Supreme Court Seems Ready to Reject Limit on Excessive-Force Suits Against Police Officers

The Supreme Court seemed poised on Wednesday to reject a legal theory that puts tight limits on lawsuits seeking to hold police officers accountable for using deadly force.

The case arose, an appeals court judge wrote, from a commonplace occurrence. “A routine traffic stop,” the judge wrote, “has again ended in the death of an unarmed Black man.”

The question for the justices was how closely courts should confine their consideration to “the moment of threat” rather than the larger context of the encounter.

There was something like consensus that the theory was focused too narrowly on the seconds preceding a shooting.

“Everybody agrees it’s wrong,” Justice Neil M. Gorsuch said. “What’s the harm of saying that?”

The case started on an April afternoon in 2016, when Ashtian Barnes, 24, was driving on a highway outside Houston in a car his girlfriend had rented. He was on his way to pick up her daughter from day care.

Though Mr. Barnes did not know it, the car’s license plate was linked to unpaid tolls that had been incurred by another driver. Office Roberto Felix Jr. of the Harris County Constable’s Office pulled the car over based on those unpaid tolls.

When Mr. Barnes could not immediately locate his license and the car’s registration, the officer asked him to step out of the car. Instead, Mr. Barnes began to pull away, with the car door still open. Officer Felix drew his gun, jumped onto the moving car’s door sill and twice shot Mr. Barnes, as recorded on dash cam footage.

Mr. Barnes’s mother, Janice Hughes Barnes, sued, saying the officer’s use of force was unreasonable, violating the Fourth Amendment.

A unanimous three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit ruled last year in favor of the officer on what it said was a narrow question. “We may only ask whether Officer Felix was in danger ‘at the moment of the threat’ that caused him to use deadly force against Barnes,” Judge Patrick E. Higginbotham wrote.

Judge Higginbotham added a concurring opinion, writing only for himself. Had he been allowed to consider all of the circumstances surrounding the stop, he wrote, he could have ruled the other way.

“Given the rapid sequence of events and Officer Felix’s role in drawing his weapon and jumping on the running board,” the judge wrote, “the totality of the circumstances merits finding that Officer Felix violated Barnes’s Fourth Amendment right to be free from excessive force.”

At Wednesday’s argument in the case, Barnes v. Felix, No. 23-1239, some justices expressed concerns about second-guessing police officers’ split-second judgments. “An officer does not get the time we’ve spent here today to make the decision,” Justice Brett M. Kavanaugh said.

But most of the justices seemed inclined to allow the court to consider more than the seconds before the shooting.

“Would you be satisfied,” Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr. asked a lawyer for Ms. Barnes, “with a narrow holding that it is wrong for a court to look just at the moment of the threat?”

The lawyer, Nathaniel A.G. Zelinsky, said he would, though he added that “it would be helpful if the court makes clear that that means that you can look at the jump in addition to the shoot.”

Charles L. McCloud, a lawyer for Officer Felix, said the court should narrow its focus to the moment he used force. “He was clinging to the side of a fleeing suspect’s car, and Felix reasonably believed that his life was in imminent danger,” Mr. McCloud said. “That conclusion should end this case.”

In rebuttal, Mr. Zelinsky disagreed. “You have to look at the whole picture,” he said, “and here that’s more than just two seconds.”