[00:00:00] Speaker 04:
versus Montanez and State of Corona has been submitted on the briefs. The final case on calendar for argument is Kirkman versus State of California.

[00:00:31] Speaker 04:
Good morning, counsel.

[00:00:33] Speaker 03:
Good morning, your honors.

[00:00:36] Speaker 03:
I'm going to try to save three minutes for rebuttal, and I'll attempt to watch the clock.

[00:00:44] Speaker 03:
May it please the court, my name is Lee Roystacker, and I represent California Highway Officer Ramon Silva.

[00:00:52] Speaker 03:
As the court knows, this is an officer-involved shooting case that took place on a busy highway in the middle of the day. The case has unique facts.

[00:01:01] Speaker 03:
It was an extremely fast-paced event with rapidly changing circumstances.

[00:01:07] Speaker 03:
Thirty seconds elapsed from the time that my client arrived on the scene until the shooting. And in that culminating moment where the shooting took place, the decedent popped out from behind a car in a shooter stance with something in his hands.

[00:01:27] Speaker 02:
Well, just a minute.

[00:01:31] Speaker 02:
I guess I'm trying to figure out.

[00:01:33] Speaker 02:
In the normal qualified immunity case, I would have to use the plaintiff's alleged facts, right?

[00:01:43] Speaker 02:
Correct.

[00:01:45] Speaker 02:
Not the defendant. You're the defendant. You've got the officer. I was there with you. I represented policemen all the time in this kind of a situation. But my biggest problem was I had to use the plaintiff's alleged facts and I had to do them in a situation where the officer was only entitled to immunity as a matter of law assuming all the factual disputes were resolved against the officer and all reasonable inferences were drawn in the in the plaintiff's favor.

[00:02:29] Speaker 02:
The only way this case is any different whatsoever, it seems, is that there's a new case out. It's Scott v. Harris.

[00:02:38] Speaker 02:
And this says that for purposes of a summary judgment as to qualified immunity, the district court's use of a plaintiff's alleged facts may be disturbed by a video where it blatantly claims contradicts the plaintiff's version of events to the point where it so utterly discredited those facts that no reasonable jury could believe it.

[00:03:09] Speaker 02:
Is that your argument today that this footage is so blatantly different than the plaintiff's facts that I have to use the camera footage rather than the plaintiff's facts. Is that your argument?

[00:03:26] Speaker 03:
Essentially, yes. And a couple things. The alleged facts is always kind of giving me a pause, because in the context of summary judgment, it's not really alleged. It's the evidence.

[00:03:41] Speaker 02:
Well, but on summary judgment, on a qualified immunity, we take the plaintiff's allegations...

[00:03:49] Speaker 02:
That's what we have to take. You can't throw in anything the defendant says. You have to say everything the plaintiff says and every intendment about it is against me, but even then I win.

[00:04:00] Speaker 03:
Provided they are material facts.

[00:04:01] Speaker 02:
I understand. Yes. But in this case, you want to undo those alleged facts by this footage.

[00:04:07] Speaker 03:
I believe the footage certainly contradicts any allegation that the decedent was not in a shooter stance.

[00:04:16] Speaker 02:
Well... I guess I looked at this video and frankly, Mr. Elaine is, if he's in a shooter stance at all in the footage, it's for less than a half of a second.

[00:04:35] Speaker 02:
I mean, I can't really tell whether it's really a shooter stance or not, but if it is, it was less than a half a second. Do you agree with that?

[00:04:46] Speaker 03:
In, in,

[00:04:47] Speaker 02:
In the video?

[00:04:48] Speaker 03:
Yes, but that was also the reaction time that Mr. or my client had.

[00:04:54] Speaker 02:
That half a second... Well, and it was hard to see Alina's at all in the video once he turns the corner because it happened so fast, right?

[00:05:03] Speaker 03:
That is part of it. It happened so fast, yes.

[00:05:05] Speaker 02:
So does your position regarding Scott v. Harris... rely solely upon the screenshots portraying the supposed shooter's stance.

[00:05:15] Speaker 03:
I don't think that's certainly part of it, but I think if record evidence directly contradicts the allegations, that also is in line with Scott and some of this court's decisions.

[00:05:28] Speaker 03:
The video is certainly one part of it.

[00:05:31] Speaker 02:
But if the video's not in, then I have to look at the plaintiff's facts. And at that point, I think you lose.

