Facts
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On January 17, 2023, R.C. was at a school classmate’s home in Covington, Louisiana. While R.C. was there, three officers from the St. Tammany Parish Sheriff’s department arrived—Lieutenant Bill Johnson, Deputy Joel Bratton, and Deputy Christopher Vado—searching for a person of interest in a recent burglary. The officers approached the house, and while standing on the porch, smelled marijuana. They also saw what appeared to be a burnt marijuana cigarette on the outside table. And when Andree Prados, the classmate’s mother and the homeowner, opened the door, the officers faced a strong marijuana odor from inside. So, the officers entered the house to investigate.
The scene quickly turned chaotic. A male minor ran out of the house. Catching him in the backyard, Lieutenant Johnson found him carrying a knife. When another male minor fought the officers while being patted down, they brought him to the ground, handcuffed him, and escorted him out of the house. Then, Lieutenant Johnson found the person of interest hiding in a closet.
The officers began bringing everyone to the living room, and as Lieutenant Johnson escorted Prados there, R.C. tried to stop him. Video from a security camera memorializes part of the fray, showing R.C. fighting Lieutenant Johnson and Deputy Vado: lunging at them, swinging at their heads, and screaming in their faces as they try to get control of her. The two officers finally wrestled R.C. to the floor and handcuffed her as she continued to struggle. She then sat against the back of a couch.
Deputy John Connolly arrived right afterward. Two more video files document what happened next. One video file is from Deputy Connolly’s body camera, and the other comes from someone’s cell phone camera in the living room. In the body camera footage, just after Connolly comes into the living room, R.C. is visible sitting on the floor against the couch. Deputy Vado is next to her; Connolly goes to the other side of the room to check for weapons.
Suddenly, unannounced, R.C. starts to get up. Deputy Vado shouts “Stay on the ground!” The cell phone video shows Deputy Vado grab R.C. by the arm and bring her back to the floor as R.C. screams back “Move [inaudible]! No! No!” Deputy Connolly starts walking back over to assist, and R.C. continues screaming at Deputy Vado. As Connolly rounds the corner of the couch, his body camera records R.C. lying on her side, visibly struggling as Deputy Vado continues to hold her down by the arm. R.C. starts to kick at the officers and shouts “Get off of me!” Connolly yells “Calm down!” and puts his hand on R.C.’s leg; she screams back and continues to kick and struggle. One of the officers says “Stop!” Connolly bends down and tries to restrain R.C.’s leg using his knee and shin. She jerks her leg away, screaming “Get the f— off of me, bro!” Although Deputy Vado is holding her by the arm, R.C. flips from her side onto her stomach and keeps kicking. Then, Deputy Connolly kneels against R.C.’s left buttocks and lower left back. The body camera pans up, showing both officers’ arms as they pull R.C. off her stomach and try to keep her on her side. R.C. keeps screaming as Connolly continues to kneel. A male voice off camera says “Watch her face, she can’t breathe.” One of the officers responds, “If she can’t breathe, she needs to chill out.” After ten seconds, just as R.C. stops physically resisting, Connolly lifts his knee. The officers stand up R.C. and take her to the sheriff’s department building in Covington.
R.C. later pled no contest to two counts of battery of a police officer and one count of resisting an officer. A year later, on January 17, 2024, Jamie Johnson (R.C.’s mother) sued Deputy Connolly and Deputy Vado for excessive force.
Johnson alleges that Vado and Connolly’s actions fractured R.C.’s T11 vertebra, causing R.C. intense pain and restricting her ability to walk, move, sit, and stand; that R.C. was hospitalized with the fractured vertebra; that doctors prescribed her Norco to address the pain and placed her in a back brace that she had to wear at all times for at least five weeks; and that R.C. continued to have movement limitations for the next year, causing her falls and further injuries.
The district court granted summary judgment for the officers. As to Connolly and Vado, the court found that Johnson did not show clearly established law prohibited the officers’ conduct, and dismissed the § 1983 claims on qualified immunity grounds. The 5th affirmed.
Analysis
As did the district court, for each officer, we start and end with the “clearly established law” prong of the qualified immunity analysis. We do so because Johnson offers no clearly established law applicable to either officer’s conduct, and that is fatal to her arguments for both Connolly and Vado. It is Johnson’s burden under the qualified immunity framework to identify a case in which an officer acting under similar circumstances was held to have violated the Fourth Amendment.
