.
“This is a kind of decision that demonstrates the pointless nature of qualified immunity,” said Joanna C. Schwartz, a police misconduct litigation expert at UCLA Schools. “The concept that in order to clearly establish the law, the idea that we must find previous court decisions with almost identical facts can be a very high barrier.”
Even if Peck was decided before the shooting, it would have been “unimaginable” Pina knew about it or could have acted on that knowledge in fast-moving, high-pressure situations.
That’s because precedents always change in small but important ways.
“Just using force, you’re talking about hundreds of cases involved,” Schwartz said.
Instead of being asked to remember these progressive changes, officers are being taught extensive strokes from major changes in the law, the professor said.
“The goal is to learn how to apply these standards in a variety of situations and not to become some sort of machinery that can cause the facts and holdings of all these cases,” Schwartz said.
Alito was worried that police officers would be unfairly exposed after reading the court of appellate court’s eligible immunity, but Schwartz said her research did not support his claim.
“If the goal is to protect officers from lawsuits, that’s not achieved,” she said.
Also, in the case of civil lawsuits, qualified immunity does not protect the police from financial ruin in the case of civil lawsuits.
“Certified immunity is necessary, but not particularly suitable to achieve what the Supreme Court says they want to achieve that,” Schwartz said.
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