A Sad Supreme Court Case Highlights the Need for Smarter Second Amendment Jurisprudence

One day in October 2010, a man by the name of Angel Mendez was at his home, asleep on a futon next to his pregnant girlfriend. He’d built the home himself, and it almost redefined the word “modest.” It was little more than a one-room shack in the back yard of another person’s residence, with a blanket for a door. He awoke from his nap to see a person pulling back the blanket. He picked up his BB gun, and heard someone shout “gun!” before 15 rounds came flying at him. He was grievously injured, ultimately losing a leg. His unarmed girlfriend was also wounded.

It turns out the person who shot at Mendez was a police officer. Los Angeles County sheriff’s deputies Christopher Conley and Jennifer Peterson were looking for a parolee who was believed to be armed and dangerous. They did not have a warrant to search Mendez’s home, and they did not announce their presence or identity before accosting him. They entered, saw his BB gun, and started firing.

Lest you think this is a unique incident, in March I wrote about the terrible case of Andrew Scott. Like Mendez, Scott was an innocent man at home with his girlfriend when the police came. Like Mendez, he was mistaken by police for the armed and dangerous man they sought. They pounded on his door, but they didn’t have a warrant, and they didn’t announce themselves. Like any reasonable person, he was alarmed at the late-night disturbance and had no reason to expect the police were its source. So he grabbed his gun. When he opened his door, the police shot him dead in two seconds.

Neither Mendez nor Scott did anything wrong. They were both absolutely within their constitutional rights to pick up a weapon in response to the unidentified persons attempting to enter their homes. Yet Mendez, and Scott’s heirs, have so far lost in court, unable to collect any meaningful compensation from the police officers who shot them precisely because they exercised those rights.

Scott’s estate lost at the Eleventh Circuit Court of Appeals, which held that the doctrine of qualified immunity protected the officers from having to pay any compensation to the innocent victims of their mistaken and wrongful use of force. Mendez lost yesterday in the Supreme Court, which ruled unanimously against a quirky Ninth Circuit use-of-force rule that allowed excessive-force claims “where an officer intentionally or recklessly provokes a violent confrontation, if the provocation is an independent Fourth Amendment violation.” In other words, if the officers violated Mendez’s Fourth Amendment rights by unlawfully entering his home, they could be held liable for shooting Mendez even if the shooting itself might otherwise have been justified under existing law.