Barnes v. Felix

What This Case Is About

A law enforcement officer pulled over Ashtian Barnes for suspected toll violations. When Barnes began to drive away, Officer Roberto Felix jumped onto the car’s doorsill and fired two shots, fatally striking Barnes. The Fifth Circuit applied its “moment-of-threat” rule, which limited the reasonableness analysis to only the two seconds when Felix was clinging to the moving car. The Supreme Court unanimously vacated that ruling, holding that the Fourth Amendment requires courts to examine the totality of the circumstances—not just the final instant before the trigger was pulled.

The Facts

Officer Roberto Felix, Jr., a law enforcement officer, pulled over Ashtian Barnes for suspected toll violations. Felix ordered Barnes to exit his vehicle, but Barnes began to drive away instead. As the car started moving forward, Felix jumped onto the vehicle’s doorsill. Two seconds after stepping onto the doorsill, Felix fired his first shot inside the car. Barnes was fatally hit but managed to stop the car. The entire sequence—from the car starting to move to it stopping—lasted approximately five seconds.

Barnes’s mother sued Felix on Barnes’s behalf under § 1983, alleging that Felix violated Barnes’s Fourth Amendment right to be free from excessive force.

The District Court granted summary judgment to Felix, applying the Fifth Circuit’s “moment-of-threat” rule. The Fifth Circuit affirmed, explaining that the rule required asking only whether the officer was “in danger at the moment of the threat that resulted in his use of deadly force.” Under this rule, events “leading up to the shooting” were “not relevant.” The court focused exclusively on the “two seconds” when Felix was clinging to a moving car and concluded that because Felix could reasonably have believed his life was in danger during those two seconds, the shooting was lawful.

What the Court Decided

The Supreme Court, in a unanimous opinion by Justice Kagan, vacated and remanded.

The Court reaffirmed that excessive force claims are analyzed under the Fourth Amendment’s “objective reasonableness” standard from Graham v. Connor. This requires examining the “totality of the circumstances” with “careful attention to the facts and circumstances” of each case—not an artificially restricted snapshot.

The Court’s key holding was that the totality-of-the-circumstances inquiry has no time limit. While the situation at the precise moment of the shooting will often matter most, earlier facts and circumstances may bear on how a reasonable officer would have understood and responded to later events. Prior events can show why a reasonable officer would perceive otherwise ambiguous conduct as threatening—or instead as innocuous.

The Court cited Plumhoff v. Rickard as a clear example: there, an officer’s use of deadly force was justified “at the moment” partly because of what had transpired during a preceding high-speed chase. The prior events provided essential context.

The moment-of-threat rule “prevents that sort of attention to context, and thus conflicts with this Court’s instruction to analyze the totality of the circumstances.” By limiting the view to the final two seconds, the lower courts could not consider the reasons for the stop, the earlier interactions between Barnes and Felix, or whether the final two seconds would look different when set within a longer timeframe.

Importantly, the Court did not address whether or how an officer’s own “creation of a dangerous situation” (such as jumping onto a moving car) factors into the reasonableness analysis. That question was not the basis of the petition for certiorari and was left for the lower courts on remand.

Justice Kavanaugh filed a concurrence, joined by Justices Thomas, Alito, and Barrett, emphasizing limits on the ruling.

Why This Case Matters for Your § 1983 Case

The full story matters. Courts must consider everything that happened leading up to the use of force, not just the final instant. If an officer escalated a routine traffic stop into a deadly confrontation, that context is relevant to whether the force was reasonable.

The “moment-of-threat” rule is dead. The Fifth Circuit can no longer apply its bright-line rule that limited the analysis to the instant of the shooting. This is a major shift that benefits plaintiffs in excessive-force cases, particularly in the Fifth Circuit.

The “officer-created danger” question remains open. The Court explicitly did not decide whether an officer who creates the dangerous situation—like jumping onto a moving car—should have that conduct weighed against him. This remains a live issue in the lower courts and could further benefit plaintiffs in future cases.

Totality of circumstances is the standard everywhere. This case confirms that no circuit may adopt a rigid temporal limitation on the Graham analysis. Every fact, from the initial encounter through the use of force, is potentially relevant.

Key Takeaway

The Supreme Court unanimously rejected the Fifth Circuit’s “moment-of-threat” rule and reaffirmed that excessive force claims must be evaluated under the totality of the circumstances—including events before the final moment of confrontation. An officer’s decision to use deadly force cannot be judged in a two-second vacuum; the full sequence of events provides essential context for determining whether the force was objectively reasonable under the Fourth Amendment.