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Civil Rights — excessive force

By: WISCONSIN LAW JOURNAL STAFF//February 6, 2014//

Civil Rights — excessive force

By: WISCONSIN LAW JOURNAL STAFF//February 6, 2014//

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United States Court of Appeals For the Seventh Circuit

Civil

Civil Rights — excessive force

Where there is no evidence that a police officer in a high-speed chase made contact with the vehicle in which the plaintiff was fleeing, summary judgment was properly granted to the officer on the plaintiff’s excessive force claim.

“If the front of the police car hit Wourms’s car hard enough to cause the car to swerve off the highway, there would be marks of collision on both vehicles. There were scratches on both Wourms’s rear right bumper and the front left bumper of the police car—potential signs of a PIT maneuver. But the three expert witnesses—one of them the plaintiff’s—submitted reports stating that the scratches on Wourms’s bumper didn’t match those on the police car in height and direction and so could not have been produced by a collision between the two cars. The experts pointed out as well that none of the paint on Wourms’s car had been found on the police car (or vice versa), that there was no debris on the road at the place where tire marks indicated that Wourms had begun to swerve, that the police car had left no tire marks on the road (indicating that it hadn’t slowed suddenly, as it would have done had it collided with Wourms’s car), and that dents and scratches had been noticed on the police car’s front bumper before the day of the accident. Two of the experts opined (without contradiction from the third, who was Wourms’s expert) that, to close the gap between the two cars when the chase was reaching its climax shortly before Wourms crashed, the officer would have had to gun his engine to more than 134 miles per hour—and his car couldn’t go that fast.”

Affirmed.

13-1178 Wourms v. Fields

Appeal from the United States District Court for the Western District of Wisconsin, Crabb, J., Posner, J.

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