[00:05:40] Speaker 02:
So that's why it's problematic to me because it seems to me that this video evidence doesn't utterly discredit the plaintiff's facts. There isn't enough to it. I mean, I looked at it enough to try to really look to see, having been in your case before, your situation, standing in your shoes, and it's less than a half of a second.

[00:06:05] Speaker 03:
I think the still shots, because it happened so quickly... I think the still shots that were taken from frames of the video are probably better in terms of showing exactly what happened in that fraction of a second.

[00:06:21] Speaker 02:
Well, don't you think that the screenshots, because they're so short, can take what is happening out of context?

[00:06:29] Speaker 03:
I don't.

[00:06:30] Speaker 02:
Well, I guess I'm trying to figure out why, having looked at it.

[00:06:34] Speaker 03:
There really isn't, in my view, well, I think the record amply supports that there really isn't any dispute that when he popped out from around the side of the car, he was in a shooter's stance. Indeed, their expert takes that position, and his opinion is the guy was trying to commit suicide by cop.

[00:06:55] Speaker 03:
The only dispute that the district court identified below was what he was doing in the fraction of a fraction of a second after he came around the car right at the same time as my client made his first shot, whether his arms were going down or whether he was turning slightly. And in our view, that fraction of a fraction of a second is immaterial. I mean, the case law is pretty clear.

[00:07:23] Speaker 03:
You don't have to wait to see a gun. The glint of steel is not the determining factor.

[00:07:31] Speaker 03:
And I think it's really important to remember the sheer speed. If he had guessed wrong

[00:07:39] Speaker 02:
If we take out of consideration that there was a shooter's stance because we don't believe the video shows it, then is it still your contention that the district court erred in denying the summary judgment?

[00:07:55] Speaker 03:
If there was no shooter's stance at all? Correct. Well, that's a different case, and I'm not sure we'd be here.

[00:08:02] Speaker 02:
So it all relies on this one-half second that I saw in the video. For screenshots, we're showing that it started 704.5 to 704.55.

[00:08:15] Speaker 02:
Yeah.

[00:08:18] Speaker 02:
I mean, we looked at it time and time again to try to help you.

[00:08:26] Speaker 03:
I understand.

[00:08:28] Speaker 03:
But, again, I don't even think the district court had an issue with him being in a shooter stance at the point he came around the side of the car.

[00:08:38] Speaker 03:
the district court's problem or the district court found couldn't tell exactly what was happening at the moment he pulled the trigger.

[00:08:47] Speaker 03:
I just don't think there's any dispute about him being in a shooter's stance.

[00:08:53] Speaker 02:
Well, I think the dispute comes in that if you look at the plaintiff's facts, there wasn't ever any shooter's stance. And the only way you get to shooter's stance is by what you say looking at the video says he did. Because otherwise, nobody says he got in the shooter's stance.

[00:09:11] Speaker 03:
Well, I think the court has jurisdiction to consider the other evidence in the record.

[00:09:19] Speaker 02:
I think the Supreme Court's case is... Well, I think we have jurisdiction because it's summary judgment on a qualified immunity. But I'm just trying to put now the evidence in the most favorable to the plaintiff.

[00:09:33] Speaker 02:
And the only way I can get out of that is by having a video... That surely shows me that it is contradictory. And I'm telling you, I looked at it and I couldn't find it.

[00:09:46] Speaker 03:
I don't think the video is the only thing you have to rely on.

[00:09:48] Speaker 02:
What is there else?

[00:09:49] Speaker 03:
The undisputed testimony in the record.

[00:09:51] Speaker 02:
There's no undisputed testimony that says there was a shooter's stance.

[00:09:55] Speaker 03:
Both officers said it.

[00:09:57] Speaker 02:
Well, but that's their side.

[00:09:59] Speaker 03:
A witness, an independent witness.

[00:10:00] Speaker 02:
And that's their side again. We're talking about the plaintiff's version of the facts.

[00:10:05] Speaker 03:
Again, I don't think there is any dispute that he was in a shooter stance when he came around the side of the car, leaving my client with half a second to assess and react.

[00:10:16] Speaker 02:
Let me go one further to a different issue.

[00:10:20] Speaker 02:
How can I ever have in front of me on qualified immunity anything about state law claims?

[00:10:33] Speaker 03:
Well, the state law claims are And I pronounce this word wrong every time.

[00:10:40] Speaker 02:
But they're not intertwined.

[00:10:41] Speaker 03:
They are with the Fourth Amendment.

