Late on an October night in 1974, Memphis, Tenn., police officer Elton Hymon responded to a call about a break in. At the scene, a neighbor said she'd heard glass shattering and pointed to the house next door. Hymon went behind it. He heard a door slam. Someone ran into the yard and stopped at a 6-foot-high chain-link fence at the yard's edge. Hymon shined his flashlight at the person and saw a teenager who he could tell was unarmed. Hymon called, "Police, halt." The teen started climbing the fence. Hymon shot him in the back of the head, fatally. Edward Garner was a 15-year-old black eighth grader. He was 5 feet 4 inches tall and weighed about 110 pounds. A purse and $10 were found on his body.
After Edward Garner's death, his father sued, arguing that his son's civil rights had been violated. The 6th Circuit, one of the federal courts of appeal, agreed, ruling that Garner's shooting violated the Fourth Amendment's protection against unreasonable seizures. In the process, the court struck down a Tennessee statute based on an 18th-century common-law "fleeing felon" rule, which allowed police to use deadly force against a felony suspect who was trying to elude arrest. In the Garner case, the 6th Circuit said that before shooting a suspect, a police offer must have probable cause to believe that the suspect poses a danger.
In 1984, the Memphis Police Department and the state of Tennessee appealed the 6th Circuit's decision to the Supreme Court. Samuel Alito, then a lawyer in the Solicitor General's office, was assigned to help decide whether the Reagan administration should take sides. "I believe that the decision below is wrong," Alito wrote in a cover note, referring to the 6th Circuit's ruling. In a 15-page memo, he argued in favor of letting states give police the power to shoot to kill at their discretion whenever a suspect flees, whether or not he poses a threat. Alito's memo is written with his usual dispassion. But he's forceful in his belief that the Constitution has no role to play in a cop's decision about whether to shoot an unarmed suspect. Alito's memo is also striking for what it doesn't say. In Memphis and across the country, cops were shooting black suspects at a far higher rate than white ones. (The evidence, beginning with studies dating from the 1960s, is collected in a 2004 article in The Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science by Northwestern political science professor Wesley G. Skogan and University of Chicago law professor Tracey L. Meares.) Laws like Tennessee's made it easier for the police to shoot unarmed black people, as Edward Garner's father argued in his suit. Alito, however, ignored the racial undertones of the case.
"Was the shooting reasonable?" Alito asked. His answer was yes. "Many of the facts recited by the court of appeals"—like Garner's youth and minor crime—"seem essentially irrelevant." To Alito, the case came down to this: If Officer Hymon shot, "there was the chance that he would kill a person guilty only of a simple breaking and entering; that is essentially what occurred. If he didn't shoot, there was a chance that a murderer or rapist would escape and possibly strike again." Hymon had no reason to think that Garner had done anything violent. Still, Alito concluded, "I do not think the Constitution provides an answer to the officer's dilemma." The Department of Justice ultimately decided not to take sides in the Garner case. But when the Supreme Court eventually ruled, it rejected the arguments Alito made in his memo.
http://www.slate.com/id/2131373/?nav=tap3
Printer-friendly format
Email this thread to a friend
Bookmark this thread
(1000+ posts)
Send PM |
Profile |
Ignore
