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10-1213 McAllister v. Price

By: dmc-admin//August 16, 2010//

10-1213 McAllister v. Price

By: dmc-admin//August 16, 2010//

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Civil Rights
Excessive force; qualified immunity

Where an officer forcibly removed a man from his car who was physically unable to obey commands, and in the midst of convulsions, and threw him to the ground with the full force of his body weight, the officer is not entitled to qualified immunity on the driver's excessive force claim.

"McAllister has introduced evidence from eyewitnesses to suggest that McAllister did not appear intoxicated but was rather convulsing and appeared to be in need of medical attention. Second, the degree of force the officers intended to apply in Smith was significantly less than the force allegedly used by Price here. In Smith, the two officers who initially responded did not slam Smith into the ground with the force necessary to cause injury, but rather attempted to use a 'straight arm bar' to pull Smith from the car to the ground. Indeed, even after Smith was mistakenly tackled (because of the reasonable belief of the third officer that Smith was struggling with the other police officers), he suffered only a bump on the head. Here, there is evidence to suggest that as a result of the intentional, rather than accidental, use of force, McAllister suffered a broken hip and a bruised lung. Smith, which upheld the use of minimal force to extract an unresponsive driver from a vehicle, would not suggest to a reasonable officer that he may slam an unresponsive, convulsing driver into the ground with force sufficient to break the driver's hip and place his knee on the driver's back with enough force to bruise his lung. Such conduct goes beyond the bounds of the plaintiff's clearly established Fourth Amendment rights and thus deprives the defendant of qualified immunity."

Affirmed.

10-1213 McAllister v. Price

Appeal from the United States District Court for the Northern District of Indiana, Van Bokkelen, J., Flaum, J.

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