- The 4th US Circuit Court of Appeals has ruled in favor of Pineville police officers sued in connection with a 2020 shooting.
- Timothy Rochell Caraway argued that the officers violated his constitutional rights when they shot him four times during a response to a 911 call.
- In a split 2-1 decision, the 4th Circuit majority ruled that officers had a reason to believe that Caraway presented a threat when they shot him.
A split 4th US Circuit Court of Appeals has ruled in favor of Pineville police officers in a lawsuit challenging the shooting of Timothy Rochell Caraway in 2020.
Officers fired 12 shots at Caraway, striking him four times. He survived the shooting and sued the city and officers in federal court. Caraway claimed officers violated his constitutional rights.
US District Judge Frank Whitney ruled in favor of Pineville and the police officers in November 2022.
“When four Pineville Police Department officers responded to a 911 call on the morning of February 1, 2020, they expected to find ‘a black male walking around, waving a gun at [passersby],’” wrote Chief Judge Albert Diaz for the 4th Circuit’s majority. “Instead, they found Timothy Caraway walking alone down the empty sidewalk with his arms at his sides and a cellphone in his left hand.”
“Yet the officers exited their vehicles, weapons at the ready, and shouted a series of commands for Caraway to both raise his hands and drop what they thought was a gun,” Diaz continued. “As Caraway tried to comply by reaching into his jacket with his right hand to discard the gun he’d stored there, Officers Adam Roberts and Jamon Griffin fired twelve shots between them — four of which struck Caraway.”
Whitney ruled that Roberts and Griffin were entitled to qualified immunity and public official immunity. That immunity blocked Caraway’s excessive force claims under the Fourth Amendment and state-law claims of assault and battery.
“We think it fair to say, with the benefit of hindsight, that the officers should have handled this encounter differently,” Diaz wrote. “But that’s not our role. Instead, we ask whether the officers’ use of deadly force was reasonable.”
“Because the record shows that in the moments before the shooting, Caraway’s gun was pointed at two of the officers, we find that it was. Accordingly, we affirm the district court’s grant of summary judgment to the officers,” Diaz added.
“[T]he relevant inquiry here is not whether Caraway threatened the officers, but whether there was an objective basis for the officers to believe that he presented a threat,” according to the appellate decision. “It’s easy to say (in the peace and quiet of chambers) that Caraway’s actions right before he moved to withdraw the gun from his pocket appeared calm and nonthreatening. But on the street that February, the officers had an objective basis to believe that Caraway was a threat in the moments right before the shooting.”
“That’s because the undisputed evidence shows that just before the officers fired, Caraway’s gun was pointed at French and Roberts,” Diaz wrote. “We therefore can’t find that the officers’ use of deadly force in response to this perceived threat was unreasonable.”
“That the officers saw Caraway holding a gun that they reasonably believed would be used against them was enough to justify their decision to deploy deadly force,” he added.
Appellate Judge Paul Niemeyer joined Diaz’s opinion. US District Judge Rossie David Alston Jr. of Virginia dissented.
“Critical to the analysis in my view is that the majority recognizes that Timothy Caraway was complying with officer commands to drop his weapon at the time the officers shot him,” Alston wrote. “Yet, the majority takes the somewhat counter-intuitive position that Caraway was somehow ‘too quick’ to comply with the officers’ instructions or that his compliance was in some way unexpected such that the officers’ twelve shots were a reasonable response to his compliance with their commands.”
“It is clear from oral argument and the majority’s opinion in this case, that there was nothing that Caraway could have done during the incident that would have enabled him to avoid being shot or that would have rendered the shooting unreasonable,” Alston added. “In my view, Caraway was essentially presented with a ‘Hobson’s Choice,’ and thus no choice at all, to either comply explicitly with the officers’ directions (and be shot twelve times) or not comply and potentially suffer worse consequences.”
“This cannot be the way § 1983 was meant to be construed,” Alston wrote, citing the federal law Caraway cited in his complaint.