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Lower courts had been divided over whether judges must limit their scrutiny of challenges to police shootings to the seconds preceding them.
May 15, 2025Updated 1:35 p.m. ET
The Supreme Court on Thursday rejected a legal theory that put 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 of whether deadly force was justified to “the moment of threat” — the seconds preceding a police shooting — rather than the larger context of the encounter.
Justice Elena Kagan, writing for a unanimous court, said that considering only the moment of threat was too limited. “To assess whether an officer acted reasonably in using force,” she wrote, “a court must consider all the relevant circumstances, including facts and events leading up to the climactic moment.”
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. Officer Roberto Felix Jr. of the Harris County Constable’s Office pulled the car over based on those unpaid tolls.