[00:10:43] Speaker 02:
All they are is a summary judgment as to what happened at that particular situation, but you can't get qualified immunity on the state law claims.

[00:10:55] Speaker 03:
That's correct.

[00:10:56] Speaker 02:
So all you can get is a summary judgment on them, which is not intertwined. You've got a summary judgment on qualified immunity, which we can look at, but when you're looking at the normal summary judgment, I couldn't have that in front of me. If there was a normal summary judgment in the case, it wouldn't be in front of me because it can't come up here on this kind of review.

[00:11:22] Speaker 03:
The California Bain Act and the battery claim are the exact same standard as the Fourth Amendment.

[00:11:31] Speaker 02:
Well, I know that, but if there was a summary judgment on the Fourth Amendment itself, we couldn't have that up here in front of us because there would still be damages left. There's no way to bring a normal summary judgment in front of us. The only kind of a summary judgment that I can have in front of me at this point when the case is still going is the qualified immunity judgment.

[00:11:58] Speaker 02:
Unless you've got another case that tells me I get something else.

[00:12:02] Speaker 03:
Well, I mean, this court in Williamson v. City of National City.

[00:12:09] Speaker 02:
But it isn't intertwined here. This is a summary judgment. You don't have qualified immunity on a state law claim.

[00:12:16] Speaker 03:
Well, I agree with that. But the point of the claims being intertwined is that the qualified immunity analysis with the two prongs looks first at whether there's a Fourth Amendment violation And second, whether there was clearly established law. All right. If there's no Fourth Amendment violation, that means there's no state law California negligence claim. I'm sorry, state law battery claim or state law BANAC claim because the standards are the same. That's how it's intertwined.

[00:12:44] Speaker 01:
Can I ask a question here? I just want to make sure I understand correctly. Is it your client's position that the qualified immunity claim, concept stands or falls on the shooter stance so are you saying like if there was let's just say there was no shooter stance would the decedent running towards two officers pulling something out of a pocket that's grayish in color that wouldn't be enough no my position is not it's just the shooter stance it's

[00:13:24] Speaker 03:
The totality of the circumstances.

[00:13:27] Speaker 03:
It's everything.

[00:13:28] Speaker 04:
Well, what specifically, when you say everything, what specifically? Is it that he's running with an object, a shooter stance, and what else?

[00:13:40] Speaker 03:
Well, I think that certainly is it, but I think the question was if he was in a shooter stance.

[00:13:46] Speaker 04:
Okay, so you say not just a shooter stance.

[00:13:49] Speaker 03:
Taking an object out of his pocket.

[00:13:50] Speaker 04:
Taking an object out of his pocket, and what else?

[00:13:51] Speaker 03:
And charging at one officer. And then turning a corner and charging at another and being about five feet away was something in his hands, even if he wasn't in a shooter stance.

[00:14:05] Speaker 04:
So the charging at the officers, is that undisputed? Do the plaintiffs dispute that?

[00:14:11] Speaker 01:
I don't think that's disputed.

[00:14:12] Speaker 04:
All right.

[00:14:14] Speaker 01:
I don't think that can be disputed given the video. No.

[00:14:18] Speaker 04:
But we'll see what the plaintiff's position is.

[00:14:21] Speaker 01:
Okay. All right.

[00:14:22] Speaker 04:
Thank you, counsel.

[00:14:36] Speaker 00:
Good morning. I'm Cooper Main, one of the attorneys for the plaintiff and appellee in this case.

[00:14:51] Speaker 00:
So I'd like to address – just go straight into it since we're already into the case – the question of whether the shooter stance is really enough here.

[00:15:03] Speaker 04:
Because on plaintiff's facts... Well, let me ask you first, do you dispute that there was a shooter stance? Do you agree that it's undisputed that the deceased was in a shooter stance?

[00:15:16] Speaker 00:
No. On plaintiff's facts, he was not in a shooter stance. And the district court agreed with us on page five of her order. She said that it's a very disputed issue, whether Alaniz was in a shooter's stance.

[00:15:29] Speaker 01:
And is that supported by evidence in the record?

[00:15:32] Speaker 00:
It's supported by circumstantial evidence, for sure, in that in Cruz and Longoria, the court found that not having a gun is circumstantial evidence that you're not pulling a gun. Not having a gun is circumstantial evidence that you're not in a shooter's stance.

[00:15:47] Speaker 04:
What about the video?

