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Feb 26, 2024

Supreme Court Rejects Cases Testing Liability Shield for Police

The US Supreme Court refused to hear two cases testing the scope of a legal doctrine that shields police officers from being held liable when they kill someone on the job, drawing sharp dissents from

The US Supreme Court refused to hear two cases testing the scope of a legal doctrine that shields police officers from being held liable when they kill someone on the job, drawing sharp dissents from Justice Sonia Sotomayor.

In the first case, the justices were asked if St. Louis, Missouri police officers who held a homeless man in custody face-down on the floor and pushed into his back until he died are entitled to qualified immunity.

The US Court of Appeals for the Eighth Circuit ruled the city and police department couldn’t be held liable because Nicholas Gilbert didn’t have a clearly established right under the circumstances to be free of police force at the time of his death.

Gilbert’s parents say the court wrongly ruled that a person’s struggle to breathe constitutes “ongoing resistance” as a matter of law.

Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson said she would have agreed to hear the case.

Sotomayor said she would have tossed out the Eighth Circuit’s decision and sent the case back to the appeals court “to resolve the question of qualified immunity without assuming that Gilbert’s final movements were those of a dangerously noncompliant person posing a threat, rather than of a dying man struggling to breathe while adequately restrained by handcuffs and leg shackles and surrounded by six officers in a secure cell.”

In the other case the court rejected, the same appeals court said a Kansas City, Missouri police officer was protected by qualified immunity despite fatally shooting in the back a man who was allegedly unarmed, non-violent, and surrendering peacefully to an arrest.

Ryan Stokes’ family argues the Eighth Circuit wrongly ruled that its precedent was not clear enough to establish that Officer William Thompson’s conduct was unconstitutional.

The cases are Lombardo v. City of St. Louis, Mo., U.S., No. 22-510 and N. S. v. Kansas City Board of Police Commissioners, U.S., No. 22-556.

To contact the reporter on this story: Lydia Wheeler in Washington at [email protected]

To contact the editors responsible for this story: Seth Stern at [email protected]; John Crawley at [email protected]

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