U.S. Supreme Court Justice Alito blasts 9th Circuit in San Jose police shooting case

U.S. Supreme Court Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr. slammed the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals this week over its handling of a California police shooting case, calling lower courts’ decision to award damages to the victim’s widow and children “a flagrant error.”

“The courts below badly fumbled this basic tenet of our qualified immunity doctrine,” by relying in part on a 2022 appellate decision to rule the officer was not shielded from liability in the 2017 shooting, Alito wrote, dissenting in the Supreme Court’s decision to not take the case.

Jacob Dominguez was unarmed and complying with officers’ instructions when San Jose Police Sgt. Michael Pina shot and killed him during a traffic stop in 2017. His head, shoulders and left arm were above the frame of the driver’s side door when he was shot. Police were attempting to arrest him for a gas station robbery, according to civil court records, and there was no evidence he was armed during the incident.

Dominguez’s widow sued Pina and the department, winning $1 million in damages in 2023 after a federal civil jury found the officer had used excessive force.

Pina’s lawyers argued that he and the San Jose Police Department were protected under qualified immunity, a legal principle that shields government officials from most civil suits.

But U.S. District Judge Beth Labson Freeman disagreed, drawing in part from the 9th Circuit’s ruling in Peck vs. Montoya, in which deputies shot and killed a belligerent blind man while responding to a 911 call.

The problem, according to Alito, is that case had been decided five years after Pina shot Dominguez.

“While Peck was decided after the events that occurred in our case, the Ninth Circuit’s analysis of what was clearly established at the time of the incident at issue in Peck is helpful,” Freeman wrote, arguing that the Peck decision upheld an earlier precedent in Cruz vs. City of Anaheim, another traffic stop case.

The appellate court also cited Peck in its unpublished decision upholding Freeman’s decision last year.

“A reasonable jury could have found that Dominguez did not appear to be reaching for a weapon when Officer Pina shot him,” the appellate panel wrote in May. “In such circumstances, deadly force is not justified.”

Attorneys for the officer did not reply to requests for comment.

The Supreme Court justice excoriated the appellate panel in his dissent, calling its work “ham-fisted” and saying the judges “ran roughshod” over qualified immunity and “sneaked” justification for their ruling into the footnotes of the decision.

“To overcome qualified immunity, a party must show that an official violated a federal right that ‘was “clearly established” at the time of [the] alleged misconduct,’” Alito wrote. “This requirement ensures that officials are not subject to the burdens of litigation or held liable for conduct without notice that such conduct is unlawful.”

In other words, Pina could not have known killing Dominguez would leave him exposed to a civil suit, because that liability hadn’t been established yet.

“This is the kind of decision that illustrates the nonsensical nature of qualified immunity,” said Joanna C. Schwartz, an expert on police misconduct litigation at the UCLA School of Law. “The notion that you have to find a prior court decision with nearly identical facts in order to clearly establish the law can be a very high barrier.”

Even if Peck had been decided before the shooting, it’s “inconceivable” Pina would have known about it or been able to act on that knowledge in a fast-moving, high-pressure situation, she said.

That’s because precedent changes in small but important ways all the time.

“Just on use of force, you’re talking about hundreds of cases that would be relevant,” Schwartz said.

Instead of being asked to memorize these incremental changes, officers are taught the broad strokes from significant shifts in the law, the professor said.

“The goal is for them to learn how to apply those standards in a variety of circumstances, not to become some sort of machine capable of conjuring up the facts and holdings of all of these court cases,” Schwartz said.

Although Alito fretted that the appellate court’s reading of qualified immunity would leave police officers unfairly exposed, Schwartz said her research doesn’t support his claim.

“If the goal is to protect officers from litigation, it’s not being accomplished,” because few claims are dismissed because of it, she said.

Nor does qualified immunity protect police from financial ruin in the case of a civil suit, since less than 1% of damages are paid by officers.

“Qualified immunity is neither necessary nor well suited to accomplish what the Supreme Court says they want it to accomplish,” Schwartz said.