Two D.C. police officers who were accused of using excessive force to subdue a suspect are immune from a civil lawsuit, the D.C. Circuit held Tuesday (June 26) in Hedgpeth v. Rahim.
In March 2015, the two cops approached Jonathan Hedgpeth outside a D.C. bar. Hedgpeth was cursing and slurring his words, and when the encounter escalated, the cops arrested him for public intoxication. What happened next is up for debate. Hedpeth claims one officer forced him to the ground, causing his head to strike a window of the bar and giving him a concussion. The cops denied using what they call a “takedown maneuver,” and they said any impact to Hedgpeth’s head was incidental to Hedpeth’s attempting to step away.
Hedgpeth sued the officers, alleging they violated his Fourth Amendment rights by arresting him without probable cause and using excessive force. In an opinion by Judge Srinivasan, the court affirmed the district judge’s ruling that the cops were entitled to qualified immunity. Srinivasan first held there were enough facts for the officers to have probable cause to arrest Hedgpeth for public intoxication. In a nod to the “dearth of decisions interpreting D.C.’s public intoxication law,” Srinivasan turned to other circuit courts to support the reasonableness of the officers’ belief in probable cause.
On the excessive force claim, Srinivasan emphasized that the doctrine of qualified immunity is longstanding and broad-sweeping. The doctrine, he said, protects the officers from civil liability because it is not “obvious” that, under these circumstances, “any competent officer would have known” that using a takedown maneuver would violate the Fourth Amendment.
To reach his conclusion, Srinivasan suggested that the cops’ conduct toward Hedgpeth was no more out of line than police conduct in other cases where the court has granted qualified immunity. In Wardlaw v. Pickett, he said, the court affirmed immunity for an officer who punched a man in the jaw and chest after the man had rushed toward the police while shouting. In Scott v. District of Columbia, a man being held in a police car was acting belligerently and attempted to exit the car. Although he offered to get back in the car upon seeing a group of officers arrive on the scene, the officers “refused to let him back into the car, one officer struck him and knocked him off balance, and multiple officers slammed him to the ground before handcuffing him and dragging him.” The court once again found the police immune from suit. And finally, in Martin v. Malhoyt, the court “rejected an excessive-force claim against an officer who ‘brutally grabbed’ a driver around the waist as he got out of the car while attempting to produce his license and registration, threw the driver back into his car, and then slammed the door on his leg.”
Srinivasan noted that “an officer does not invariably ha[ve] the authority to forcibly take down a suspect in the course of a routine arrest,” but the facts of Hedgpeth’s case “fortified” the conclusion to affirm qualified immunity.
