BREAKING: Public Accountability Wins Deadly Force Case
Friends,
The Second Circuit just issued its decision in Fagon v. Kiely, a Public Accountability case—and we won. The facts of this case are horrifying: Police in New Britain, Connecticut, tried to arrest our client’s son on suspicion of armed robbery. But they were all in plainclothes, they were mostly in unmarked cars, and they didn’t use their lights or sirens. They just cornered his car in a cul-de-sac, got out of their vehicles, and started pointing guns and shouting at him. He tried to flee. Before he’d gotten more than a couple of blocks away, they emptied 28 rounds at his car. One went into the back of his head and one into his neck. He died at the scene. He was 20 years old.
The district court denied the officers’ request for qualified immunity. They took an immediate appeal, and the family’s lawyers brought us in to handle matters in the Second Circuit. We argued that the appellate court couldn’t even hear the case—that it lacked jurisdiction over the officers’ factual arguments about what happened and why they did what they did. The Second Circuit agreed with our analysis and dismissed the officers’ appeal.
The right to an “interlocutory” appeal—before a case is over—is one of the many ways that qualified immunity protects police at the expense of everyone else. The ordinary rule of federal civil procedure is that you don’t get to appeal until the case is over. But when police are involved, the Supreme Court has created special exception, allowing officers to appeal a denial of qualified immunity immediately. This right of immediate appeal can bog down civil-rights cases for years and even “starve them out” entirely. We’ve argued elsewhere that this special rule should be overruled. But until then, our victory in Fagon preserves an important boundary: Interlocutory appeals of qualified-immunity denials must be limited to purely legal arguments—or risk being dismissed outright.
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Thanks for reading,
Athul K. Acharya
Founder & Executive Director
Public Accountability
