(1) where officers must provide emergency assistance to an occupant of the home,<\/p>\n
(2) to engage in \u201chot pursuit\u201d of a fleeing suspect after<\/em> the commission of a felony,<\/p>\n (3) to enter a burning building to put out a fire and investigate its cause, or<\/p>\n (4) to prevent the imminent destruction of evidence.[2]<\/a><\/p>\nImportantly, a warrantless arrest at home is not justified where there is no showing of exigent circumstances leading to the arrest itself; that is, if the police created the alleged exigent circumstances, the exception could not apply.\n\nAccordingly, existing case<\/a> law<\/a> establishes that warrantless arrests\u2014in the absence of exigent circumstances and clear consent\u2014violate the Fourth Amendment.\n\nThe students\u2019 encounter with the police originated with a noncriminal noise complaint. None of those \u201cexigent circumstances\u201d appear in the video or are alleged by the police<\/a>, there appears to be a clear answer to our question: It was not legal for the police to enter the student apartment and it was not legal to effectuate the arrests under the circumstances.\n\nThat leads us to the second issue regarding the use of force. In Graham v. Connor<\/em><\/a>, the Supreme Court recognizes the long-standing right of police officers to use reasonable force (or threat of force) to arrest individuals. That means that \u201cnot every push or shove, even if it may seem unnecessary later,\u201d by the police is excessive and unconstitutional. Instead, the Court articulates a careful balance of the \u201cnature and quality of the intrusion on the individual\u2019s Fourth Amendment interests\u201d against the countervailing governmental interests at stake. Consequently, all claims of excessive police force are subject to this analysis.\n\nThe Graham<\/em> standard is one of objective reasonableness, without consideration of a police officer\u2019s subjective intent or motivation (whether malicious or in good faith). The Graham<\/em> standard measures this from the perspective of a reasonable police officer on the scene based on the totality of circumstances. That means \u201c20\/20 hindsight\u201d is irrelevant; rather, taking into account that circumstances are \u201coften tense, uncertain and rapidly evolving.\u201d\n\nUltimately, in determining reasonableness courts look to the so-called \u201cGraham <\/em>Factors\u201d, including:\n (1) the severity of the crime at issue,<\/p>\n (2) whether the suspect poses an immediate threat to the safety of the officers or others, and<\/p>\n (3) whether the suspect is actively resisting arrest or attempting to evade arrest by flight.<\/p>\n In McNally v. Eve<\/em><\/a>, a federal court applied this analysis to facts nearly analogous to this case. There, police were called to investigate a noise violation at a house party, finding the host wearing only a bathrobe. The host refused the police entrance without a warrant and attempted to turn away when threatened with arrest. The host was then tasered, brought to the ground, and arrested for obstruction of justice. The court found that violating the noise ordinance\u2014and even the alleged crime of obstruction\u2014was of minor severity; that the host, speaking calmly and clearly unarmed, posed no threat to the officer nor anyone else; and, that the host never resisted arrest, nor attempted to flee (even by turning away). Accordingly, the court held that the evidence was sufficient to find the officer\u2019s conduct objectively unreasonable under the circumstances, thus, the conduct was excessive and in violation of the Fourth Amendment.\n\nBased on the video evidence<\/a> and existing law, it\u2019s difficult to find the officers\u2019 conduct, in this case, reasonable. As in McNally<\/em>, the police responded to a noncriminal noise complaint and were refused entrance without a warrant by the unarmed students who made little or no attempt to resist or flee; then the students were tasered and repeatedly beaten with batons while clearly in police custody. (See \u201c00:34\u201300:37\u201d in the video<\/a>.) This is particularly significant considering that a suspect, being held on the ground and in police custody, cannot objectively be considered a threat requiring additional force<\/a>. Hence, under a Graham<\/em> analysis, the officers\u2019 conduct is almost certainly objectively unreasonable based on the circumstances, and therefore, unconstitutional.\n\nSo, the bottom line: the officers\u2019 conduct in the video certainly appear to be illegal.\n\n[1]<\/a> 5 Am. Jur. 2d Arrest \u00a7\u00a7 99, 102 (2015).\n\n[2]<\/a> 3A Charles Alan Wright, Andrew D. Leipold, Peter J. Henning, & Sarah N. Welling, Federal Practice and Procedure: Federal Rules of Criminal Procedure \u00a7 678 (4th ed. 2010).\n\n ","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" A recent post-game celebration in Tuscaloosa, Alabama received national attention after local news reported an altercation between University of Alabama students and local police. Videos of the incident, captured by bystanders, paint a violent picture as police tasered students multiple times, threw them to the ground, struck them with batons and dragged them outside of…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":2044,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[18,19,27],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2043","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-feature","category-feature-img","category-recent-stories"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/publications.lawschool.cornell.edu\/jlpp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2043","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/publications.lawschool.cornell.edu\/jlpp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/publications.lawschool.cornell.edu\/jlpp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/publications.lawschool.cornell.edu\/jlpp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/publications.lawschool.cornell.edu\/jlpp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2043"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/publications.lawschool.cornell.edu\/jlpp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2043\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/publications.lawschool.cornell.edu\/jlpp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/2044"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/publications.lawschool.cornell.edu\/jlpp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2043"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/publications.lawschool.cornell.edu\/jlpp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2043"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/publications.lawschool.cornell.edu\/jlpp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2043"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}