The Eighth Circuit granted summary judgment to a police officer accused of kneeing Iowa resident Charles McManemy in the head twenty to thirty times, ruling that the conduct was protected by qualified immunity. McManemy had sought recovery for damage to his eye, including vision impairment.
Police believed McManemy was delivering drugs, and turned on their sirens for him to pull over. But McManemy led police on a high speed chase across Grundy County, Iowa before eventually surrendering after police rammed his vehicle. McManemy left his car and lay face down on the road with arms and legs spread.
From there, the officers and McManemy tell two tales. The dash cam footage clearly shows Officer Tierney kicking and stomping McManemy’s leg, but the view is then obscured behind another officer. According to the police, McManemy resisted and they struggled to get him into handcuffs, but did not know what had caused the injury to his eye. McManemy claims what the officers interpreted as resistance was an involuntary response to their use of a taser, and that Officer Tierney then kneed McManemy in the face twenty to thirty times.
The court is required to accept the facts as presented by the non-moving party at the summary judgment stage. Although the Eighth Circuit analyzed the facts as though Officer Tierney had caused McManemy’s injury, it distinguished the circumstances from another case where an officer injured an arrestee by kneeing him in the head in part because McManemy “put up some resistance once captured.” In doing so, the court appears to endorse the police’s version of the facts, precluding debate on whether McManemy had in fact resisted arrest once he left his vehicle and granting summary judgment for Officer Tierney in spite of a key issue of fact remaining disputed between the parties.
The case also continues an unfortunate trend of decisions that require law be “clearly established” in an exceedingly narrow manner. Despite McManemy showing a prior case where another arrestee was injured by police in a near-identical manner being held as excessive force, the court still distinguished his case on minute details – some of which were contested by the parties – in order to conclude that the law was not yet settled regarding whether Officer Tierney’s actions could constitute excessive force.
Judge Stephen Grasz, who was appointed to the Eighth Circuit by President Trump in 2017, wrote a scathing dissent in which he notes that “a jury could find that Tierney struck McManey’s face when he…. offered no resistance.” Quoting Eighth Circuit precedent, Grasz asserts that “‘when a person is subdued and restrained with handfcuffs, a gratuitous and unnecessary act of violence …violates the Fourth Amendment.’”
McManemy’s case is yet another illustration of how qualified immunity makes it extraordinarily difficult for citizens to hold public officials accountable for their actions. And in granting summary judgment while McManemy still disputed facts central to the holding, the Eighth Circuit highlights another failure of the doctrine: its subtle corrosion of the safeguards of civil procedure.