[00:15:48] Speaker 00:
The video itself is ambiguous. I think it doesn't show... definitively one way or the other. It's blurry. It's very quick.

[00:16:00] Speaker 00:
So I think it can go both ways, and the court below found that, in its view, it did not show a shooter's stance, and the court's decision wasn't blatantly contradicted by the video, as Judge Smith mentioned.

[00:16:14] Speaker 02:
Well, if I say that there was no shooter's stance, and if I say...

[00:16:23] Speaker 02:
that at that point I've got to rely on the plaintiff's facts.

[00:16:30] Speaker 02:
What is the crime that's at issue for the first gram factor?

[00:16:36] Speaker 00:
So there's no serious crime here. This is a mental health call, not a call of a serious crime in progress. Well, wasn't it a supposed assault? The district court addressed that below and determined that the officers couldn't make out an assault because given that he had just been hit by a truck going 55 miles an hour, he was not able to actually assault anybody. He was bleeding.

[00:17:02] Speaker 02:
Did we consider whether he was resisting arrest?

[00:17:07] Speaker 00:
She may have addressed that. I don't think it was brought up in our briefing.

[00:17:14] Speaker 02:
Well, it wasn't brought up in the briefing. That's why I'm trying to figure out what the crime was, that issue in the first Graham Factor.

[00:17:22] Speaker 00:
I don't think there's any crime here. I don't think he's able to actually do much. He's just been hit by a truck going 55 miles an hour. He's bleeding from his head. He's woozy. He's not actually able to assault anybody.

[00:17:35] Speaker 04:
How would the officers know that?

[00:17:39] Speaker 00:
The officers knew that an individual had been hit by a car, I believe a truck, and they knew that he had been hit actually multiple times by multiple vehicles.

[00:17:52] Speaker 00:
And there were reports over dispatch that he was trying to kill himself, but that there was no indication that he had a weapon, no indication that he was trying to hurt anybody else, no indication that he had threatened anybody. And when they came to the scene, they ordered him to show his hands, and he complied with that. He showed his hands and brought out a glasses case.

[00:18:16] Speaker 04:
Is there a dispute of fact regarding whether or not he was charging... At the officers, plural.

[00:18:24] Speaker 04:
At the time of the shooting, and this gets into the... At any point, was there a dispute of fact regarding whether or not he was charging at the officers?

[00:18:33] Speaker 00:
I guess the word charging is a little bit loaded. So, I mean, he was definitely moving towards the officers at a quick pace. I wouldn't describe it as charging.

[00:18:44] Speaker 00:
So it would be disputed only to the extent that that word's a loaded term. But, yes, he was moving towards the officers.

[00:18:51] Speaker 04:
So the reason I'm asking these questions is because I'm trying to decide whether or not this is clearly established law. And so with these facts, what is the clearly established law that would put the officers on notice that shooting the decedent under these circumstances would be unconstitutional?

[00:19:11] Speaker 00:
So there's several cases.

[00:19:12] Speaker 04:
Tell me your best case for the proposition because we cannot do this at a high level of generality. So the Supreme Court has told us we have to have pretty close facts to give officers notice that what they are doing violates clearly established law. So what is the closest case here that would tell the officers that shooting an individual under these circumstances would be unconstitutional?

[00:19:39] Speaker 00:
Yes, Your Honor. So our best case is Espinosa. It's a 2010 case where a suicidal individual was contacted by two officers. The officers said they believed he raised an object that they thought was a gun, and they shot him in self-defense. Both officers shot him. One of them claimed that he heard a gunshot and mistook that for a shot coming from the suspect. When they investigated the scene, they found a glasses case under the suspect's right arm.

[00:20:11] Speaker 04:
Was that in a home, though?

[00:20:14] Speaker 00:
That was in a home. It was in the attic of a home.

[00:20:15] Speaker 04:
Yeah. That's a little different than being... On a busy freeway, do you think that makes a difference to this being clearly established law? Because the home is a more sacrosanct place than a freeway. So do you see that as making a difference in terms of whether this law is clearly established?

[00:20:33] Speaker 00:
Well, I would actually argue that our case was more unreasonable use of force because in that situation, they were in a contained area where the officers were shooting without a risk of hitting bystanders here. The bullets were going past the suspect, and one of them almost hit a truck driver in the background. So opening fire in a public area like this is even more unreasonable. What about Landros? Landeros is also, that's probably our second best case.

