(CN) — The U.S. Supreme Court declined to take up a case over two plainclothes police officers who beat Michigan college student James King during an attempted arrest after mistaking him for a fugitive in 2014.
It would have been the second time the high court heard the case, which stemmed from King’s 2020 civil lawsuit against the officers.
The case has put police officers' legal protections in the spotlight. This time, the court would have considered whether the lower court's dismissal of federal tort claims against the U.S. nullified King’s continued constitutional claims against the individual officers.
While the Supreme Court denied King a writ of certiorari, that fundamental question remains unanswered, Justice Sonia Sotomayor said Monday.
“In an appropriate future case, this Court should decide this issue,” Sotomayor wrote in a statement.
She noted that few circuit courts have analyzed whether the so-called “judgment bar” of the Federal Tort Claims Act should bar all claims arising in the same lawsuit.
“Indeed, applying the judgment bar in such circumstances produces unfair and inefficient results,” Sotomayor wrote. “James King now cannot litigate his claims that officers unconstitutionally stopped, searched, assaulted and hospitalized him, even though the Sixth Circuit previously concluded these claims could proceed to a jury trial.”
It was in 2014 that two plainclothes officers, Todd Allen and Douglas Brownback, mistook King for a fugitive and attempted to arrest him. King, a college student with no warrants, believed he was being mugged and ran from the officers, who beat him until he was unconscious.
King was hospitalized and charged with resisting arrest. A jury later acquitted him of the felony charges, and he filed suit, bringing torts claims against the United States and constitutional claims against the officers. But a Michigan federal court dismissed the case, claiming the officers had qualified immunity.
In his appeal to the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals, King dropped the torts claims. That allowed the lower court's dismissal to stand, and the government built its case around that result, arguing that the judgement bar in federal torts law precluded King's constitutional claims.
The Sixth Circuit initially ruled in King’s favor, finding that the lower court’s dismissal of the tort claims was based on jurisdiction and not on the merits of the case, which warranted jury review.
But the government petitioned the Supreme Court, which in 2021 remanded the case to the Sixth Circuit, where a panel determined that the Michigan court's dismissal was in fact based on the case's merits.
The Supreme Court left open the question of whether the Federal Tort Claims Act's judgment bar applied to all claims in the same lawsuit — in other words, it declined to rule on whether King could continue his constitutional claims against the officers, and instead asked the Sixth Circuit to weigh in.
A divided Sixth Circuit panel ultimately sided with the government, leaning on precedent that suggested that the judgment bar could apply to claims raised within the same case. The court effectively dismissed King’s claims and prompted his now-denied appeal to the high court.
In her statement Monday Sotomayor reiterated what she had said the first time the case came to the Supreme Court: “While many lower courts have uncritically held that the FTCA’s judgment bar applies to claims brought in the same action, there are reasons to question that conclusion.”
The issue “merits far closer consideration than it has thus far received,” she maintained on Monday.
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