Case Information
*1 Before WILSON and JORDAN, Circuit Judges, and ROTHSTEIN, [*] District Judge.
JORDAN, Circuit Judge:
We have repeatedly ruled that a police officer violates the Fourth
Amendment, and is denied qualified immunity, if he or she uses gratuitous and
excessive force against a suspect who is under control, not resisting, and obeying
commands.
See, e.g.
,
Priester v. City of Riviera Beach, Florida
,
I
Proceeding pro se , Mr. Saunders filed a complaint under 42 U.S.C. § 1983 against FDLE Agent George Duke and MBI Agents Thomas Matthews and Conrad Kilian. As amended, the operative complaint alleged the following facts.
On January 24, 2008, Mr. Saunders met with a couple of individuals at a gas station in Orlando, Florida, to sell them oxycodone pills. Those individuals, however, turned out to be an undercover officer and a confidential informant. Mr. Saunders entered the front passenger seat of the undercover agent’s car and conducted the narcotics transaction. After the sale was completed, Agents Duke, Matthews, and Kilian surrounded the vehicle with their weapons drawn. Agent Matthews ordered Mr. Saunders to place his hands on the car’s windshield and not move. Mr. Saunders immediately complied with the command without resisting or attempting to flee. Agent Kilian then jerked Mr. Saunders out of the vehicle and pushed him down on the hot pavement in order to handcuff him.
After he was handcuffed, Mr. Saunders was held down against the hot pavement on his stomach for a “long period of time,” though he was “not resisting, posing [a] threat, or attempting to flee.” He told the agents that he was “getting burnt.” During this time Mr. Saunders “was holding his face up off the hot pavement to keep from being burn[ed].” Though he was not resisting or attempting to flee, one of the agents “slammed” Mr. Saunders’ face onto the pavement “with extreme force.” Mr. Saunders did not see which one of the agents struck him, but all three agents were present at the time. When Mr. Saunders was brought to his feet, “blood was pouring out of his mouth [and] face from the impact against the pavement.” Mr. Saunders suffered lacerations, injuries to his teeth and jaw, damage to his left eardrum, and emotional distress due to his head striking the pavement.
II
The district court’s dismissal of Mr. Saunders’ Fourth Amendment claim is
subject to plenary review. We accept the factual allegations in the complaint as
true and view them in the light most favorable to Mr. Saunders.
See Butler v.
Sheriff of Palm Beach Cnty.
, 685 F.3d 1261, 1265 (11th Cir. 2012). We also
construe the complaint liberally because it was filed
pro se
.
See Boxer X v. Harris
,
“Factual allegations must be enough to raise a right to relief above the
speculative level.”
Bell Atlantic Corp. v. Twombly
, 550 U.S. 544, 555 (2007).
After
Ashcroft v. Iqbal
, 556 U.S. 662, 678-69, 685-86 (2009), which applied the
Twombly
pleading standard in a civil rights/qualified immunity context, there is no
longer a “heightened pleading” standard in “cases governed by Rule 8(a)(2),
including civil rights [cases]” under § 1983.
Randall v. Scott
,
III
With respect to the Fourth Amendment claim arising out of the alleged slamming of Mr. Saunders’ head to the pavement, the district court ruled that Agents Duke, Matthews, and Kilian were entitled to qualified immunity. The district court acknowledged the existence of cases like Hadley v. Gutierrez , 526 F.3d 1324, 1330, 1332 (11th Cir. 2008) (holding that a police officer who struck a handcuffed, non-resisting suspect in the stomach violated the Fourth Amendment and was not entitled to qualified immunity), but explained that the “use of force during an arrest is not clearly unlawful if an arresting officer is faced with an uncooperative suspect or if an officer perceives resistance in a volatile situation.” It then reasoned that, because Mr. Saunders had lifted his head off the pavement, “a reasonable officer in [the defendants’] position could have believed that the use of force to return [Mr. Saunders’] head to the pavement was lawful on the bases that [Mr. Saunders] was refusing to cooperate and/or resisting arrest when he lifted his head from the pavement.” In so ruling, the district court erred.
A
“Qualified immunity ‘gives government officials breathing room to make
reasonable but mistaken judgments about open legal questions.’”
Lane v. Franks
,
In determining whether a right was clearly established, we look to the
decisions of the United States Supreme Court, the Eleventh Circuit, and the Florida
Supreme Court.
See Barnes v. Zaccari
,
B
The Fourth Amendment’s guarantee against unreasonable searches and
seizures includes the right to be free from the use of excessive force in the course
of an arrest.
See id.
at 1197. In order to determine whether the amount of force
used was proper, a court must ask “whether the officer’s conduct is objectively
reasonable in light of the facts confronting the officer.”
Vinyard v. Wilson
, 311
F.3d 1340, 1347 (11th Cir. 2002). In this respect, “[t]he ‘reasonableness’ of a
particular use of force must be judged from the perspective of a reasonable officer
on the scene, rather than with the 20/20 vision of hindsight.”
Graham v. Connor
,
“Determining whether the force used to effect a particular seizure is
‘reasonable’ under the Fourth Amendment requires a careful balancing of the
nature and quality of the intrusion on the individual’s Fourth Amendment interests
against the countervailing governmental interests at stake.”
