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No Qualified Immunity for Officers in Deadly Chase-Crash
Majority Says Bystanders May Maintain Action Premised on Officers Violating Their Substantive Due Process Rights By Virtue of Malicious Intent Toward Driver Being Pursued, Failure to Render Aid After Witnessing Crash
By a MetNews Staff Writer
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LOLOMANIA SOAKAI decedent |
A divided Ninth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals panel held Friday that qualified immunity was properly denied at the pleading stage to two officers relating to a “ghost chase”—or the following of a suspect at a high rate of speed without activating lights and sirens—that ended in the suspect vehicle crashing into and killing a bystander.
The decision drew a sharp dissent by Circuit Judge Patrick Bumatay who argued:
“[Q]ualified immunity weeds out claims premised on novel or opaque theories of constitutional violation. Yet the majority greenlights exactly that sort of claim—offering a string of unprecedented rulings untethered from the Constitution.”
In January 2023, the estate of the decedent, Lolomania Soakai, and several of his family members who were also injured in the June 2022 crash, sued Oakland Police Department Officers Jimmy Marin-Coronel and Walid Abdelaziz under 42 U.S.C. §1983. They asserted that the defendants violated the plaintiffs’ substantive due process rights under the Fourteenth Amendment, which protects against abuses of power that “shock the conscience.”
According to the plaintiffs, the defendants initiated the pursuit after they spotted a car they suspected of being involved in an illegal car rally. Because department policy prohibited high-speed chases unless the suspect was involved in a violent crime, the officers allegedly pursued the vehicle with their lights and sirens turned off.
The plaintiffs claim that, after the crash, the officers did not stop to render aid or summon emergency services and were overheard saying that they hoped the suspect had died in the collision.
Marin-Coronel and Abdelaziz moved for judgment on the pleadings, arguing that they were entitled to qualified immunity. Under governing jurisprudence, police are entitled to such protection if they can show that the allegations in the operative complaint do not make out a violation of a constitutional principle or that the right at issue was not clearly established at the time of the alleged misconduct.
Purpose to Harm
Police behavior during a high-speed chase will “shock the conscience” under clearly established law if it is conducted with the purpose to harm a civilian for reasons unrelated to legitimate law enforcement objectives.
In Friday’s opinion, authored by Senior Circuit Judge Susan P. Graber and joined in by Circuit Judge Michelle T. Friedland, the court affirmed the denial of the motion for judgment on the pleadings by Magistrate Judge Sallie Kim of the Northern District of California.
At issue is whether plausibly alleging that the defendants acted with a purpose to harm the other driver is sufficient to establish that the officers behaved in a manner that “shocked the conscience” as to the innocent bystanders.
Graber said that the officers concede that the court must accept as true the plaintiff’s allegation that they intended to harm the driver but “assert that, to state a claim, a bystander injured by a high-speed police chase must plausibly allege that the officer acted with an improper purpose to harm the bystander.” She declared that “[w]e reject Defendants’ argument.”
Citing language indicating that a bystander injured in a high-speed police chase must show that the police acted with a purpose to harm, from cases in which courts have found that the officers did not act with the requisite malicious intent, Graber said:
“The fundamental question for the purpose of deciding whether Plaintiffs have stated a substantive due process claim is whether Defendants’ alleged conduct shocks the conscience. We see no reason to think that conduct is any less shocking when it injures someone other than the intended target, particularly when harm to a third party is a clear, known risk and is entirely foreseeable.”
She declared:
“Defendants make much of the fact that neither the Supreme Court nor our court has ruled in favor of a bystander injured in a high-speed chase when addressing the merits of a substantive due process claim. But whether the plaintiffs in prior cases succeeded in establishing a substantive due process claim is beside the point. Instead, we must determine whether the law provided ‘fair warning that [Defendants’ alleged] conduct [was] unconstitutional.’ ”
Failure to Aid
The plaintiffs alternatively argued that the defendants violated their constitutional rights by failing to summon aid after the crash. Graber acknowledged that the Fourteenth Amendment generally does not confer any affirmative right to governmental help but noted that an officer may be found to have violated a plaintiff’s due process rights if his affirmative conduct exposed the plaintiff to foreseeable danger and he responds with deliberate indifference.
Applying this standard, the jurist found that the plaintiffs had met their burden, saying:
“As Defendants point out, Plaintiffs do not identify—nor are we aware of—a controlling case applying the state-created danger theory to injuries suffered by bystanders after a high-speed police chase. But ‘[t]here need not be a case directly on point for a right to be clearly established.’ ”
Graber continued:
“Defendants allegedly saw the ‘carnage, injuries[,] and death’ caused by the collision but did not render aid or call for help, even though the police department had a policy…that officers ‘provide and summon emergency medical services for injured persons.’ Instead, Defendants allegedly kept driving, without turning on their sirens or lights, before doubling back and pretending to arrive at the scene for the first time after hearing other first responders arrive. From those allegations, we can reasonably infer that Defendants saw that Plaintiffs needed immediate medical attention, knew…that the danger to Plaintiffs would increase the longer they went without help, and…still ‘chose to do nothing about it.’ ”
She added:
“Failing to aid victims of a car crash will…rarely constitute deliberate indifference; if, for instance, an officer did not summon emergency services because the officer was distracted by the need to locate the suspect, did not see the victims, or was injured, the officer almost certainly would lack the ‘culpable mental state’ required…In the universe of high-speed chase cases, this one, with its particularly unusual allegations, is an outlier.” Bumatay acknowledged that the case “presents jarring facts,” but said:
“As shocking as these allegations appear, we must always adhere to our constitutional role. That means following established law and not grasping at rulings to reach certain outcomes.”
Arguing that the majority violated these principles, he wrote:
“First, the majority adopts a brand-new theory of substantive due process—contrary to precedent and to the Supreme Court’s admonition against such judicial overreach….For the first time, the majority rules that a bystander may assert a substantive due process claim against an officer if the bystander can show that the officer intended to harm someone else….So it’s no wonder that the majority can’t point to a single Supreme Court or Ninth Circuit opinion stating that intent to harm someone else violates the Due Process Clause.”
Continuing, he argued:
“Second, the majority expands the state-created-danger doctrine to create a new constitutional duty requiring law enforcement officers to render or summon medical aid for civilians harmed by private actors under certain circumstances….The Supreme Court has never recognized the state-created-danger doctrine, and its roots are both ahistorical and atextual. So we shouldn’t casually expand the doctrine. That means following our precedent closely.”
He went on to say:
“[W]hat’s needed to make a claim under the doctrine is ‘affirmative conduct’ by a state actor that exposed plaintiffs to ‘actual, particularized danger.’…All that’s needed now is state action without particularized danger coupled with state inaction with apparent particularized danger. So the majority creates a state duty to render aid whenever a private actor harms civilians if police officers acted in any way in the causal chain of harm. This is a confusing expansion of a dubious doctrine.”
The judge declared:
“Only by reaching novel holding after novel holding can the high standard of ‘clearly established law’ be overcome. This was not our role. Rather than hack together unprecedented rulings to create not one—but two—new due process rights, we should have simply followed the law and precedent and granted qualified immunity.”
The case is Estate of Soakai v. Abdelaziz, 23-4466.
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