The Supreme Court declined on Monday to hear Salazar-Limon v. City of Houston, a case surrounding an officer-involved shooting.
The case stems from a police officer that shot Ricardo Salazar-Limon, who was unarmed, in the back. The question the court refused to take up involved whether a court may rule for the officer simply by relying on the officer’s testimony that Salazar-Limon was reaching for his waist when he said he was just walking away.
Justice Sonia Sotomayor dissented from the court’s decision and was joined by Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg in blasting the high court’s decision.
“Our failure to correct the error made by the courts below leaves in place a judgment that accepts the word of one party over the word of another,” Sotomayor wrote in dissent. “It also continues a disturbing trend regarding the use of this court’s resources. We have not hesitated to summarily reverse courts for wrongly denying officers the protection of qualified immunity in cases involving the use of force.”
Justice Samuel Alito wrote a concurring opinion supporting the court’s judgment in response to Sotomayor, which was joined by Justice Clarence Thomas.
“The dissent acknowledges that summary judgment would be proper if the record compelled the conclusion that Salazar-Limon reached for his waist, but the dissent believes that, if the case had gone to trial, a jury could have reasonably inferred that Salazar-Limon did not reach for his waist — even if Salazar-Limon never testified to that fact,” Alito wrote. “The dissent’s conclusion is surely debatable. But in any event, this court does not typically grant a petition for a writ of certiorari to review a factual question of this sort, see this Court’s Rule 10, and I therefore concur in the denial of review here.”
Whether the issue of officer-involved shootings, which have garnered mass attention nationwide in recent years, ultimately comes before the high court again in the future remains to be seen.
