Caseflicks

Supreme Court of the United States • 1989

Graham v. Connor

490 U.S. 386 | 109 S. Ct. 1865 | 104 L. Ed. 2d 443 | 1989 U.S. LEXIS 2467 | 57 U.S.L.W. 4513

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Takeaway

In short, this case establishes that police force used during an arrest or investigatory stop of a free citizen is judged solely by Fourth Amendment objective reasonableness, not by an officer's subjective good faith or malice.

Background

Dethorne Graham, a diabetic, experienced an insulin reaction and asked his friend William Berry to drive him to a convenience store for orange juice. Graham entered the store, saw a long checkout line, and quickly left without buying anything. Officer Connor saw Graham hurriedly enter and exit the store, became suspicious, and stopped Berry's car about a half-mile away.

Berry explained that Graham was suffering from a diabetic “sugar reaction,” but Connor made them wait while he checked the store. As Graham's condition worsened, he briefly lost consciousness. Other officers arrived, handcuffed Graham tightly, ignored requests to give him sugar, shoved him against Berry's car, and threw him headfirst into a police car. After Connor learned that nothing improper had occurred at the store, officers drove Graham home. Graham claimed injuries including a broken foot, wrist cuts, a bruised forehead, a shoulder injury, and continuing ringing in his ear.

Graham brought a damages action under 42 U.S.C. § 1983, alleging excessive force in violation of the Fourteenth Amendment. At the close of Graham's evidence, the District Court directed a verdict for the officers. It applied a four-factor substantive-due-process test that asked, among other things, whether force was used maliciously and sadistically rather than in good faith. The Fourth Circuit affirmed. The Supreme Court granted review, vacated the judgment, and remanded for application of the proper constitutional standard.

Issues

Issue #1

Whether a free citizen's excessive-force claim arising during an arrest, investigatory stop, or other seizure is governed by substantive due process or by the Fourth Amendment.

Holding

Such a claim is governed by the Fourth Amendment's prohibition on unreasonable seizures, not by a generalized substantive-due-process standard.

Reasoning

Section 1983 does not itself create substantive rights; it supplies a remedy for violations of rights found elsewhere in federal law. A court therefore must first identify the particular constitutional right allegedly infringed rather than treat excessive force as violating a free-floating, generic constitutional right.

The Fourth Amendment expressly protects persons against unreasonable seizures. Because an arrest or investigatory stop of a free citizen is a seizure, force used to carry out that seizure must be evaluated under the Amendment's reasonableness requirement.

Tennessee v. Garner had already treated a claim involving deadly force used to apprehend a suspect as a Fourth Amendment question. Graham made explicit that the same framework applies to all force used in the course of an arrest, investigatory stop, or other seizure of a free citizen, whether deadly or nondeadly.

The Court distinguished other custodial settings. The Eighth Amendment supplies the principal protection for convicted prisoners challenging force as cruel and unusual punishment, while the Due Process Clause protects pretrial detainees from force amounting to punishment. But those standards do not displace the Fourth Amendment where the challenged force occurs during a seizure of a free citizen.

Issue #2

What does Fourth Amendment objective reasonableness require in evaluating force used during a seizure?

Holding

The factfinder must assess whether the force was objectively reasonable in light of the facts and circumstances confronting officers at the time, including the severity of the offense, the immediate safety threat, and resistance or flight.

Reasoning

Reasonableness requires balancing the nature and quality of the intrusion on the individual's Fourth Amendment interests against the governmental interests supporting the force. Officers are entitled to use some physical coercion or threat of force when making an arrest or investigatory stop, but the amount used must be justified by the circumstances.

The inquiry is fact-specific. Important considerations include the severity of the suspected crime, whether the person posed an immediate threat to officers or others, and whether the person was actively resisting arrest or trying to flee. These considerations guide, but do not mechanically resolve, the totality-of-the-circumstances inquiry.

Courts must judge the force from the perspective of a reasonable officer on the scene, not with hindsight. Officers often make split-second decisions in tense, uncertain, and rapidly evolving situations, so the Constitution does not turn every later-appearing unnecessary push or shove into a Fourth Amendment violation.

The test is objective: the officer's subjective intent or motivation does not determine whether the seizure was reasonable. An officer's bad intentions cannot render objectively reasonable force unconstitutional, and good intentions cannot validate force that was objectively unreasonable.

Issue #3

Whether the lower courts properly applied a test requiring proof that officers acted maliciously and sadistically for the purpose of causing harm.

Holding

No. The malicious-and-sadistic inquiry is incompatible with Fourth Amendment excessive-force analysis because it improperly focuses on officers' subjective motivations.

Reasoning

The District Court and Fourth Circuit relied on the four-factor test from Johnson v. Glick, including whether officers acted in good faith or maliciously and sadistically. That test had developed in a substantive-due-process setting and could not govern Graham's Fourth Amendment claim.

Whether force was malicious or sadistic asks about an officer's subjective state of mind. The Fourth Amendment instead asks whether the force was objectively reasonable under the circumstances, making subjective concepts such as malice and sadism irrelevant to the constitutional merits of Graham's claim.

The fact that subjective intent matters in certain Eighth Amendment claims by convicted prisoners does not justify using that inquiry here. The different constitutional language and custodial settings support different standards: the Eighth Amendment addresses cruel punishments, while the Fourth Amendment addresses unreasonable seizures.

Because the lower courts evaluated the directed-verdict motion under the wrong substantive standard, the Supreme Court vacated the Fourth Circuit's judgment and remanded for reconsideration under Fourth Amendment objective reasonableness.

Concurrences

Justice Blackmun

Reasoning

Justice Blackmun, joined by Justices Brennan and Marshall, agreed that the pleadings could be construed to raise a Fourth Amendment claim and agreed that the case should be remanded for reconsideration under a reasonableness standard. He therefore joined the judgment and the portion of the opinion applying the Fourth Amendment to Graham's own prearrest claim.

He would not have gone further to hold categorically that substantive due process is unavailable for all prearrest excessive-force claims. In his view, respondents' concession about the pleadings made that broader ruling unnecessary, and Tennessee v. Garner did not itself decide or reject substantive due process as an alternative framework.

Justice Blackmun expected that force not shown unreasonable under the Fourth Amendment would only rarely create a substantive-due-process problem. Still, he believed the Court should reserve that question until it arose in a case where the issue had been squarely presented and fully argued by adversaries with an interest in preserving that alternative theory.