Officers fired 13 rounds at a car that was moving slower than walking speed. The plaintiffs tell the Fifth Circuit that the city’s failure to train its officers should be tried by a jury, regardless of qualified immunity.
(CN) – Genevive Dawes and her husband were sleeping in a parked car in January 2017 when six Dallas police officers surrounded them.
As the 21-year-old Dawes slowly backed out of the parking spot at approximately 3 mph, two officers fired 13 shots through the passenger window, hitting her four times and killing her. Her husband, 23-year-old Virgilio Rosales, was injured but survived.
Officers said the situation turned dangerous in seconds. Responding to a call about a suspicious vehicle, they discovered that behind the license plates, the car had been reported stolen. After repeated commands went unnoticed, Dawes maneuvered the car into the tight space. Two officers fired, believing they or their colleagues faced an immediate threat.
The Dawes estate filed its civil rights lawsuit in 2017, but the case was delayed first while one of the officers was tried and acquitted of aggravated assault, and again after the plaintiffs appealed a lower court ruling that granted qualified immunity to individual officers.
After the case was remanded to resolve constitutional claims against the city, it returned to the Fifth Circuit for a second time on Tuesday. There, the plaintiffs argued that the lower court erred in granting summary judgment to the City of Dallas on their failure-to-train claims. The central legal battle now revolves around the interplay between qualified immunity and municipal liability.
Attorney Shelby White, who represents the estates of Dawes and Rosales, asked the panel to reverse, arguing the Fifth Circuit’s earlier ruling — asserting qualified immunity for officers because the law was not “clearly established” – should not automatically bar claims against the city.
Answering a question from U.S. District Judge Stuart Kyle Duncan, an appointee of Donald Trump, White told the panel that Bustillos v. El Paso County Hospital Districtheavily relied upon by the trial court and the district court, is distinguishable and not controlling.
“We’re talking about training for officers who use deadly weapons, using weapons,” White said. “This is a very well-established precedent that officers should be trained on.”
White cited other cases to argue that a pattern of unconstitutional conduct can create deliberate indifference, regardless of whether the specific incident violated clearly defined law.
U.S. District Judge Stephen A. Higginson, a Barack Obama appointee, repeatedly pressed White for her stronger authority. White originally cited the Fourth Circuit Atkinson v. Godfrey before landing in the Ninth Circuit Horton v. City of Santa Maria as the best example of a model case where municipal liability survived the absence of clearly defined incident-specific law.
City attorney Cheves Ligon disputed this Bustillo remains “good law, and its holding was not on a very narrow set of facts. Its holding was actually quite broad.”
Ligon argued that without clearly defined law, the city could not have been deliberately indifferent as a matter of law. He emphasized that the internal Dallas Police Department policies violated by the officers are not official “policy” and are irrelevant to the Fourth Amendment analysis.
The panel also investigated the fundamental constitutional question: whether the officers’ use of deadly force was objectively reasonable. White emphasized the vehicle’s slow speed and lack of immediate threat. The shooting was captured on body cameras worn by police. footage of which has since been released.
“When you look at the actual facts of this case, the actual risks, this car is going 3 mph, which is less than walking speed,” White said. “None of the officers are in danger.”
Ligon retreated, asking the court to look at the events through the eyes of the officers at this point.
“The car was moving, the car had hit some things after being told to stop … It doesn’t take half a second to accelerate faster. If she had done that, they would have died.”
In opposition, White turned to Supreme Court precedent in Owen v. City of Independencearguing that municipal liability serves a different purpose than qualified immunity.
“When the issue is justice to the citizen versus justice to the municipality, the citizen always wins,” she said.
The lower court case has been assigned to U.S. District Judge Brantley Starr, a Trump appointee in the Northern District of Texas. Tuesday’s appeals panel also included Senior U.S. District Judge Carolyn Dineen King, a Jimmy Carter appointee. The court did not say when it would rule.
Subscribe to our free newsletters
Our weekly newsletter Closing arguments provides the latest on ongoing trials, major litigation and decisions in courts around the US and the world, while monthly Under the lights feeds legal dirt from Hollywood, sports, Big Tech and the arts.