[00:21:04] Speaker 02:
Why is it second best?

[00:21:08] Speaker 02:
I mean, the district court didn't use either one of those. The district court uses Zion versus County of Orange.

[00:21:16] Speaker 00:
Yes, Landeros.

[00:21:17] Speaker 02:
And I looked at Zion v. County of Orange, so I was glad Judge Hollinson set us off in this idea because I was trying to find the case, and I frankly thought Landros v. City of Dustin might be better.

[00:21:34] Speaker 00:
Oh, a.k.a. H. Landeros?

[00:21:37] Speaker 02:
So in that case – I call it Landros, but I'm an Idaho boy.

[00:21:43] Speaker 02:
I'm just a yahoo, so you can use the term.

[00:21:45] Speaker 00:
So that case does have significant similarities. In that case, we also have an individual much more dangerous than the individual here because he had just been assaulting his girlfriend.

[00:21:59] Speaker 00:
He had gang ties. There was indication that he might have a gun. He's walking down the street. an officer pulls up, and he starts, the officer says, charging towards him.

[00:22:10] Speaker 00:
He is ordered to show his hands, and he pulls his hands out just like the suspect did in this case, and the officer shoots him. And in that case, the court found that because he was unarmed, a jury could find that it was unreasonable because he couldn't pose an immediate threat, being that he was unarmed.

[00:22:28] Speaker 00:
So that's a great case. Another good case for us is Longoria. that has some very helpful language, and it's a very similar circumstance in that the officer is claiming in that case that he believed an unarmed man had a gun and was in a shooter's stance, but the court analyzed the facts, looked at the video, and the Ninth Circuit found that viewing the facts in the light most favorable to plaintiff, a reasonable jury could conclude that the officer knew or should have known that the suspect was not armed, which is our primary argument here, that the other officer at the scene similar circumstances, was able to identify accurately that the suspect was not armed, that Alaniz was not armed, and therefore couldn't pose an immediate threat of death or severe bodily injury.

[00:23:13] Speaker 00:
And just to finish up on Longoria, the court concluded that the question of mistake of fact was a pure question of fact, not a question of law.

[00:23:25] Speaker 02:
What about, do we have any jurisdiction over these state law claims?

[00:23:30] Speaker 00:
No, on the qualified immunity issue, that doesn't extend to state law claims. Additionally, the state law claims have different elements to them, different standards, different jury instructions. They're not exactly overlapping, especially with recent changes to the battery instruction.

[00:23:49] Speaker 02:
So I don't believe that there's enough of an overlap to... But we did, the district court did grant summary judgment as to those claims, right?

[00:24:00] Speaker 00:
Denied summary judgment.

[00:24:01] Speaker 02:
Excuse me, denied summary judgment as those claims?

[00:24:04] Speaker 00:
True.

[00:24:06] Speaker 02:
But there wasn't any summary judgment granted or denied as to the run-of-the-mill Fourth Amendment claim. It's only as to the qualified immunity claim, right?

[00:24:22] Speaker 00:
Well, the court denied summary judgment for the Fourth Amendment claim on both qualified immunity grounds, on both The clearly established prong and the underlying violation prong.

[00:24:34] Speaker 02:
All right.

[00:24:37] Speaker 00:
So I wanted to just talk about the video for a minute. The case is cited by the defendant to show when a video clearly contradicts what the plaintiff's facts are and what the court determined are the facts of the case. are cases like Williams versus City of Sparks, where the video clearly contradicted what the district court was saying happened. They said that the car was not being attempted to be moved, but in the video you see the wheel turning.

[00:25:10] Speaker 00:
So it's just obviously not true. The facts of the case are contradicted by the video. Same with Scott v. Harris.

[00:25:18] Speaker 00:
So this doesn't raise to that level. The video is very consistent with everything the court says.

[00:25:35] Speaker 00:
And I wanted to talk about the – there's two issues that come up. We've been focusing on the shooter stance, but I think the case can be really determined more, and there was a lot of discussion about this at the district court level, by whether a reasonable officer would have thought that Alaniz was armed. So that's a problem on two levels. First, there's a credibility issue that during the incident itself, Officer Silva didn't say anything indicating that he believed he had seen a gun.

[00:26:07] Speaker 00:
So even though his partner had transitioned to nonlethal force, he didn't warn his partner saying, hey, the suspect has a gun, which you would think he would do. And after the incident, he walked up to his partner and said, what was that in his hands? Was that a gun? Both indicating that he may not have believed that in the moment anyways. And a jury could find that his credibility was not...

