Edwards v. OliverEdwards v. Oliver
Jordan Edwards, a fifteen-year-old boy, was shot and killed while leaving a house party by then-Officer Roy Oliver, who had responded to a 911 call about possible underage drinking. Edwards‘s family and friends sued
I. BACKGROUND
On April 29, 2017, fifteen-year-old Jordan Edwards attended a party at a house in Balch Springs, Texas (east of Dallas) with his two brothers and two friends. The house is situated on the south side of Baron Drive, a residential road that runs east-west and originates on the east end in a “T” intersection with Shepherd Lane.
At around 11 p.m., Balch Springs Police Department officers Roy Oliver and Tyler Gross arrived at the house in response to a 911 call about possible underage drinking. The partygoers dispersed, and the boys returned to their car parked on Baron Drive near the “T” intersection with Shepherd Lane. Jordan Edwards‘s brother, Vidal Allen, got in the driver‘s seat, and Jordan got in the front passenger seat, with the three other boys in the back seat.
While the officers were in the house talking with the party host, gunfire erupted from a parking lot on the east side of Shepherd Lane. Officer Gross exited the house and immediately walked east. Officer Oliver also exited the house but walked to his squad car to retrieve his semi-automatic rifle before beginning to walk east.
While Vidal drove his car slowly, in reverse, on Baron Drive toward Shepherd Lane, Officer Gross, approaching on foot, yelled at the car to stop. Officer Oliver continued to walk east along Baron Drive from his squad car,
Once Vidal got into the intersection, he put the car in drive and proceeded southbound on Shepherd Lane. It is at this critical point—when Vidal started driving forward on Shepherd Lane rather than in reverse—where the parties dispute what happened.1 Officer Oliver argues that Vidal accelerated toward Officer Gross, whereas the plaintiffs-appellees claim that the vehicle was not close to Officer Gross when it proceeded forward and that Officer Gross was never in the path of the vehicle.
When Officer Oliver arrived at the intersection, the car was accelerating past Officer Gross,2 and Oliver fired five shots at the car‘s passenger side as it headed southbound on Shepherd Lane, away from the officers in the “T” intersection.
One bullet struck Jordan in the head, killing him. Three days after the incident, on May 2, 2017, the Balch Springs Police Department terminated Oliver‘s employment. Then, on May 5, 2017, Jordan‘s father, Odell Edwards, and his two (now adult) brothers, Vidal Allen and Kevon Edwards, filed complaints against the City of Balch Springs and Oliver, alleging, among other things, a violation of
Then, in September 2020, Oliver moved for summary judgment in the civil suit on the basis of qualified immunity. The magistrate judge denied the summary judgment motion, concluding that “a reasonable jury could conclude the car full of teenagers presented no immediate threat to the officers’ safety, making Oliver‘s use of deadly force unreasonable.” The district court issued an order accepting the magistrate judge‘s findings, conclusions, and recommendation and denying Oliver‘s motion for summary judgment.. Oliver appeals this decision.
II. STANDARD OF REVIEW
“District court orders denying summary judgment on the basis of qualified immunity are . . . reviewed de novo.” Kokesh v. Curlee, 14 F.4th 382, 390 (5th Cir. 2021). Cases like this one “involve[] multiple legal standards, corresponding to qualified immunity, summary judgment, . . . and the Fourth Amendment.” Joseph v. Bartlett, 981 F.3d 319, 328 (5th Cir. 2020). And the “intersection of these standards gets tricky,” especially how “[q]ualified immunity changes the nature of the summary-judgment burden, how and
Complicating our task further, “[w]hen a defendant invokes qualified immunity,” and the district court denies the defendant‘s motion for summary judgment, “it affects our jurisdiction in two ways—‘we review earlier than we otherwise would, and we review less than we otherwise would.‘” Kokesh, 14 F.4th at 391 (quoting Joseph, 981 F.3d at 330). First, we allow an interlocutory appeal “even though denials of summary judgment are not generally final, appealable orders under
Accordingly, to avoid an improper review of the genuineness of this case‘s facts, we consider only whether the district court correctly assessed the legal significance—that is, the materiality—of the disputed facts in plaintiffs-appellees’ Fourth Amendment excessive force claim.
III. MATERIAL FACT DISPUTE
“To determine whether a denial of summary judgment based on qualified immunity is immediately appealable, this Court looks at the legal argument advanced.” Reyes v. City of Richmond, 287 F.3d 346, 350 (5th Cir. 2002). “An officer challenges materiality when he contends that ‘taking all the plaintiff‘s factual allegations as true no violation of a clearly established right was shown.‘” Id. at 351 (quoting Cantu v. Rocha, 77 F.3d 795, 803 (5th Cir. 1996)).
On appeal Oliver argues that the facts at the moment of the threat are undisputed and urges this court to exercise jurisdiction over the case on the issue of materiality. “[D]espite giving lip service to the correct legal standard, [Oliver‘s] argument does not take the facts in a light most favorable to the [p]laintiffs. In fact, significant portions of his argument assume facts different from those assumed by the [m]agistrate [judge].” Id.
