Tennessee v. Garner

A seizure occurs when an officer restrains a person's freedom to walk away. Although the exact boundary of a seizure can sometimes be difficult to identify, shooting a suspect to stop him is unquestionably a means of apprehension and therefore a seizure.

The State and the City argued that probable cause to arrest ended the Fourth Amendment inquiry. The Court rejected that position because Fourth Amendment reasonableness concerns not only whether the government may seize a person, but also how it carries out that seizure.

The Court applied its established balancing approach: it weighed the nature and quality of the intrusion on Garner's Fourth Amendment interests against the governmental interests asserted to justify it. Because lethal force takes a person's life and forecloses both trial and punishment through the ordinary criminal process, it is the most intrusive form of seizure.

The State's interests in apprehending suspects and encouraging compliance with police orders are important, but they do not justify killing every fleeing felon. The Court concluded that deadly force is not shown to be sufficiently necessary or effective to outweigh a nondangerous suspect's fundamental interest in life.

The Court stated the governing rule: an officer may use deadly force to prevent escape only when it is necessary and the officer has probable cause to believe the suspect poses a significant threat of death or serious physical injury to the officer or others. Where feasible, the officer must give a warning before using such force.

The rule permits deadly force when a suspect threatens an officer with a weapon or when there is probable cause to believe the suspect committed a crime involving the actual or threatened infliction of serious physical harm. But where the suspect poses no immediate threat to the officer or others, the harm from a failed apprehension does not justify a lethal seizure.

At common law, officers generally could use necessary deadly force against fleeing felons but not fleeing misdemeanants. The Court acknowledged that common-law practice can inform Fourth Amendment reasonableness, but explained that constitutional doctrine does not mechanically preserve every practice that existed when the Fourth Amendment was adopted.

The historical rule arose when many felonies were punishable by death and when felony classifications more plausibly marked especially dangerous offenses. In modern law, most felonies are not capital crimes, and the felony-misdemeanor line no longer reliably tracks physical dangerousness; some misdemeanors are more dangerous than many felonies.

Modern firearms also permit officers to inflict deadly force at a distance, unlike the hand-to-hand confrontations in which the old rule developed. Moreover, the Court found that the long-term trend in state law and, especially, police-department policies had moved toward limiting deadly force to situations involving a threat of death or serious injury.

The District Court found that Garner appeared unarmed, and Hymon had no articulable basis to believe otherwise. Garner was young, slight, and fleeing; Hymon himself justified the shooting solely as necessary to prevent escape, not as a response to any perceived physical danger.

The fact that Garner was suspected of nighttime burglary did not automatically establish dangerousness. Although burglary is serious, it is generally a property crime, and an unarmed burglary suspect does not necessarily pose a threat of death or serious bodily injury.

Because Hymon had no probable cause to believe Garner was armed or otherwise dangerous, the killing was an unreasonable seizure. Tennessee's statute was therefore invalid insofar as it authorized Hymon to use deadly force in these circumstances.

The statute could constitutionally apply in circumstances where an officer has probable cause to believe a fleeing suspect poses a serious physical threat and deadly force is necessary to prevent escape. The Court therefore held the statute invalid only insofar as it purported to authorize the shooting in this case.

The individual defendants had already been dismissed, and Tennessee intervened only to defend its statute rather than as a damages defendant. Whether the Police Department or City could be liable depended on whether an unconstitutional policy or custom existed under Monell v. New York City Department of Social Services.

Because the lower courts had not adequately addressed the validity of the Memphis policy and the record was uncertain, the Court did not decide municipal liability. It affirmed the Sixth Circuit and remanded for proceedings consistent with the Fourth Amendment ruling.