Mills v. Fenger

216 F. App'x 7
CourtCourt of Appeals for the Second Circuit
DecidedDecember 26, 2006
DocketNo. 03-0048-PR
StatusPublished
Cited by22 cases

This text of 216 F. App'x 7 (Mills v. Fenger) is published on Counsel Stack Legal Research, covering Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit primary law. Counsel Stack provides free access to over 12 million legal documents including statutes, case law, regulations, and constitutions.

Bluebook
Mills v. Fenger, 216 F. App'x 7 (2d Cir. 2006).

Opinion

SUMMARY ORDER

Plaintiff-appellant Gabriel Mills appeals from the January 6, 2003 judgment of the district court granting summary judgment to defendants Lieutenant Fenger, Detective Dill, and Detective Hassett (the “officers”) on Mills’s claims of excessive force and denial of medical care, which he brought pursuant to 42 U.S.C § 1983. Mills v. Fenger, No. 98-ev-0034E, 2003 WL 251953 (W.D.N.Y. Jan.3, 2003). We assume the parties’ familiarity with the underlying facts of the case, its procedural history and the arguments on appeal.

Mills claims that the officers used excessive force at three separate points during his arrest. First, Mills challenges the level of force Dill used upon their initial encounter in the bedroom of his apartment. According to Mills, after Dill informed him he was under arrest, Mills stood up from the bed but did not resist in any way. Mills alleges that Dill then “grabbed [him] and lifted [him] and [they] both fell to the floor” or “grabbed [him] and threw [him] down” with enough force to rupture his patellar tendon. Dill, by contrast, contends that as he entered the bedroom, Mills jumped on him from behind the door and tackled him, and that Dill—soon joined by Hassett and Fenger—then struggled to subdue Mills.

When considering a government official’s qualified immunity claim, we ask first whether, “[t]aken in the light most favorable to the party asserting the injury, ... the facts alleged show the officer’s conduct violated a constitutional right.” Saucier v. Katz, 538 U.S. 194, 201, 121 S.Ct. 2151, 150 L.Ed.2d 272 (2001). We analyze claims of excessive force arising in the context of an arrest under the Fourth Amendment’s objective reasonableness test, paying “careful attention to the facts and circumstances of each particular case, including the severity of the crime at issue, whether the suspect poses an immediate threat to the safety of the officers or others, and whether he is actively resisting arrest or attempting to evade arrest by flight.” Graham v. Connor, 490 U.S. 386, 394, 396, 109 S.Ct. 1865, 104 L.Ed.2d 443 (1989). Accepting Mills’s account that he merely stood up but did not resist in any way, we cannot say that, even if Dill believed Mills may have been armed, the level of force Dill used was reasonable as a matter of law. See, e.g., Curry v. City of Syracuse, 316 F.3d 324, 332 (2d Cir.2003) (stating that plaintiff may prevail on excessive force claim “if he is able to show that [the officer] used more force than was necessary to subdue him”).

The officers claim that even if the force used was excessive, they are nonetheless entitled to qualified immunity because they did not violate any “clearly established” right, Saucier, 533 U.S. at 201, 121 S.Ct. 2151. “The right of an individual not to be subjected to excessive force has long been clearly established.” Calamia v. New York, 879 F.2d 1025, 1036 (2d Cir.1989). Because whether force is excessive turns on its reasonableness, we have held that “[s]ummary judgment on qualified immunity grounds is not appro[9]*9priate when there are facts in dispute that are material to a determination of reasonableness.” Thomas v. Roach, 165 F.3d 137, 143 (2d Cir.1999); see also Kerman v. City of New York, 261 F.3d 229, 239 (2d Cir.2001) (reversing grant of judgment as a matter of law on excessive force claim because “the contrasting accounts ... present factual issues as to the degree of force actually employed and its reasonableness”). Because the parties’ accounts differ on the important questions of whether Mills resisted arrest and whether his actions threatened the officer or required the force used, summary judgment on qualified immunity is inappropriate.

Second, Mills alleges that excessive force was used when the officers dragged him down three flights of stairs by pulling on the handcuffs they had used to fasten his hands in front of him. The officers, for their part, assert that Mills walked down the stairs of his own accord. The district court found that even under Mills’s version of events, the officers were justified in dragging Mills down the stairs because of the “unpredictable environment” and Mills’s “uncooperativeness.” Mills, 2003 WL 251953, at *3 n. 16. In doing so, however, the district court improperly failed to credit Mills’s claim that he was physically unable to walk, and imputed to the officers a perceived threat to their safety from other individuals in the apartment without any testimony to that effect from the officers themselves (indeed, the officers’ testimony that Mills walked down the stairs on his own would support the opposite inference). In light of Mills’s account that he had informed the officers of his injury, offered to hop down the stairs on one leg, and was later assisted by the officers in hopping from the building to the patrol car, we cannot conclude that it was reasonable, as a matter of law, for the officers to have dragged Mills down three flights of stairs by his handcuffs. See Kerman, 261 F.3d at 233, 239-40 (finding judgment for defendants as a matter of law on excessive force claim inappropriate when arresting officers, inter alia, dragged unresisting man up stairs and removed him from building in a restraint bag). And as with the previous incident, factual disputes “as to the degree of force actually employed and its reasonableness,” id. at 239, including a dispute about whether any force was used at all, preclude the grant of summary judgment.

Third, Mills claims that Dill used excessive force when he pointed a gun to Mills’s head and said, “I ought to blow your brains out and save these taxpayers money.” In his deposition, however, Mills said only that he “remember[ed] [Dill] taking the gun and” making the comment. Circuit law could very well support Mills’s claim that a gunpoint death threat issued to a restrained and unresisting arrestee represents excessive force;1 however, giv[10]*10en the lack of a factual predicate for the claim that the gun was pointed at Mills’s head and the resulting vagueness as to what precisely Dill did with the gun, we cannot find that the comment was sufficiently threatening to constitute excessive force.

Finally, Mills claims that the officers unconstitutionally denied him medical care for his ruptured patellar tendon. When such claims arise in the course of pretrial arrest and detainment, we evaluate them under the Due Process Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment, rather than the Eighth Amendment. Weyant v. Okst, 101 F.3d 845, 856 (2d Cir.1996). To prevail on such a claim, a plaintiff must demonstrate: (1) that an official “denied [him] treatment needed to remedy a serious medical condition,” and (2) that the official did so “because of his deliberate indifference to that need.” Id.

Unlike the district court, we cannot conclude as a matter of law that a ruptured patellar tendon is not a “serious medical condition.” In the Eighth Amendment context,2 we have defined a “sufficiently serious” injury to include one which causes “extreme pain,” Hathaway v. Coughlin,

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Bluebook (online)
216 F. App'x 7, Counsel Stack Legal Research, https://law.counselstack.com/opinion/mills-v-fenger-ca2-2006.