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SUPREME COURT OF THE UNITED STATES
_________________
No. 16–369
_________________
COUNTY OF LOS ANGELES, CALIFORNIA,
et al., PETITIONERS
v. ANGEL MENDEZ, et al.
on writ of certiorari to the united states
court of appeals for the ninth circuit
[May 30, 2017]
Justice Alito delivered the opinion of the
Court.
If law enforcement officers make a “seizure” of
a person using force that is judged to be reasonable based on a
consideration of the circumstances relevant to that determination,
may the officers nevertheless be held liable for injuries caused by
the seizure on the ground that they committed a separate Fourth
Amendment violation that contributed to their need to use force?
The Ninth Circuit has adopted a “provocation rule” that imposes
liability in such a situation.
We hold that the Fourth Amendment provides no
basis for such a rule. A different Fourth Amendment violation
cannot transform a later, reasonable use of force into an
unreasonable seizure.
I
A
In October 2010, deputies from the Los Angeles
County Sheriff’s Department were searching for a parolee-at-large
named Ronnie O’Dell. A felony arrest warrant had been issued for
O’Dell, who was believed to be armed and dangerous and had
previously evaded capture. Findings of Fact and Conclusions of Law,
No. 2:11–cv–04771 (CD Cal.), App. to Pet. for Cert. 56a, 64a.
Deputies Christopher Conley and Jennifer Pederson were assigned to
assist the task force searching for O’Dell.
Id., at 57a–58a.
The task force received word from a confidential informant that
O’Dell had been seen on a bicycle at a home in Lancaster,
California, owned by Paula Hughes, and the officers then mapped out
a plan for apprehending O’Dell.
Id., at 58a
. Some
officers would approach the front door of the Hughes residence,
while Deputies Conley and Pederson would search the rear of the
property and cover the back door of the residence.
Id., at
59a. During this briefing, it was announced that a man named Angel
Mendez lived in the backyard of the Hughes home with a pregnant
woman named Jennifer Garcia (now Mrs. Jennifer Mendez).
Ibid. Deputy Pederson heard this announcement, but at trial
Deputy Conley testified that he did not remember it.
Ibid.
When the officers reached the Hughes residence
around midday, three of them knocked on the front door while
Deputies Conley and Pederson went to the back of the property.
Id., at 63a. At the front door, Hughes asked if the officers
had a warrant.
Ibid. A sergeant responded that they did not
but were searching for O’Dell and had a warrant for his arrest.
Ibid. One of the officers heard what he thought were sounds
of someone running inside the house.
Id., at 64a. As the
officers prepared to open the door by force, Hughes opened the door
and informed them that O’Dell was not in the house.
Ibid.
She was placed under arrest, and the house was searched, but O’Dell
was not found.
Ibid.
Meanwhile, Deputies Conley and Pederson, with
guns drawn, searched the rear of the residence, which was cluttered
with debris and abandoned automobiles.
Id., at 60a, 65a. The
property included three metal storage sheds and a one-room shack
made of wood and plywood.
Id., at 60a. Mendez had built the
shack, and he and Garcia had lived inside for about 10 months.
Id., at 61a. The shack had a single doorway covered by a
blue blanket.
Ibid. Amid the debris on the ground, an
electrical cord ran into the shack, and an air conditioner was
mounted on the side.
Id., at 62a. A gym storage locker and
clothes and other possessions were nearby.
Id., at 61a.
Mendez kept a BB rifle in the shack for use on rats and other
pests.
Id., at 62a. The BB gun “closely resembled a small
caliber rifle.”
Ibid.
Deputies Conley and Pederson first checked the
three metal sheds and found no one inside.
Id., at 65a. They
then approached the door of the shack.
Id., at 66a.
Unbeknownst to the officers, Mendez and Garcia were in the shack
and were napping on a futon.
Id., at 67a. The deputies did
not have a search warrant and did not knock and announce their
presence.
Id., at 66a. When Deputy Conley opened the wooden
door and pulled back the blanket, Mendez thought it was Ms. Hughes
and rose from the bed, picking up the BB gun so he could stand up
and place it on the floor.
Id., at 68a. As a result, when
the deputies entered, he was holding the BB gun, and it was
“point[ing] somewhat south towards Deputy Conley.”
Id., at
69a. Deputy Conley yelled, “Gun!” and the deputies immediately
opened fire, discharging a total of 15 rounds.
