Background
Fahirri Dannah was stopped during a traffic stop and asked to exit his vehicle. During a pat-down, Dannah moved his hands away from his head, broke free from an officer’s grasp, and attempted to run. Officers tackled him, wrestled with him for several minutes, and applied physical force including punches until they could handcuff him. Dannah sued the officers under Section nineteen eighty-three, alleging unlawful search and seizure and excessive force. The district court denied qualified immunity on the excessive force claims, but the officers appealed.
The court’s reasoning
The court applied the qualified immunity standard, requiring a showing that the officers violated a clearly established constitutional right. The court found that Dannah failed to identify precedent with facts similar enough to squarely govern the case. The court noted that Dannah’s active, physical resistance and attempt to flee permitted increasing exercises of force to subdue him. The court distinguished prior cases like LaPlante and Grawey, noting they involved different circumstances such as unconscious suspects or lack of resistance. The court concluded that no clearly established right prevented the officers from using force to rein in Dannah’s volitional and conscious defiance.
No caselaw clearly establishes that this amount of force entered the forbidden territory of excessiveness, much less in an obvious way.
Rivas-Villegas v. Cortesluna, 595 U.S. 1, 6 (2021)
What it means going forward
This ruling reinforces that police officers are not liable for using force against suspects who actively resist arrest or attempt to flee, provided the force is not clearly established as excessive by prior case law.
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