[00:26:33] Speaker 00:
intact and not believe him on that front. But even if we grant that he subjectively believed that he saw a gun, there's lots of evidence to say that it wouldn't be a reasonable mistake to think that he was armed. So the other officer at the scene, in similar circumstances, was able to identify that Alaniz was unarmed. And the object itself is a gray glasses container. This isn't like one of the cases where you have a replica weapon like Strickland or that had to do with a replica gun or napuk that had to do with a replica sword.

[00:27:08] Speaker 00:
This object doesn't have a trigger. It doesn't have a barrel.

[00:27:11] Speaker 01:
Why would somebody rush towards a police officer and pull out a gray glasses container? What would be the purpose of that?

[00:27:20] Speaker 00:
Well, I think the analysis for Fourth Amendment isn't so much what's going on in the head of the suspect as much as it is what are the circumstances being faced by the officer. So no matter what is going on in the head of a suspect, if you can see that they're unarmed, you know that they are not immediate threat of death.

[00:27:41] Speaker 04:
But the officer said they couldn't see if he was unarmed.

[00:27:45] Speaker 00:
Well, Officer Von Dracht, facing similar circumstances, could see that he was unarmed, which is evidenced by the fact that he transitioned from his firearm to his taser. And he said in deposition and in statements he would never transition to a taser if he thought he was being faced by something that looked like a gun.

[00:28:03] Speaker 00:
So he also described the object as too big and too wide to be a gun.

[00:28:11] Speaker 00:
So based on the other officer at the scene and his actions and the object itself, a jury could find that it was unreasonable to mistake Alaniz as armed and that a reasonable officer would have seen that he's unarmed. So then the question of the stance that he's in is not really material, because whether somebody is in a stance with their hands out or their hands down or to the side, if you can accurately perceive that they're unarmed, they don't pose an immediate threat of death or severe bodily injury, and it's unreasonable to use lethal force against them.

[00:28:52] Speaker 02:
I definitely wouldn't have helped your client if we'd looked at that video and we'd absolutely seen your client in a shooter's stance standing there for three minutes looking at him.

[00:29:09] Speaker 02:
That would have definitely helped the other side, wouldn't it?

[00:29:12] Speaker 00:
I think that could cut both ways because the more time he had to look, the more obvious it would be that he was unarmed. All right. And the object just looks nothing like a gun.

[00:29:19] Speaker 02:
When I said three minutes, that might have been too long.

[00:29:22] Speaker 00:
But anyway, okay. Another case to consider here is Longoria, which we talked about a little bit but goes straight to this issue of credibility of an officer saying that an unarmed person, you know, is pointing a gun at them.

[00:29:39] Speaker 00:
And the court finds that that's just a classic jury issue and denies qualified immunity on that basis.

[00:29:47] Speaker 04:
All right, counsel, you've exceeded your time. Thank you.

[00:29:52] Speaker 04:
Rebuttal.

[00:29:55] Speaker 03:
Thank you. Just a couple of comments.

[00:30:00] Speaker 03:
Scott clearly says that the court can consider the level of culpability of everybody, so that includes the decedent here. You can look at his conduct.

[00:30:16] Speaker 03:
With respect to what the other officer saw, his testimony is clear that he didn't know what the guy had. He said it could have been a knife, it could have been a gun. He thought it was too big to be a gun, but he clearly said several times, I didn't really know what it was. It could have been a knife, it could have been a gun.

[00:30:37] Speaker 03:
If you look at the purpose of qualified immunity, I don't think under any set of these facts that you could say my client was clearly incompetent or committed a known violation of the law.

[00:30:54] Speaker 04:
And remember, in the Fourth Amendment... Well, isn't that what the clearly established prong does to determine whether or not the officer committed a known violation? Because that's what we do with the clearly established prong.

[00:31:08] Speaker 03:
And in the context of force and under the Fourth Amendment, it's important to remember that facts dictate the result, and these cases often fall in the hazy border between acceptable and unreasonable force. And I clearly believe that this is a case that warrants qualified immunity.

[00:31:29] Speaker 04:
All right. Thank you, counsel. Thank you to both counsel. The case just argued is submitted for decision by the courts.

[00:31:38] Speaker 04:
That completes our calendar for today. We are on recess until 9.30 a.m. tomorrow morning.