Id.
(citations and
internal quotation marks omitted). This objective analysis “requires careful
attention to the facts and circumstances of each particular case, including the
severity of the crime at issue, whether the suspect poses an immediate threat to the
safety of the officers or others, and whether he is actively resisting arrest or
attempting to evade arrest by flight.”
Id.
Other considerations are “the need for
the application of force, the relationship between the need and the amount of force
used, [and] the extent of the injury inflicted.”
Hadley
,
Mr. Saunders alleged that, while he was left on the hot pavement for a long period of time, he kept his head raised to avoid being burned. At the time he did this, he was handcuffed and on his stomach, and he was not resisting or attempting to flee. Nevertheless, one of the agents “slammed” his head against the pavement with “extreme force,” resulting in a number of significant injuries. As we explain, Mr. Saunders’ complaint sufficiently alleged a gratuitous use of force. Because “[o]ur cases hold that gratuitous use of force when a criminal suspect is not resisting arrest constitutes excessive force,” id. at 1330, the district court should not have dismissed the Fourth Amendment claim.
We begin our discussion of Eleventh Circuit precedent with our 2000
decision in
Priester
. In that case, a police officer with a canine found a suspect
who had been hiding and ordered him to lie down on the ground. Under the
version of facts found by the jury, the officer released his dog to attack the suspect
after he had complied with the command to lie down. We held that the officer
violated the Fourth Amendment because the force used was “objectively
unreasonable.”
Slicker
, decided the same year as
Priester
, presented facts remarkably
similar to the allegations made by Mr. Saunders. There some police officers, after
arresting the plaintiff for disorderly conduct and handcuffing him, slammed his
head against the pavement, knocking him unconscious. Then, after the plaintiff
came to, and while he was still handcuffed, the officers kicked him in the leg, back,
and head.
In
Lee
, decided in 2002, a police officer arrested a driver for improperly
honking her horn. After he had handcuffed the driver, the officer slammed her
head against the trunk of her car. That use of force, we ruled, violated the Fourth
Amendment because it was “plainly excessive, wholly unnecessary, and indeed,
grossly disproportionate[,]” as there was no evidence that the driver posed any
threat to the officer or to anyone else.
Based on these cases, Mr. Saunders’ allegations are more than sufficient to
state a Fourth Amendment claim. While he was on the ground and handcuffed,
Mr. Saunders held his head up in order to avoid having his face burned by the hot
pavement. Though he was not resisting or posing a threat to anyone, one of the
agents allegedly “slammed” his head into the pavement with “extreme force.” If
these allegations are true, and we must assume that they are at this stage of the
case, that force was unnecessary, disproportionate, and constitutionally excessive.
See, e.g.
,
Slicker
,
C
The allegations also make clear that the agents are not entitled to qualified
immunity. “[A] handcuffed, non-resisting [suspect’s] right to be free from
excessive force was clearly established [by] February 2002,”
Hadley
, 526 F.3d at
1333, or about six years before the alleged incident in this case occurred. Given
Mr. Saunders’ lack of resistance or threat, and the severity of the force used, no
reasonable officer could have believed that such conduct was permissible.
See,
e.g.
,
Slicker
,
The district court’s grant of qualified immunity was based on the assumption
that, by lifting his head, Mr. Saunders was being uncooperative or was resisting.
That assumption, however, does not read the allegations of the complaint in the
light most favorable to Mr. Saunders. First, the complaint can fairly be read to
allege that Mr. Saunders kept his face off the pavement the whole time he was on
the ground (which was for a “long period”), and did not just lift it up all of a
identify that defendant).
See also Block Indus. v. DHJ Indus., Inc.
,
sudden in defiance of contrary commands. Second, Mr. Saunders specifically alleged that, once he was handcuffed and on the ground, he did not resist and did not do anything to threaten the agents or anyone else.
But even if the complaint could be read to allege that Mr. Saunders
disobeyed an order by lifting his head off the hot pavement, that minor
transgression does not mean that the force allegedly used was a constitutionally
permissible response, or that the agents are entitled to qualified immunity.
See Lee
,
D
Agents Duke and Kilian (Agent Matthews did not file a brief) nevertheless argue that they are entitled to qualified immunity because they only used de minimis force and because Mr. Saunders did not suffer a constitutionally cognizable injury. Both arguments, in our view, are significantly flawed.
“[T]he right to make an arrest or investigatory stop necessarily carries with it
the right to use some degree of physical coercion or threat thereof to effect it.”
Graham
, 490 U.S. at 396. As a result, “the application of
de minimis
force,
without more, will not support a claim for excessive force in violation of the
Fourth Amendment.”
Myers v. Bowman
, 713 F.3d 1319, 1327 (11th Cir. 2013)
(citation and internal quotation marks omitted).
See, e.g.
