Around 3 AM on March 3, 2019, Roy Anthony Scott was in crisis. Scott, a 65-year-old Black man with a history of mental illness, believed that multiple assailants were outside his home—an apartment in a senior living complex in Las Vegas, Nevada—and that one of the would-be intruders may be armed with a saw. He called 911 and asked for help.
What Scott received instead was a visit from Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department Officers Kyle Smith and Theodore Huntsman. By the end of the encounter, Scott was dead.
On Monday, the Supreme Court issued an order that casts doubt on whether Smith and Huntsman can be held accountable for Scott’s death. In an unsigned order in Smith v. Scott, the Court vacated a lower court’s ruling that the officers were not entitled to qualified immunity—a contentious legal doctrine that lets cops avoid being put on trial for violating constitutional rights unless a prior court decision “clearly established” that their conduct was illegal. Only the three liberal justices noted their dissent.
Monday’s order is at least the second time in as many months that the conservative justices have summarily rejected a lower court’s ruling that denied a cop’s request for qualified immunity. In the previous case, Zorn v. Linton, the Court in an unsigned opinion stressed that precedents need a “high degree of specificity” to make it “clear” to officers which actions violate the law. Basically, under Zorn, it’s not enough for a court to say, “Don’t use excessive force,” or even “Don’t use this particular maneuver.” Courts have to say, “Don’t use this particular maneuver in these particular conditions.” To be safe, they should probably specify the day of the week.
By refusing to hold officers liable for violating rights unless other officers have previously been held liable in identical circumstances, the Court’s qualified immunity jurisprudence effectively nullifies those rights altogether.
When Smith and Huntsman arrived at Scott’s residence and knocked on the door, Scott yelled that there were people in his apartment, and said that the officers should break down the door. The officers said they wouldn’t do so since they didn’t hear anyone else inside, and ordered Scott to open up. After a couple minutes of knocking, Smith told Huntsman, “This is a 421A for sure,” using the department code for a mentally ill person.
While Scott continued to hunker down in his apartment, Smith and Huntsman debated what to do. “I ain’t going in there. That’s too sketchy,” said Smith. Huntsman agreed and said, “That dude’s wacky.” Huntsman shined a flashlight through Scott’s second-floor window and confirmed no one else was in the apartment, and said that Scott had a “crazed look in his eye.”
Eventually, Scott opened the door and walked out of the apartment, holding a metal pipe. Smith pointed his gun at Scott and told him to drop it. Scott did so immediately. “What am I supposed to do?” he then asked, twice. The officers directed him to stand near a wall. Scott again did as ordered. After Huntsman asked Scott if he had any other weapons, Scott handed over a knife he had in his front pocket, and said he was sorry. He had paranoid schizophrenia, he explained, and he had weapons because he thought people were after him.
Then the officers ordered Scott to turn around and face the wall. Scott asked twice if officers could just put him in the police car instead, but Smith again directed Scott to turn and face the wall. “I’m paranoid, I can’t turn around,” Scott replied; if he did so, he worried, someone might get him. “I am scared,” Scott told the officers.
“You’re fine,” said Smith. “We are out here to help you.”
The officers then grabbed hold of Scott’s arms. Scott begged them to stop, and as Smith and Huntsman tried to handcuff him, the three struggled to the ground. The cops held Scott down as he thrashed and screamed, “Please leave me alone,” over and over. At first, the officers held Scott down on his back, but then they rolled him over to his stomach with his arms restrained behind him. Smith put his body weight on Scott’s legs. Huntsman put his weight on Scott’s back and his knee on Scott’s neck. After a few minutes, Scott’s struggle subsided. So did his breathing. Paramedics removed Scott from the scene, and later pronounced him dead.
In October 2020, Scott’s daughter, Rochelle Scott, sued Smith, Huntsman, and the police department for violating her late father’s constitutional right to be free from excessive force. The police tried to block Rochelle’s case by invoking qualified immunity, but in March 2023, Nevada’s federal district court denied their request, and in July 2024, a three-judge panel for the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals unanimously affirmed that denial. Both courts repeatedly pointed to a 2003 Ninth Circuit decision, Drummond v. City of Anaheim, as evidence that Scott’s rights were “clearly established.”
In Drummond, like in this case, police responded to a call to help a schizophrenic person who was hallucinating. In Drummond, like in this case, the person was agitated, but complied with the officers’ orders, and had not endangered himself or others or committed a crime. In Drummond, like in this case, officers forced the person to the ground and put a knee on the neck of a person experiencing a mental health crisis. And in Drummond, the Ninth Circuit held that the officers’ use of force was unconstitutionally excessive.
“The similarities between this case and Drummond are striking,” wrote Judge Roopali Desai in Scott’s case in the Ninth Circuit. The panel rejected the police officers’ attempts to split hairs between the two: While Desai acknowledged that officers “must be fairly on notice that their conduct was unconstitutional,” she warned that defining the “right allegedly violated” in too much detail would allow “officials, and future defendants, to define away all potential claims.”
Sure enough, the officers then appealed to the Supreme Court and argued that Drummond was different: In Drummond, they said, officers used their body weight against a prone person on the ground who was already restrained with handcuffs and not resisting. Here, they contended, they used their body weight against a prone person on the ground who was already restrained, but not with handcuffs, and they allege he was resisting. Their petition to the Supreme Court accuses the lower courts of “arm-chair quarterbacking” and “relying on 20/20 hindsight to scrutinize the officers’ actions from the peace of a judge’s chambers.”
Smith v. Scott didn’t come right out and say the officers are entitled to qualified immunity, but it isn’t subtle, either. The lower courts’ determination that Smith and Huntsman weren’t entitled to such immunity meant that Rochelle Scott could sue the police department to try and hold them accountable. The Court’s new order, which requires the Ninth Circuit to reconsider the case in light of Zorn’s demanding standard, probably means that she will never have the opportunity to do so. The orders betray the Court’s hostility towards the rights of victims of police brutality, and reveal qualified immunity as a misnomer: There’s nothing “qualified” about the extent of the protection the Court’s conservatives will extend to violent cops.
