Dan Withers v. City of Cleveland

640 F. App'x 416
CourtCourt of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit
DecidedJanuary 13, 2016
Docket15-3110
StatusUnpublished
Cited by8 cases

This text of 640 F. App'x 416 (Dan Withers v. City of Cleveland) is published on Counsel Stack Legal Research, covering Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit primary law. Counsel Stack provides free access to over 12 million legal documents including statutes, case law, regulations, and constitutions.

Bluebook
Dan Withers v. City of Cleveland, 640 F. App'x 416 (6th Cir. 2016).

Opinions

MERRITT, Circuit Judge.

Cleveland police officer Daniel Zola, in the execution of an arrest warrant, shot and killed Daniel Withers, an unarmed twenty-one-year-old man, in a basement closet at the home Withers shared with his grandmother. Withers’s parents sued the city and Zola under 42 U.S.C. § 1983, asserting a constitutional violation of Withers’s Fourth Amendment right to be free from unreasonable seizure. After limited discovery, the District Court entered summary judgment in favor of Zola and granted the City of Cleveland’s motion to dismiss Withers’s municipal liability claim. It found that Zola acted reasonably as a matter of law when he shot and killed Withers. As in our recent Cleveland police shooting case, Lopez v. City of Cleveland, 625 Fed. Appx. 742 (6th Cir.2015), we conclude that there is a material dispute of fact that requires a jury trial under the Seventh Amendment (“the right to a trial by jury shall be preserved ... according to the rules of the common law”). U.S. Const. amend. VII. We follow the same standards announced in the Lopez v. City of Cleveland case:

“In resolving questions of qualified immunity at summary judgment, courts engage in a two-pronged inquiry.” Tolan [v. Cotton, —U.S.-,] 134 S.Ct. [1861,] 1865 [188 L.Ed.2d 895 (2014)]. Under the first prong, a court must determine whether “the facts, ‘[t]aken in the light most favorable to the party asserting the injury, ... show the officer’s conduct violated a [federal] right [.]’ ” Id. (quoting Saucier v. Katz, 533 U.S. 194, 201, 121 S.Ct. 2151, 150 L.Ed.2d 272 (2001)). Under the second prong, a court must determine whether the right was “clearly established” at the time of the alleged violation. Id. at 1866. “[U]nder either prong, courts may not resolve genuine disputes of fact in favor of the party seeking summary judgment.” Id. This is “an. application of the more general rule that a ‘judge’s function’ at summary judgment is not ‘to weigh the evidence and determine the-truth of the matter but to determine whether there is a genuine issue for trial.’ ” Id. (quoting Anderson [v. Liberty Lobby ], 477 U.S. [242], 249 [106 S.Ct. 2505, 91 L.Ed.2d 202 (1986) ]).

Lopez, 625 Fed.Appx. at 745.

Because the District Court improperly disregarded the factual disputes underly-[418]*418mg Withers’s claim against Zola, we REVERSE the court’s grant of summary-judgment in Zola’s favor and REMAND for further proceedings consistent with this opinion.

I. Facts

On the night of September 30, 2010, Cleveland police officers Thomas Shoulders, David Shapiro, and Daniel Zola executed an arrest warrant for Daniel Withers, an armed bank robbery suspect who had allegedly threatened to “blow [the teller’s] head off.” The officers arrived at the home Withers shared with his grandmother and saw a man that they presumed to be Withers in the upstairs window. After the man disappeared from the window, the officers obtained Withers’s grandmother’s consent to search the house. The three officers cleared the upper floors of the house, leaving only the basement to be searched. Once backup arrived to secure the perimeter, Shoulders, Shapiro, and Zola conducted a search of the basement.

Shoulders entered the basement first, followed by Shapiro and Zola, respectively. Because only a single light illuminated the basement, the officers used their flashlights to provide additional lighting during the search. After entering the basement, the officers repeatedly ordered Withers to come out and “show us your hands.” Having cleared the rest of the house, the officers zeroed in on the last place they had yet to search, the built-out closet in the far left corner of the basement. Shoulders positioned himself by the closed closet door while Zola moved into a tactical position at a twenty to thirty degree angle from the door. [R. 38, Page ID #: 737, 739-40; R. 38-1, Page ID #: 783]. Shapiro stood in the area behind Zola.

From this point on, the facts are in dispute. Zola testified that when Shoulders opened the door, Zola saw a body and “an arm [that] flew up real fast” on the right side of the body. According to Zola’s testimony, he fired a single deadly shot into the person’s chest “[l]ess than a split second” later. At the time Zola fired at the figure in the closet, he saw no weapon, and because of the angle of Zola’s position in relation to the closet, Zola was unable to see the left side of the person’s body. [R. 38, Page ID #: 739-40; R. 38-1, Page ID #: 849].

A neighbor named Dennis Daniels contradicted Zola’s testimony by offering a different account of the shooting. After Withers had been removed from the house, Daniels overheard a conversation in the front yard of Withers’s home between two Cleveland police officers, a superior officer and another male officer who had been inside the basement when Withers was shot. Daniels observed and heard the superior officer, who was not present at the shooting, ask the junior officer, who was present at the shooting, what happened inside the basement. Apparently the junior officer was Zola. He stated that he saw Withers, “we [the officers] said ‘get down fucker, get down fucker,”’ and then he shot Withers.

In the moments after the shooting, Zola and his colleagues searched the person for a firearm; the person was unarmed. The person was identified as Daniel Withers. Withers later died from his gunshot wound.

Withers’s parents sued Zola and the City of Cleveland under 42 U.S.C. § 1983, asserting a violation of Withers’s constitutional rights, including his right under the Fourth Amendment to be free from unreasonable seizure. After limited discovery, Zola moved for summary judgment. The District Court granted summary judgment in favor of- Zola after finding, as a matter of law, that Zola acted reasonably when he shot Withers. Withers v. City of Cleve[419]*419land, No. 1:11CV2004, 2014 WL 1761925, at *1 (N.D.Ohio May 1, 2014). Because the District Court found that Zola’s use of deadly force was reasonable as a matter of law, it did not specifically address the qualified immunity question of whether the constitutional right at issue was clearly established. Id. at *5. Having found no underlying constitutional violation, the court dismissed Withers’s claim against the City of Cleveland.

II. Analysis

We set out the standard for qualified immunity in the introductory paragraphs above. Qualified immunity in cases involving claims of excessive use of deadly force is difficult to determine on summary judgment because an officer’s liability turns upon the Fourth Amendment’s reasonableness test. Sova v. City of Mt. Pleasant, 142 F.3d 898, 902 (6th Cir.1998); see also Lytle v. Bexar County, Tex., 560 F.3d 404, 411 (5th Cir.2009) (quoting Abraham v. Raso, 183 F.3d 279, 290 (3d Cir.1999) (stating that “reasonableness under the Fourth Amendment should frequently remain a question for the jury”)).

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Bluebook (online)
640 F. App'x 416, Counsel Stack Legal Research, https://law.counselstack.com/opinion/dan-withers-v-city-of-cleveland-ca6-2016.