Id., at
69a–70a. Mendez and Garcia “were shot multiple times and suffered
severe injuries,” and Mendez’s right leg was later amputated below
the knee.
Id., at 70a. O’Dell was not in the shack or
anywhere on the property.
Ibid.
B
Mendez and his wife (respondents here) filed
suit under Rev. Stat. §1976, 42 U. S. C. §1983, against
petitioners, the County of Los Angeles and Deputies Conley and
Pederson. As relevant here, they pressed three Fourth Amendment
claims. First, they claimed that the deputies executed an
unreasonable search by entering the shack without a warrant (the
“warrantless entry claim”); second, they asserted that the deputies
performed an unreason-able search because they failed to announce
their presence before entering the shack (the “knock-and-announce
claim”); and third, they claimed that the deputies effected an
unreasonable seizure by deploying excessive force in opening fire
after entering the shack (the “excessive force claim”).
After a bench trial, the District Court ruled
largely in favor of respondents. App. to Pet. for Cert. 135a–136a.
The court found Deputy Conley liable on the warrantless entry
claim, and the court also found both deputies liable on the
knock-and-announce claim. But the court awarded nominal damages for
these violations because “the act of pointing the BB gun” was a
superseding cause “as far as damage [from the shooting was]
concerned.” App. 238.
The District Court then addressed respondents’
excessive force claim. App. to Pet. for Cert. 105a–127a. The court
began by evaluating whether the deputies used excessive force under
Graham v.
Connor, 490 U. S. 386 (1989) . The
court held that, under
Graham, the deputies’ use of force
was reasonable “given their belief that a man was holding a firearm
rifle threatening their lives.” App. to Pet. for Cert. 108a. But
the court did not end its excessive force analysis at this point.
Instead, the court turned to the Ninth Circuit’s provocation rule,
which holds that “an officer’s otherwise reasonable (and lawful)
defensive use of force is unreasonable as a matter of law, if (1)
the officer intentionally or recklessly provoked a violent
response, and (2) that provocation is an independent constitutional
violation.”
Id., at 111a. Based on this rule, the District
Court held the deputies liable for excessive force and awarded
respondents around $4 million in damages.
Id., at
135a–136a.
The Court of Appeals affirmed in part and
reversed in part. 815 F. 3d 1178 (CA9 2016). Contrary to the
District Court, the Court of Appeals held that the officers were
entitled to qualified immunity on the knock-and-announce claim.
Id., at 1191–1193. But the court concluded that the
warrantless entry of the shack violated clearly established law and
was attributable to both deputies.
Id., at 1191, 1195.
Finally, and most important for present purposes, the court
affirmed the application of the provocation rule. The Court of
Appeals did not disagree with the conclusion that the shooting was
reasonable under
Graham; instead, like the District Court,
the Court of Appeals applied the provocation rule and held the
deputies liable for the use of force on the theory that they had
intentionally and recklessly brought about the shooting by entering
the shack without a warrant in violation of clearly established
law. 815 F. 3d, at 1193.
The Court of Appeals also adopted an alternative
rationale for its judgment. It held that “basic notions of
proximate cause” would support liability even without the
provocation rule because it was “reasonably foreseeable” that the
officers would meet an armed homeowner when they “barged into the
shack unannounced.”
Id., at 1194–1195.
We granted certiorari. 580 U. S. ___
(2016).
II
The Ninth Circuit’s provocation rule permits
an excessive force claim under the Fourth Amendment “where an
officer intentionally or recklessly provokes a violent
confrontation, if the provocation is an independent Fourth
Amendment violation.”
Billington v.
Smith, 292
F. 3d 1177, 1189 (CA9 2002). The rule comes into play after a
forceful seizure has been judged to be reasonable under
Graham. Once a court has made that determination, the rule
instructs the court to ask whether the law enforcement officer
violated the Fourth Amendment in some other way in the course of
events leading up to the seizure. If so, that separate Fourth
Amendment violation may “render the officer’s otherwise
reasonable defensive use of force
unreasonable as a
matter of law.”
Id., at 1190–1191.
The provocation rule, which has been “sharply
questioned” outside the Ninth Circuit,
City and County of San
Francisco v.
Sheehan, 575 U. S. ___, ___, n. 4
(2015) (slip op., at 14, n. 4), is incompatible with our
excessive force jurisprudence. The rule’s fundamental flaw is that
it uses another constitutional violation to manufacture an
excessive force claim where one would not otherwise exist.
