The Supreme Court has ruled in favor of an elderly California woman who was involved in an aggressive police traffic stop in 2019, giving new life to a lawsuit that accuses the officers of excessive force.
The high court sided with Elise Brown in a case that challenged the controversial legal doctrine known as qualified immunity, which largely shields officers from civil liability claims in misconduct cases.
Brown, who is 83 years old and frail, was pulled over in a blue Oldsmobile mistakenly reported stolen. Officers then surrounded the car with weapons drawn, manhandled Brown out of the driver’s seat and forced her on her knees, where she was eventually handcuffed.
Chino Police Department officers contested Brown’s lawsuit, claiming they followed official protocols during the “high-risk” arrest, leading a lower court to dismiss Brown’s excessive force claim, which was brought in 2020.
Earlier this year, however, a federal appeals court reinstated Brown’s lawsuit, ruling that it was constitutional for the plaintiff to sue the police for excessive force, while Monday’s Supreme Court ruling reaffirmed the appeals court decision and breathed new life into Brown’s case.
“Ms. Brown was terrified, humiliated, and emotionally traumatized,” Brown’s lawyer argued before the nine justices. “That conduct was not reasonable; it was extraordinarily dangerous and flatly inconsistent with the Fourth Amendment’s prohibition on excessive force.”
The ruling marked a notable shift for the Supreme Court in its handling of recent cases that deal with qualified immunity as fatal police confrontations appear more frequent in communities across the nation, highlighted by the ubiquitous presence of camera phones that popularize the violent encounters on social media.
Until now, the conservative-majority court had rejected several other lawsuits challenging the legal protection granted to police officers as law enforcement advocates continue to argue that deputies in the field require immunity, especially in situations where they need to defend themselves with lethal force.
The officers claimed they only required Brown to kneel for less than 20 seconds and kept her in handcuffs for about three minutes.
They also “deployed firearms in states of readiness consistent with their responsibilities on the scene of a high-risk stop,” the police said in a filing to the Supreme Court, also claiming that Brown appeared three decades younger than her actual age at the time of the arrest, and “appeared not to need any accommodation due to health or frailty.”
Qualified immunity came into existence after a ruling by the Supreme Court in 1967 that extended personal liability protections to public officials like police officers in misconduct cases unless the official is found to have clearly violated an individual’s constitutional rights.
In practice, most police officers are indemnified from personal liability for legal claims brought against them for conduct in the line of duty, meaning they are not held personally responsible for damages, costs that are instead passed on to the department, the municipality, or state through taxpayer funds.
