US Supreme Court Tennessee v. Garner 471

Decided March 27, 1985

   Police responded to a call of a burglary in progress, and found the suspect (Garner) fleeing from the house.  The officer attempting to stop Garner could see that he was 17 or 18, and appeared to be unarmed.  He identified himself as an officer and ordered Garner to stop.  Garner instead continued to flee, and began climbing over a fence.  In order to prevent him from escaping, the officer shot him in the back of the head.  He died, and was found to have stolen $10 and a purse during the burglary.

   The officer was acting under the authority of a state statute which authorized the use of any necessary force to effect an arrest (although most police departments of the time had policies that would have prohibited this use of force, this particular department did not).  The state argued in this case that the reasonableness of a seizure depends only on the facts justifying it, and not on how the seizure is actually carried out.  The court held that "to determine the constitutionality of a seizure we must balance the nature and quality of the intrusion on the individual's Fourth Amendment interests against the importance of the governmental interests alleged to justify the intrusion."

   The court also explored the justifications for the old common law rule that allowed deadly force to be used to apprehend a fleeing felon, but that rule came from a time when most felonies were punishable by death, and when the use of deadly force generally involved  closer combat and therefore was justified in part by the risk to the officer.  None of those justifications were found to be appropriate for the modern world, where many felonies are less violent and dangerous than some misdemeanors.

   The court ruled that "whenever an officer restrains the freedom of a person to walk away, he has seized that person.  While it is not always clear just when minimal police interference becomes a seizure, there can be no question that apprehension by the use of deadly force is a seizure subject to the reasonableness requirement of the Fourth Amendment," and that "where the officer has probable cause to believe that the suspect poses a threat of serious physical harm, either to the officer or to others, it is not constitutionally unreasonable to prevent escape by using deadly force. Thus, if the suspect threatens the officer with a weapon or there is probable cause to believe that he has committed a crime involving the infliction or threatened infliction of serious physical harm, deadly force may be used if necessary to prevent escape, and if, where feasible, some warning has been given."

   Obviously, under the facts of this case, the use of deadly force was unreasonable.