A. Deputy Christopher Vado
We address the excessive force claim against Deputy Vado first. Johnson has offered no case demonstrating Vado’s conduct was unlawful. Johnson argues that even if R.C. was fighting Vado before, R.C. was no longer resisting by the time she stood up, making Vado’s next use of force excessive because the threat had dissipated. As the Supreme Court recently reiterated in Barnes v. Felix, we must look too, in this and all excessive-force cases, at any relevant events coming before the use of force in question. See Barnes, 605 U.S. at 83. Context is critical. And moments before the force in dispute, the living room security camera recorded R.C. aggressively confronting Deputy Vado and Lieutenant Johnson. She lunged and swung at the officers, shouted in their faces, resisted their movements, and struck Lieutenant Johnson in the head. The footage proves R.C. is tall and strong enough to put up real resistance, showing that two officers struggled to subdue her. Officers finally got R.C. handcuffed, but even then, the body camera footage shows her continuing to resist and shout.
The force in dispute took place only “about a minute” after R.C.’s first outburst of violence against the officers. R.C. was not resisting across different “conceptually distinct” incidents; she was resisting over the course of one ongoing encounter with the officers. It is true that in the seconds before she stood up, R.C. wasn’t actively fighting back. But R.C.’s previous resistance reasonably influenced Vado’s reaction after she suddenly stood up—not to mention that, as the district court assumed, an arrestee standing up unannounced and screaming at officers is resistance all on its own.
Prior events may show why a reasonable officer would perceive otherwise ambiguous conduct as threatening. The right question, then, is whether clearly established law barred Deputy Vado from using force with measured and ascending actions that corresponded to the suspect’s escalating verbal and physical resistance in the overall context of the encounter.
Johnson offers no on-point cases to support that Vado mishandled R.C., likely because Vado’s response was not objectively unreasonable. Up until the disputed use of force, Deputy Vado had watched R.C. continuously escalate the scene. She impeded officers from searching the house to secure their own safety, she hit and tried to tackle the officers, and she screamed and distracted them as they tried to get information. Given her hostile behavior only “about a minute” before, it was reasonable for Deputy Vado to expect that R.C., standing up unannounced, planned to escalate things again. And the video confirms she did just that. Deputy Vado ordered R.C. to “stay on the ground,” grabbing her to stop her from standing up, but R.C. screamed “No! No!” and resisted again.
Because Johnson does not show clearly established law prohibited Deputy Vado’s use of force against a resisting arrestee, she has not rebutted his assertion of qualified immunity. The district court correctly granted summary judgment for Vado on the § 1983 claim against him.
B. Deputy John Connolly
Turning to Deputy Connolly, we reach the same conclusion. Johnson recycles the same “clearly established law” arguments that she used for Vado, which again fail to demonstrate that clearly established law barred Connolly’s restraint techniques.
The body camera footage shows that when Deputy Connolly arrived, R.C. was already handcuffed on the ground. She was screaming at Deputy Vado as Deputy Connolly entered. While Connolly surveyed the room, Vado said to R.C., “You just fought the police!” Connolly testified that these events raised his alert about R.C. as he first stepped on the scene. Then, while Deputy Connolly helped secure the house, R.C. began to stand up and struggle with Deputy Vado. The video footage shows that R.C. resisted Vado for thirteen more seconds before Deputy Connolly made it over to help; although the body camera footage is sometimes obstructed, screaming and scuffling can be heard while Connolly walks over.
The video makes clear that by the time Connolly applied his knee, R.C. was actively resisting—kicking, thrashing, and screaming. Only then did Connolly kneel down. Connolly left his leg in place for ten seconds, and the video shows him get up as soon as R.C. became more still. As with Deputy Vado, Johnson frames the clearly established law question as whether officers may use serious force against restrained individuals who are not actively resisting. Multiple videos prove Connolly applied force in context of an actively resistant arrestee—not, as Johnson claims, a restrained individual who was not actively resisting.
Viewing the facts as they appear on video, the real question is (again) whether under clearly established law, Connolly unreasonably used additional force to restrain an actively resistant R.C.—force that he removed once the resistance stopped. And in asking that question, we must remember that the qualified immunity defense protects all but the plainly incompetent or those who knowingly violate the law.
As with Deputy Vado, Johnson points to no clearly established law supporting that Connolly acted unreasonably or unlawfully. She again cites cases about arrestees who have stopped resisting, but that is a different factual predicate that the videos disprove.
Johnson has not carried her burden to rebut Connolly’s assertion of qualified immunity. The district court correctly granted summary judgment for Connolly on the excessive force claim against him.
https://www.ca5.uscourts.gov/opinions/unpub/24/24-30791.0.pdf