The Fourth Amendment prohibits “unreasonable
searches and seizures.” “[R]easonableness is always the touchstone
of Fourth Amendment analysis,”
Birchfield v.
North
Dakota, 579 U. S. ___, ___ (2016) (slip op., at 37), and
reasonableness is generally assessed by carefully weighing “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.”
Tennessee v.
Garner, 471 U. S. 1, 8 (1985) (internal quotation marks
omitted).
Our case law sets forth a settled and exclusive
framework for analyzing whether the force used in making a seizure
complies with the Fourth Amendment. See
Graham, 490
U. S., at 395. As in other areas of our Fourth Amendment
jurisprudence, “[d]etermining whether the force used to effect a
particular seizure is ‘reasonable’ ” requires balancing of the
individual’s Fourth Amendment interests against the relevant
government interests.
Id., at 396. The operative question in
excessive force cases is “whether the totality of the circumstances
justifie[s] a particular sort of search or seizure.”
Garner,
supra, at 8–9.
The reasonableness of the use of force is
evaluated under an “objective” inquiry that pays “careful attention
to the facts and circumstances of each particular case.”
Graham,
supra, at 396. And “[t]he ‘reasonableness’ of
a particular use of force must be judged from the perspective of a
reasonable officer on the scene, rather than with the 20/20 vision
of hindsight.”
Ibid. “Excessive force claims . . .
are evaluated for objective reasonableness based upon the
information the officers had when the conduct occurred.”
Saucier v.
Katz, 533 U. S. 194, 207 (2001) .
That inquiry is dispositive: When an officer carries out a seizure
that is reasonable, taking into account all relevant circumstances,
there is no valid excessive force claim.
The basic problem with the provocation rule is
that it fails to stop there. Instead, the rule provides a novel and
unsupported path to liability in cases in which the use of force
was reasonable. Specifically, it instructs courts to look back in
time to see if there was a
different Fourth Amendment
violation that is somehow tied to the eventual use of force. That
distinct violation, rather than the forceful seizure itself, may
then serve as the foundation of the plaintiff’s excessive force
claim.
Billington,
supra, at 1190 (“The basis of
liability for the subsequent use of force is the initial
constitutional violation . . . ”).
This approach mistakenly conflates distinct
Fourth Amendment claims. Contrary to this approach, the objective
reasonableness analysis must be conducted separately for each
search or seizure that is alleged to be unconstitutional. An
excessive force claim is a claim that a law enforcement officer
carried out an unreasonable seizure through a use of force that was
not justified under the relevant circumstances. It is not a claim
that an officer used reasonable force after committing a distinct
Fourth Amendment violation such as an unreasonable entry.
By conflating excessive force claims with other
Fourth Amendment claims, the provocation rule permits excessive
force claims that cannot succeed on their own terms. That is
precisely how the rule operated in this case. The District Court
found (and the Ninth Circuit did not dispute) that the use of force
by the deputies was reasonable under
Graham. However,
respondents were still able to recover damages because the deputies
committed a separate constitutional violation (the warrantless
entry into the shack) that in some sense set the table for the use
of force. That is wrong.
The framework for analyzing
excessive force claims is set out in
Graham. If there is no
excessive force claim under
Graham, there is no excessive
force claim at all. To the extent that a plaintiff has other Fourth
Amendment claims, they should be analyzed separately.[
1]*
The Ninth Circuit’s efforts to cabin the
provocation rule only undermine it further. The Ninth Circuit
appears to recognize that it would be going entirely too far to
suggest that
any Fourth Amendment violation that is
connected to a reasonable use of force should create a valid
excessive force claim. See,
e.g.,
Beier v.
Lewiston, 354 F. 3d 1058, 1064 (CA9 2004) (“Because the
excessive force and false arrest factual inquiries are distinct,
establishing a lack of probable cause to make an arrest does not
establish an excessive force claim, and vice-versa”). Instead, that
court has endeavored to limit the rule to only those distinct
Fourth Amendment violations that in some sense “provoked” the need
to use force. The concept of provocation, in turn, has been defined
using a two-prong test. First, the separate constitutional
violation must “creat[e] a situation which led to” the use of
force; second, the separate constitutional violation must be
committed recklessly or intentionally. 815 F. 3d, at 1193
(internal quotation marks omitted).
Neither of these limitations solves the
fundamental problem of the provocation rule: namely, that it is an
unwarranted and illogical expansion of
Graham. But in
addition, each of the limitations creates problems of its own.
