CONSTITUTIONAL INTERPRETATIONS

decided May 15, 2025

In applying the Fourth Amendment’s (and the 14^th Amendment’s) prohibition against “unreasonable searches and seizures” (U.S. Const. Amendment IV), several federal courts apply a rule known as the “Moment of Threat Rule,” in which the judge or the jury considering a police officer’s use of deadly force against a suspect may only consider the parties’ interactions between the time a deadly attack is threatened by the suspect, and the time a deadly attack is actually carried out by the police officer. In this case, the Court unanimously ruled that the “Moment of Threat Rule” illegally curtailed the scope of the evidence necessary to understand the reasonableness or the unreasonableness of a police officer’s use of deadly force against a suspect. The Court basically told the lower courts to discard the “Moment of Threat Rule.”

Comment: A fair resolution to a claim that the police used excessive force in attempting to arrest a suspect requires a full understanding of the context of the attempted arrest, both before and after the injurious act, such as a police shooting. Here, the Court relied on its own caselaw precedent that required consideration of the “totality of circumstances” in an excessive force case against police officers. That precedent rested comfortably on the unambiguous text and structure of the Fourth and Fourteenth Amendments.