Shooting at and hitting plaintiff with the intent to stop her flight is an attempted seizure under the Fourth Amendment. She made it 75 miles to a hospital, was airlifted back, and was arrested. (Qualified immunity is not decided here.) Torres v. Madrid, 2021 U.S. LEXIS 1611 (Mar. 25, 2021) (5-3):
Respondents Janice Madrid and Richard Williamson, officers with the New Mexico State Police, arrived at an Albuquerque apartment complex to execute an arrest warrant and approached petitioner Roxanne Torres, then standing near a Toyota FJ Cruiser. The officers attempted to speak with her as she got into the drivers seat. Believing the officers to be carjackers, Torres hit the gas to escape. The officers fired their service pistols 13 times to stop Torres, striking her twice. Torres managed to escape and drove to a hospital 75 miles away, only to be airlifted back to a hospital in Albuquerque, where the police arrested her the next day. Torres later sought damages from the officers under 42 U.S.C. 1983. She claimed that the officers used excessive force against her and that the shooting constituted an unreasonable seizure under the Fourth Amendment. Affirming the District Court’s grant of summary judgment to the officers, the Tenth Circuit held that a suspect’s continued flight after being shot by police negates a Fourth Amendment excessive-force claim. 769 Fed. Appx. 654, 657.
Held: The application of physical force to the body of a person with intent to restrain is a seizure even if the person does not submit and is not subdued. Pp. 3-18.
(a) The Fourth Amendment protects [t]he right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures. This Court’s precedents have interpreted the term seizure by consulting the common law of arrest, the quintessential seizure of the person. Payton v. New York, 445 U.S. 573, 585; California v. Hodari D., 499 U.S. 621, 624. In Hodari D., this Court explained that the common law considered the application of physical force to the body of a person with the intent to restrain to be an arrest–not an attempted arrest–even if the person does not yield. Id., at 624-625. A review of the pertinent English and American decisions confirms that the slightest touching was a constructive detention that would complete the arrest. See, e.g., Genner v. Sparks, 6 Mod. 173, 87 Eng. Rep. 928.
The analysis does not change because the officers used force from a distance to restrain Torres. The required corporal seizing or touching the defendant’s body, 3 W. Blackstone, Commentaries on the Laws of England 288 (1768), can be as readily accomplished by a bullet as by the end of a finger. The focus of the Fourth Amendment is the privacy and security of individuals, not the particular form of governmental intrusion. Camara v. Municipal Court of City and County of San Francisco, 387 U.S. 523, 528.
The application of force, standing alone, does not satisfy the rule recognized in this decision. A seizure requires the use of force with intent to restrain, as opposed to force applied by accident or for some other purpose. County of Sacramento v. Lewis, 523 U.S. 833, 844. The appropriate inquiry is whether the challenged conduct objectively manifests an intent to restrain. Michigan v. Chesternut, 486 U.S. 567, 574. This test does not depend on either the subjective motivation of the officer or the subjective perception of the suspect. Finally, a seizure by force lasts only as long as the application of force unless the suspect submits. Hodari D., 499 U.S., at 625. Pp. 3-11.
(b) In place of the rule that the application of force completes an arrest, the officers would assess all seizures under one test: intentional acquisition of control. This alternative approach finds support in neither the history of the Fourth Amendment nor this Court’s precedents. Pp. 11-16.
(1) The officers attempt to recast the common law doctrine recognized in Hodari D. as a rule applicable only to civil arrests. But the common law did not define the arrest of a debtor any differently from the arrest of a felon. Treatises and courts discussing criminal arrests articulated a rule indistinguishable from the one applied to civil arrests at common law. Pp. 11-14.
(2) The officers’ contrary test would limit seizures of a person to an intentional acquisition of physical control. Brower v. County of Inyo, 489 U.S. 593, 596. While that test properly describes seizures by control, seizures by force enjoy a separate common law pedigree that gives rise to a separate rule. A seizure by acquisition of control involves either voluntary submission to a show of authority or the termination of freedom of movement. But as common law courts recognized, any such requirement of control would be difficult to apply to seizures by force. The officers’ test will often yield uncertainty about whether an officer succeeded in gaining control over a suspect. For centuries, the rule recognized in this opinion has avoided such line-drawing problems. Pp. 14-16.
(c) The officers seized Torres by shooting her with the intent to restrain her movement. This Court does not address the reasonableness of the seizure, the damages caused by the seizure, or the officers’ entitlement to qualified immunity. Pp. 17-18.
769 Fed. Appx. 654, vacated and remanded.
Roberts, C. J., delivered the opinion of the Court, in which Breyer, Sotomayor, Kagan, and Kavanaugh, JJ., joined. Gorsuch, J., filed a dissenting opinion, in which Thomas and Alito, JJ., joined. Barrett, J., took no part in the consideration or decision of the case.