,
Rodriguez v. Farrell
,
But this principle has never been used to immunize officers who use excessive and gratuitous force after a suspect has been subdued, is not resisting, and poses no threat. Indeed, we recognized the principle in Slicker , 215 F.3d at 1233, and Lee , 284 F.3d at 1197, and yet in both cases we held that there was a Fourth Amendment violation based on the use of gratuitous force on a handcuffed and compliant suspect, and that the officers in question were not entitled to qualified immunity. Here the force allegedly used against Mr. Saunders was gratuitous and constitutionally excessive, so that qualified immunity is not appropriate.
The argument that Mr. Saunders did not suffer a constitutionally cognizable
injury fares no better. First, Mr. Saunders alleged significant injuries resulting
from having his head slammed against the pavement: lacerations, injuries to his
teeth and jaw, damage to his left eardrum, and emotional distress. Such injuries
are not
de minimis
. Second, in the context of an Eighth Amendment excessive
force claim, the Supreme Court has recognized that “[a] [defendant] who is
gratuitously beaten by guards does not lose his ability to pursue an excessive force
claim merely because he has the good fortune to escape without serious injury.”
Wilkins v. Gaddy
, 559 U.S. 34, 38-39 (2010) (explaining that the “core judicial
inquiry” for an excessive force claim under the Eighth Amendment is not based on
the extent of the plaintiff’s injury, but rather on “the nature of the force” used, i.e.,
“whether [the force] was nontrivial and ‘was applied maliciously and sadistically
to cause harm’”). “To conclude . . . that the absence of ‘some arbitrary quantity of
injury’ requires automatic dismissal of an excessive force claim improperly
bypasses [the] core [judicial] inquiry,” which is the nature of the force.
Id.
at 39.
We see no reason why the same rationale should not apply in a Fourth Amendment
excessive force case.
See Hadley
,
E
Agent Duke argues that no valid Fourth Amendment claim was stated against him because police reports attached to Mr. Saunders’ complaint (in support of a now-dismissed conspiracy claim) show that he merely “applied shield coverage to the right from [the] passenger window where the drug transaction occurred.” Brief for Agent Duke at 21. We are not persuaded.
It is true that documents attached to a complaint or incorporated in the
complaint by reference can generally be considered by a federal court in ruling on
a motion to dismiss under Rule 12(b)(6).
See Tellabs, Inc. v. Makor Issues &
Rights, Ltd.
, 551 U.S. 308, 322 (2007). Here, however, Mr. Saunders expressly
alleged in his complaint that the police reports that were submitted failed to
properly and correctly document the excessive force inflicted on him and the
injuries he suffered. Where a civil rights plaintiff attaches a police report to his
complaint and alleges that it is false, as Mr. Saunders did, the contents of the report
cannot be considered as true for purposes of ruling on a motion to dismiss.
Otherwise, officers sued under § 1983 could just attach police reports referenced in
a civil rights complaint to their motions to dismiss and ask courts to consider the
contents of those reports even if they contradicted the allegations of the complaint.
And that, as we have said, would be improper.
See Fuller v. SunTrust Banks, Inc.
,
IV
Accepting the allegations in the complaint as true, as we must at the motion to dismiss stage, we conclude that the district court erred in dismissing Mr. Saunders’ Fourth Amendment excessive force claim on qualified immunity grounds, and remand for further proceedings. [4]
R EVERSED AND R EMANDED .
Notes
[*] Honorable Barbara J. Rothstein, United States District Judge for the Western District of Washington, sitting by designation.
[1] Mr. Saunders does not challenge the dismissal of his other claims, and we therefore do not address them.
[2] Agent Duke argues that he is entitled to dismissal because the complaint does not name
him as the one who committed the Fourth Amendment violation. Mr. Saunders responds that
that under Rule 20 of the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure he is permitted to plead in the
alternative with respect to the identity of the agent who slammed his head against the pavement.
We agree with Mr. Saunders.
Rule 20(a)(2)(A) states that “persons . . . may be joined in one action as defendants if any
right to relief is asserted against them . . . in the alternative with respect to or arising out of the
same . . . occurrence.” Because we conclude that Mr. Saunders sufficiently alleged that one of
the three agents struck him in violation of his Fourth Amendment rights, and that all three agents
were present at the time, Mr. Saunders can plead in the alternative and pursue discovery to
uncover the identity of the agent who allegedly struck him.
See Dean v. Barber
,
[3] The alleged collision between Mr. Saunders’ head and the pavement brings to mind one of Sancho Panza’s many proverbs: “Whether the pitcher hits the stone, or the stone hits the pitcher, it is bad for the pitcher[.]” M IGUEL DE C ERVANTES S AAVEDRA , T HE L IFE AND E XPLOITS OF THE I NGENIOUS G ENTLEMAN D ON Q UIXOTE OF L A M ANCHA , Vol. II, Chapter XLIII, at 356 (Charles Jarvis trans., W. Lewis for S. A. and H. Oddy, Oxford 1809) [1615].
[4] Because we conclude that Mr. Saunders has sufficiently alleged a Fourth Amendment excessive force claim and are remanding for further proceedings, we need not address whether the district court abused its discretion in denying Mr. Saunders’ request for appointment of counsel pursuant to 28 U.S.C. § 1915(e)(1). On remand, we encourage the district court to reconsider whether it would be appropriate to appoint counsel for Mr. Saunders.