Six years after his son was killed by a Seattle police officer involved in multiple mortal meetings, a federal judge cleared the way for the demand for excessive force of Rose Johnson to advance.
The United States District Judge, Thomas Zilly, established an attempt date of September 15 after an appeal court this year rejected the claim of the qualified immunity officer, the very debated legal doctrine that can protect police officers from civil rights claims.
The March 3 ruling by the 9th Court of Appeals of the United States Circuit is an incremental change sign that takes place in courts and state houses throughout the country, since legislative efforts to reform immunity qualified in Congress have stagnated.
To Johnson, who filed Seattle’s demand after the police fatally shot his son seconds after they kicked his door on May 8, 2019, the panel’s decision was an important victory on a long and hard path of trying to heal.
“Trying to move forward and heal from the trauma of losing Ryan has not been easier because they have spent six years,” he said about his son, Ryan Smith, 31. “He was, and it’s my heart and soul.”
Johnson’s demand, presented in 2022 after a NBC news investigation detailed his son’s case, alleges that the behavior “deliberate and reckless” of Officer Christopher Myers violated Smith’s constitutional rights and caused his death.
The lawsuit appoints a second officer as accused and accuses the Seattle Police Department of demonstrating “deliberate indifference” by not getting Myers to fire his weapon in four separate meetings from 2010 to 2019, three of which were fatal: “professional, mental or other help to ensure that he stops shooting people.”
Myers has not been disciplined or accused of any crime in relation to those shootings, although an appeal panel ruled in 2014 that there was little evidence to corroborate his account of the supposedly suspicious behavior that caused one of them. Myers did not respond to a request for comments. He previously defended his use of lethal force, telling NBC News in 2021 that he never expects a meeting to become a shooting.
“Unfortunately, some people do not yield and sometimes forcing the situation,” he said.
The lawyers representing the officers and the Police Department did not respond to a request for comments. The lawyers previously sought to dismiss the claim, claiming in a 2023 presentation that city officials could not be considered responsible because they had not violated Smith’s constitutional rights. Smith represented an imminent and mortal threat when they triggered him fatally, they wrote, and the officers had the right to qualified immunity.
The legal defense of qualified immunity, first adopted by the Supreme Court of the United States in 1967, allows the agents of the law to argue that the claims of constitutional violations should be dismissed because the violations were not “clearly established” at the time they occurred.
“There was no case (and not) to put into account all reasonable officers to shoot Mr. Smith would violate the clearly established law,” the lawyers wrote.
Smith received a deadly shot after his girlfriend marked 911 and described a terrifying situation: Smith had a knife, and threatened to assault and take his life, according to the record of the call of a dispatcher included in the presentation. It was locked in the bathroom, according to the call record, and Smith was scratching the door. “There is blood throughout the bathroom,” a dispatcher told the officers who responded.
The city officials recognized that this final detail was based on inaccurate information that the 911 policyholder called Malinterpretado. The bride actually told the operator that she didn’t need a doctor, but she feared Smith had hurt and needed help, according to Johnson’s demand.
But when Myers responded to the call to 911, he believed that Smith’s girlfriend could be bleeding, he told researchers. In the presentation of 2023, officers’ lawyers wrote that “any objectively reasonable officer would have believed that this was an emergency of domestic violence.”
The body of the body of the body of what it followed showed the officers ordering Smith to open the door. Seconds later, after he did not comply, they knocked him down. In the video, you can see Smith walking slowly towards the threshold with what appears to be a knife in his hand while the officers order him to lift his hands, to climb to the ground and let the knife fall.
In six seconds, Myers shot eight shots, depending on the demand. The second officer, Ryan Beecroft, shot twice. Smith was hit seven times, says the demand.
According to the presentation, the officers opened fire only after Smith refused to fulfill their orders and advanced towards them with their knife in an “attack position.”
Smith’s mother has said that her son fought for years with depression, anxiety and alcoholism, and she believes that she was having a mental health crisis the night she was triggered fatally. In the demand of his family, Johnson’s lawyers wrote that the police did not follow the techniques of decalccing and crisis intervention even though Beecroft had been in the Smith apartment weeks before and was aware of their mental health problems.
In the March ruling, the judge of the Ninth Circuit William Fletcher disputed the claims of the officers, writing that a reasonable jury could conclude that Smith did not represent an immediate threat and did not actively resist the arrest. It may not have understood the orders of the officers, “who were shouted at the same time and inconsistent,” Fletcher wrote.
“The officers did not give warnings and the use of a Taser could have been available,” he wrote. “Given the jurisprudence of this circuit, a reasonable officer should have noticed that it was not reasonable to use the deadly force only because Smith held a knife in his right hand and raised that hand on his chest.”
The next hearing in the case is scheduled for July 18. Officers’ lawyers have tried to delay the September trial, which is scheduled to last five to 10 days.
