A federal appeals court dismissed a civil-rights lawsuit filed against a Georgia deputy who tried to shoot a family’s dog, but instead hit a 10-year-old boy lying down on the ground. Instead of having to face a $2 million lawsuit for excessive force, Coffee County Deputy Sheriff Michael Vickers was entitled to “qualified immunity” for his actions and cannot be sued in federal court, the Eleventh U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ruled last week.
Starting in the 1980s, the U.S. Supreme Court began to radically re-shape its doctrine of qualified immunity, creating an escape hatch that lets government officials dodge federal civil-rights lawsuits. As the Supreme Court once put it, qualified immunity “provides ample protection to all but the plainly incompetent or those who knowingly violate the law.”
Today, government officials can only be held accountable in court if plaintiffs show that their constitutional rights were violated and that those rights were “clearly established.” And according to the Supreme Court, “the clearly established law must be ‘particularized’ to the facts of the case.”
Since the Eleventh Circuit couldn’t find “a materially similar case,” the court ruled that Vickers “intentionally firing at the dog and unintentionally shooting [the 10-year-old] did not violate any clearly established Fourth Amendment rights.”
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The case began on July 10, 2014, when Georgia law enforcement were searching for Christopher Barnett, a Florida man suspected of robbing a convenience store and shooting a police officer earlier that day. Their investigation tracked Barnett to Amy Corbitt’s mobile home in Douglas, Georgia. Outside, Corbitt’s 10-year-old son was with five other kids, two of whom were under the age of 3. None of them had ever met Barnett before.
Suddenly, officers swarmed the scene and ordered everyone down on the ground. That included Barnett and all six children, as well as Damion Stewart, who was “brutally handcuffed” in front of his own kids. According to a complaint Corbitt filed, the children “were held at gun point, each having an officer forcefully shove the barrel of a loaded gun into their backs.”
Now detained, Barnett was “visibly unarmed and readily compliant” with the officers. While Barnett was subdued, Coffee County Deputy Sheriff Michael Vickers saw the Corbitt’s dog, a pit bull named Bruce, approach.
No one “appeared to be threatened by [Bruce’s] presence,” the complaint alleged. Yet in roughly 10 seconds, Vickers fired at the dog—twice. Both shots missed Bruce. But his second shot struck Corbitt’s son, piercing the back of his right knee.
When Vickers fired, the boy was lying, face down on the ground, reportedly just 18 inches away from the deputy. And the other children were also very close by, only a few feet removed from Vickers. None of those kids presented “any threat or danger to provoke…Vickers to fire two shots,” as the complaint drily observed.
The boy suffered a serious gunshot wound, with bullet fragments remaining in the wound for an extended period. “I ran out the house with one of my kids and I just seen my little brother, on the porch, pouring blood,” his sister recounted to WALB. He “suffered severe pain and mental trauma” and even had to be taken out of public school following the shooting.
Outraged, Corbitt filed a civil-rights lawsuit against Vickers, seeking $2 million in damages to compensate for her son’s medical expenses. “Vickers wantonly, intentionally, knowingly, recklessly, and excessively used unnecessary force without any reasonable justification or probable cause,” Corbitt claimed, while the deputy’s conduct deprived her son of his right “to be free from excessive use of force as guaranteed by the law and the Constitution of the United States, via the Fourth and Fourteenth Amendments.”
In December 2017, a federal judge ruled that Corbitt’s lawsuit against Vickers over the accidental shooting could proceed, since “no allegations suggest that Vickers was unsafe in any way or that Bruce exhibited any signs of aggression.” (As for Barnett, he was ultimately convicted for armed robbery and aggravated assault on a police officer and is currently serving a 20-year prison sentence.)
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But on appeal, the Eleventh Circuit reversed that ruling. Writing for the majority in Corbitt v. Vickers, Judge R. Lanier Anderson III claimed that “this is not a case that so obviously violates the Fourth Amendment that prior case law is unnecessary to hold Vickers individually liable for his conduct.”
Incredibly, the fact that the boy was an “innocent bystander” when he was accidentally shot made the case “more difficult” for Anderson, since the kid wasn’t arrested, investigated, or intentionally targeted when he was shot in the knee.
Although the court did mildly admonish the deputy (“we do not doubt that Vickers could have acted more carefully; the firing of a deadly weapon at a dog located close enough to a prone child that the child is struck by a trained officer’s errant shot hardly qualifies as conduct we wish to see repeated”), it nevertheless could not “conclude that no reasonable officer would have fired his gun at the dog under the circumstances.”
Worse, having declared that Vickers was entitled to qualified immunity, Anderson wrote that “we need not reach the other qualified immunity question of whether a constitutional violation occurred in the first place. This opinion expressly takes no position as to that question.”
So even if there were a future case with an almost identical fact pattern, the court’s refusal means the right not to be accidentally shot by police still wouldn’t have been “clearly established” in the eyes of the Eleventh Circuit.
Attorneys for both Corbitt and Vickers declined to comment.
In a withering, six-page dissent, Judge Charles Wilson blasted the faulty logic in the majority opinion. The deputy’s actions were “plainly unreasonable,” Judge Wilson wrote: “Facing no apparent threat, Officer Vickers chose to fire his lethal weapon in the direction of these children. No reasonable officer would engage in such recklessness and no reasonable officer would think such recklessness was lawful.”
Wilson also criticized the majority for refusing “to accept Corbitt’s allegations that the dog was nonthreatening,” since “neither Officer Vickers nor the majority elaborates on the dog’s behavior or explains how its behavior was so outrageous as to warrant shooting into a group of children.”
Moreover, the judge noted that at the motion to dismiss stage in litigation, “we are required to accept Corbitt’s allegations as true. It is not for us to weigh the likelihood of either account. That is a job for the jury.”
“Because no competent officer would fire his weapon in the direction of a nonthreatening pet while that pet was surrounded by children,” Wilson wrote, “qualified immunity should not protect Officer Vickers.”
Hat tip to the Short Circuit newsletter from the Institute for Justice.