First, the rule includes a vague causal standard. It applies when a
prior constitutional violation “created a situation which led to”
the use of force. The rule does not incorporate the familiar
proximate cause standard. Indeed, it is not clear what causal
standard is being applied. Second, while the reasonableness of a
search or seizure is almost always based on objective factors, see
Whren v.
United States, 517 U. S. 806, 814
(1996) , the provocation rule looks to the subjective intent of the
officers who carried out the seizure. As noted, under the Ninth
Circuit’s rule, a prior Fourth Amendment violation may be held to
have provoked a later, reasonable use of force only if the prior
violation was intentional or reckless.
The provocation rule may be motivated by the
notion that it is important to hold law enforcement officers liable
for the foreseeable consequences of all of their constitutional
torts. See
Billington, 292 F. 3d, at 1190 (“[I]f an
officer’s provocative actions are objectively unreasonable under
the Fourth Amendment, . . . liability is established, and
the question becomes . . . what harms the constitutional
violation proximately caused”). However, there is no need to
distort the excessive force inquiry in order to accomplish this
objective. To the contrary, both parties accept the principle that
plaintiffs can—subject to qualified immunity—generally recover
damages that are proximately caused by any Fourth Amendment
violation. See,
e.g.,
Heck v.
Humphrey, 512
U. S. 477, 483 (1994) (§1983 “creates a species of tort
liability” informed by tort principles regarding “damages and the
prerequisites for their recovery” (internal quotation marks
omitted));
Memphis Community School Dist. v.
Stachura, 477 U. S. 299, 306 (1986) (“[W]hen §1983
plaintiffs seek damages for violations of constitutional rights,
the level of damages is ordinarily determined according to
principles derived from the common law of torts”). Thus, there is
no need to dress up every Fourth Amendment claim as an excessive
force claim. For example, if the plaintiffs in this case cannot
recover on their excessive force claim, that will not foreclose
recovery for injuries proximately caused
by the warrantless
entry. The harm proximately caused by these two torts may
overlap, but the two claims should not be confused.
III
The Court of Appeals also held that “even
without relying on [the] provocation theory, the deputies are
liable for the shooting under basic notions of proximate cause.”
815 F. 3d, at 1194. In other words, the court apparently
concluded that the shooting was proximately caused by the deputies’
warrantless entry of the shack. Proper analysis of this proximate
cause question required consideration of the “foreseeability or the
scope of the risk created by the predicate conduct,” and required
the court to conclude that there was “some direct relation between
the injury asserted and the injurious conduct alleged.”
Paroline v.
United States, 572 U. S. ___, ___
(2014) (slip op., at 7) (internal quotation marks omitted).
Unfortunately, the Court of Appeals’ proximate
cause analysis appears to have been tainted by the same errors that
cause us to reject the provocation rule. The court reasoned that
when officers make a “startling entry” by “barg[ing] into” a home
“unannounced,” it is reasonably foreseeable that violence may
result. 815 F. 3d, at 1194–1195 (internal quotation marks
omitted). But this appears to focus solely on the risks foreseeably
associated with the failure to knock and announce, which could not
serve as the basis for liability since the Court of Appeals
concluded that the officers had qualified immunity on that claim.
By contrast, the Court of Appeals did not identify the foreseeable
risks associated with the
relevant constitutional violation
(the warrantless entry); nor did it explain how, on these facts,
respondents’ injuries were proximately caused by the warrantless
entry. In other words, the Court of Appeals’ proximate cause
analysis, like the provocation rule, conflated distinct Fourth
Amendment claims and required only a murky causal link between the
warrantless entry and the injuries attributed to it. On remand, the
court should revisit the question whether proximate cause permits
respondents to recover damages for their shooting injuries based on
the deputies’ failure to secure a warrant at the outset. See
Bank of America Corp. v.
Miami, ante, at 12
(declining to “draw the precise boundaries of proximate cause” in
the first instance). The arguments made on this point by the
parties and by the United States as
amicus provide a useful
starting point for this inquiry. See Brief for Petitioners 42–56;
Brief for Respondents 20–31, 51–59; Reply Brief 17–24; Brief for
United States as
Amicus Curiae 26–32.
* * *
For these reasons, the judgment of the Court
of Appeals is vacated, and the case is remanded for further
proceedings consistent with this opinion.
It is so ordered.
Justice Gorsuch took no part in the
consideration or decision of this case.