For example, Oliver invites us to consider the fact that Oliver “heard the window shatter right next to Gross,” which may have “sounded like a gunshot,” making it “reasonable to think it was a gunshot.” Although the magistrate judge acknowledges the fact that the officers heard gunfire while they were in the house, nowhere in the magistrate judge‘s findings,
Furthermore, the extent of the car‘s threat to Officer Gross is the factual question at the heart of this case, and despite Oliver‘s argument to the contrary, it is a genuinely disputed question. Oliver describes that the car accelerated “towards/near/by” Officer Gross, whereas plaintiffs assert that Officer Gross was never in the path of the vehicle. The magistrate judge identified this as the crux of the factual dispute warranting denial of summary judgment: “[T]he body-camera footage sufficiently raises a fact question. . . [about the car‘s] threat of harm to [Officer] Gross because it was moving away” from him.
Oliver points to a recent unpublished case from our court, Irwin v. Santiago, No. 21-10020, 2021 WL 4932988, at *3 (5th Cir. Oct. 21, 2021), for the proposition that an officer‘s position “standing ‘toward the front’ ” of a moving car precludes Lytle‘s applicability for purposes of the “clearly established” prong. But to reach that conclusion, we would have to resolve the factual dispute as to whether Officer Gross was standing toward the front of, toward the back of, or behind the car at the time that Oliver fired his shots. Unlike in Irwin, viewing the facts at issue here in the plaintiffs’ favor, the district court stated Officer Gross was toward the back of the car, or behind the car, as it accelerated down Shephard Lane and before Oliver fired his shots. In fact, the parties dispute how close Officer Gross was to the car such that he could hit the back window with his gun before Oliver fired.
The dissenting opinion asserts that the “central question in this case is whether” the videos in Irwin “are meaningfully distinguishable” from the videos at issue here. See post, at 1. Although it is tempting to engage in such a factual comparison, to do so would be inappropriate because, unlike the Irwin
Our dissenting colleague encourages us to conduct a direct comparison of the two cases’ videos6 and conclude that the threat posed to Officer Gross was akin to the threat posed to Officer Santiago, who—according to the Irwin panel conducting a de novo review of a final judgment granting qualified immunity—“was standing ‘toward the front‘” of the moving vehicle when the officers began shooting. 2021 WL 4932988, at *3. Conducting a comparison of the two videos would not only run counter to our court‘s binding precedent regarding the scope of our role in interlocutory appeals in qualified immunity cases, but the conclusion our dissenting colleague would have us draw from that comparison would also implicitly overturn the lower court‘s determination that a genuine factual dispute exists.
Because an analysis of the clearly established prong is fact-intensive, “courts must take care not to define a case‘s ‘context’ in a manner that imports genuinely disputed factual propositions.” Kokesh, 14 F.4th at 392 (quoting Tolan v. Cotton, 572 U.S. 650, 657 (2014)). As such, “[w]e find that if a jury accepts Plaintiffs’ version of the facts as true, particularly as to what occurred in the moments before [Oliver] shot [at the car], the jury could conclude that the officers violated [Plaintiffs‘] clearly established right to be free from excessive force.” Amador v. Vasquez, 961 F.3d 721, 730 (5th Cir. 2020), cert. denied, 141 S. Ct. 1513 (2021); see also Flores v. City of Palacios, 381 F.3d 391, 400 (5th Cir. 2004) (stating the resolution of whether shooting into tires in “circumstances such as these” depended on the dispute of material fact and affirming the denial of summary judgment); Joseph, 981 F.3d at 342 (denying qualified immunity at the summary judgment stage because there was a dispute of material fact). Moreover, to the extent that Oliver argues that the car‘s threat is immaterial to the excessive-force analysis, we disagree
IV. CONCLUSION
For the foregoing reasons, we DISMISS Oliver‘s interlocutory appeal. The case is REMANDED for further proceedings.
In my view, the central question in this case is whether the events depicted in the videos taken from the body cameras of Officers Roy Oliver and Tyler Gross, see ante, at 3 n.1, are meaningfully distinguishable from the bodycam video at issue in Irwin v. Santiago, 2021 WL 4932988, at *1 n.1 (5th Cir.).
If there is a meaningful distinction here, then we should explain what it is. But if there isn‘t one, then we should reach the same outcome as we did in Irwin—entry of summary judgment based on qualified immunity. Barring that, we should at least explain why we think our court‘s unanimous but unpublished, non-precedential decision in Irwin is incorrect.
For my part, I see no principled difference between the video evidence in Irwin and the videos in this case. In both cases, the driver of an automobile appears to be trying to escape a police officer by driving away from him—not by running him over. In both cases, the officer was nevertheless close enough to the anticipated path of the automobile that he theoretically could have been hit and badly injured as a result.
So a reasonable viewer of the videos may be troubled by the callous conduct of the officers in both cases—or unconcerned because of the hypothetical threat to officer safety in both cases. But the reaction should be the same.
