Tennessee v. Garner
The Supreme Court ruled that police officers cannot shoot a fleeing suspect just to keep him from escaping unless the officer has good reason to believe the suspect is dangerous — either armed or likely to seriously hurt someone. The Court struck down a Tennessee law that let officers use deadly force against any fleeing felon, including unarmed and nonviolent ones.
The decision means police nationwide can no longer treat all felony flight the same way; the seriousness of the crime alone, like burglary, isn't enough to justify deadly force against someone who doesn't appear to pose a physical threat.
“A police officer may not seize an unarmed, nondangerous suspect by shooting him dead.”
The Court's core holding on when police may not use deadly force to stop a fleeing suspect.
How it got here: A federal trial court upheld the shooting as constitutional; the Sixth Circuit reversed, finding the Tennessee law unconstitutional; Tennessee and the city appealed to the Supreme Court.
The Case in Depth
What happened
A Memphis police officer shot and killed Edward Garner, an unarmed 15-year-old, as he tried to climb a fence to flee after breaking into a house at night. The officer could not tell if Garner was armed but believed he would otherwise escape. Garner's father sued the officer, the police department, and the city, claiming the shooting violated Garner's constitutional rights.
The question before the Court
Can police shoot an unarmed, fleeing burglary suspect just to stop him from escaping, even if he poses no danger to anyone?
The Court's answer
No — the Court ruled that police cannot shoot an unarmed, nondangerous fleeing suspect just to prevent his escape. Deadly force is only a reasonable Fourth Amendment seizure when the officer has probable cause to believe the suspect poses a significant threat of death or serious physical injury to the officer or to others.
Because the officer here had no reason to believe the 15-year-old suspect, who had broken into a house and was fleeing, was armed or dangerous, using deadly force to stop his escape was unconstitutional. The Tennessee law authorizing deadly force against any fleeing felon was therefore struck down as applied to nondangerous suspects, though the Court said the law could still validly apply to genuinely dangerous suspects.
Curious how the Court got there? See the step-by-step legal reasoning →
Why it matters
Police departments across the country must retrain officers and revise policies on when shooting a fleeing suspect is legally allowed, since laws in many states that broadly permitted deadly force against any fleeing felon are now unconstitutional. Families of unarmed suspects shot while fleeing gain a clearer constitutional claim, while officers face tighter, though not unworkable, limits on split-second use-of-force decisions.
What changes now
The case is sent back for further proceedings on whether the city of Memphis can be held liable under the standard set out in an earlier case governing when local governments answer for their employees' constitutional violations. This is a final merits ruling on the constitutional question, though the city's ultimate liability and the validity of the police department's own internal policy remain open for the lower courts to resolve.
What this does not decide
The Court does not decide whether the Memphis Police Department's own internal policy (which was stricter than the state statute) was constitutional, nor does it resolve the city's potential liability, which depends on a separate municipal-liability standard left for the lower courts on remand.
Concurrences and dissents
Dissent — Justice O'Connor
Justice O'Connor argued the majority disregarded the serious, inherently dangerous nature of nighttime residential burglary and the long history of the common-law fleeing-felon rule, still followed by nearly half the states. She would have upheld the shooting as reasonable given the officer's split-second decision and the suspect's refusal to halt. She also criticized the majority's new standard as vague, offering no guidance on which weapons or circumstances establish sufficient danger, inviting a flood of litigation over future split-second police decisions.
How the Court got there
The legal reasoning, step by step
- The Court applied its established Fourth Amendment balancing framework, which weighs how much a search or seizure intrudes on a person's rights against the government's need to conduct it, to decide whether shooting a fleeing suspect is a reasonable way to make an arrest.
- The Court identified the suspect's interest in his own life as the most severe kind of intrusion possible, since deadly force forecloses any chance of a trial and permanently ends the person's life.
- Weighing that against the government's interest in effective law enforcement, the Court found that the threat of deadly force does not meaningfully improve arrest rates for nondangerous suspects, so the added intrusion isn't justified merely to catch someone who might otherwise get away.
- The Court considered but declined to give controlling weight to the old common-law rule allowing deadly force against any fleeing felon, reasoning that the rule developed when nearly all felonies were capital crimes and weapons were primitive — conditions that no longer hold today.
- Applying this balance to the facts, the Court concluded that because the officer had no reason to think Garner was armed or dangerous, shooting him to prevent escape from a nonviolent burglary was not a reasonable use of force.
- The Court therefore held that deadly force to stop a fleeing suspect is only reasonable when the officer has probable cause to believe the suspect poses a significant threat of death or serious injury to the officer or others.