And that should decide this case. Because in Irwin, our court concluded that the officers may well have violated the Fourth Amendment, due to the absence of immediate danger of harm—but that any such violation was not “clearly established,” so the officers were entitled to qualified immunity. Id. at *3. And Irwin was decided well after the events in this case. So if the law wasn‘t clearly established at the time of Irwin, then it wasn‘t clearly established here, either.
I.
The panel majority concludes that we need not—and indeed cannot—decide whether the videos in this case are comparable to the video in Irwin. According to the panel, that‘s a fact dispute for a jury to resolve, not a qualified immunity question for this court to decide. See ante, at 8-9.
But it‘s not clear to me why that is. We all agree that, on interlocutory appeal from the denial of qualified immunity, we do not address whether a fact dispute is genuine—but we do address whether a fact dispute is material. See, e.g., Lytle v. Bexar Cty., 560 F.3d 404, 408 (5th Cir. 2009) (“Where the district court has determined that genuine issues of material fact preclude a determination of qualified immunity, we have jurisdiction only to address the
And we all agree that any fact dispute, no matter how genuine, is immaterial “[i]f the defendant would still be entitled to qualified immunity under [the plaintiff‘s] view of the facts“—and that in such cases, “denial of summary judgment [is] improper, and we must reverse.” Id. at 409.
Finally, we all agree that Oliver properly presented a materiality argument on appeal. He argues that there‘s no clearly established violation in this case, citing Irwin. And he invites us to compare this case to the bodycam video in Irwin.
The panel majority acknowledges all of this. It agrees that we “lack jurisdiction to review the genuineness of a fact issue but have jurisdiction insofar as the interlocutory appeal challenges the materiality of the factual issues.” Ante, at 5-6 (quoting Melton v. Phillips, 875 F.3d 256, 261 (5th Cir. 2017) (en banc)) (cleaned up). And it agrees that a fact dispute is immaterial, and the defendant is entitled to qualified immunity, when, “‘taking all the plaintiff‘s factual allegations as true[,] no violation of a clearly established right was shown.‘” Ante, at 6 (quoting Reyes v. City of Richmond, 287 F.3d 346, 351 (5th Cir. 2002)).
So it‘s not clear to me why the panel responds by explaining why it is improper for us to review the genuineness of a fact dispute—a point that is both undisputed and irrelevant to this appeal.
In any event, my point is simply this: I see no principled reason why we should depart from what our colleagues did in Irwin. Both here and in Irwin, there was a genuine fact dispute—but an immaterial one for purposes of qualified immunity.
That‘s because, even accepting the plaintiff‘s view that “[n]either officer ‘was positioned directly in front of or in the pathway of [the] vehicle,‘” the facts as depicted in the bodycam video were “not sufficiently analogous to” prior authorities such that the officers “would have been ‘on notice’ that their conduct was unconstitutional.” Irwin, 2021 WL 4932988, at *1, *3.
So the fact dispute identified by the panel here is virtually identical to the dispute in Irwin: Oliver says the vehicle accelerated toward Gross, while Plaintiffs say Gross was never in the vehicle‘s path.
If that dispute was immaterial in Irwin, it‘s immaterial here as well.
II.
Plaintiffs’ efforts to distinguish the videos here and in Irwin are unconvincing. During oral argument, Plaintiffs’ counsel claimed that the officer was in greater danger in Irwin than here due to their relative proximity to the automobiles. But I see nothing in the videos to support such a claim. In both cases, an officer was plausibly, albeit not likely, within the anticipated path of the automobile.
In fact, if anything, the perceived risk might have been greater in this case: Here, the officers were responding to a series of gun shots, and ran to the scene on a dark street late at night with limited visibility—facts not present in Irwin, and undisputed here.
The panel majority responds that it must ignore these facts because they have nothing to do with how the officers perceived the very different
The panel majority also invokes the fact that, in Irwin, our court noted that “‘the projected path of Irwin‘s vehicle was in the officer‘s direction, at least generally.‘” Ante, at 10 (quoting Irwin, 2021 WL 4932988, at *3) (emphasis added). But the same thing is true in this case, as the videos here and in Irwin readily confirm.
Finally, the panel majority suggests a potential distinction based on the timing of the shots fired in this case and in Irwin. See ante, at 10. But to be clear, we‘re talking about less than a second here. To their credit, Plaintiffs’ counsel during oral argument disclaimed any meaningful reliance on the timing of the shots fired here as compared to Irwin.
And even putting all of this aside, one central problem remains: To overcome qualified immunity, Plaintiffs (and the panel majority) must demonstrate that the constitutional violation here was clearly established. So what authority clearly establishes the constitutional violation in this case? There is none. And that‘s the whole point of Irwin—that there is no such authority, at least none before Irwin itself.
* * *
If Irwin is wrong, we should say so. It‘s unpublished. So we‘re not bound by it. We‘re subject only to persuasion by the respected members of that panel.
Our legal system is premised on the principle of treating like cases alike. See, e.g., H.L.A. Hart, The Concept of Law 163–64 (3d ed. 2012). We should follow that principle here. I respectfully dissent.