Cop kills driver in routine stop. Supreme Court weighs whether it's justified.

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WASHINGTON − Ashtian Barnes was headed down a Texas toll road to pick up his girlfriend’s daughter from day care when a traffic enforcement officer stopped him – because his girlfriend’s rental car had outstanding toll violations.

A few minutes later, the officer fatally shot Barnes.

The officer had jumped onto Barnes’ moving car. He blindly fired his weapon inside it.            

The question the Supreme Court will consider Wednesday is whether courts can look at everything that happened during the 2016 traffic stop in determining if the officer can be tried for unreasonable force under the Fourth Amendment. Or are courts restricted to how the officer responded in the split seconds when he feared for his safety, as the appeals court ruled?

How the high court decides this broader civil rights issue could affect how readily judges across the country will dismiss suits against police officers for improper use of deadly force.

The judge who authored the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals’ decision that Sergeant Roberto Felix can’t be sued lamented that a “routine traffic stop has again ended in the death of an unarmed black man, and again we cloak the officer with qualified immunity, shielding his liability.”

Judge Patrick Higginbotham wrote the court was bound by previous decisions by the 5th Circuit to look only at the moment the officer felt threatened, but said most other appeals courts allow the entire sequence of events to be considered in deadly force cases.

Lawyers for the traffic cop said the Supreme Court has long recognized that any earlier missteps by an officer do not strip them of the right to self-defense thereafter.

“That Barnes was pulled over for a minor toll infraction has no bearing on the life-or-death stakes that ultimately confronted Felix that afternoon,” his lawyers said in a filing.

What led to the shooting?

Portions of the quickly escalating police encounter were captured by the dashboard camera on the patrol car.

About three minutes into the stop, Felix directed Barnes to exit the Toyota Corolla his girlfriend had rented a week earlier.

In a matter of seconds, Barnes’ door opened, the officer drew his gun, and the car started to move forward.

Felix appeared to step onto the driver’s side door frame as the door began to close, yelling at Barnes to stop, according to the district court.

While the car was moving, the officer shot twice inside the vehicle without being able to see where he was aiming.

Was the shooting justified?

Lawyers for Barnes’ family said it was “objectively unreasonable” for Felix to jump onto a moving vehicle, “shoot the driver a heartbeat later, and claim the action was justified because the officer could have been injured by the moving vehicle.”

“Officer Felix’s actions became less reasonable, not more reasonable, because he jumped onto Barnes’s car,” they wrote.

But Felix’s attorneys say his decision to step onto the open door frame was fully justified because part of his body was within the vehicle. They also said the reasonableness of force is determined from the perspective of the officer.

Felix's body was trapped between the car and the door and the moving car was effectively a weapon, they contend.

“At the moment he used force, Felix reasonably feared for his life,” Felix’s attorneys wrote.

Justice Department wants to consider the 'totality of the circumstances'

The Justice Department asked the Supreme Court for time Wednesday to make its own arguments for why the appeals court's decision was wrong.

The department, which offered its perspective from its dual role of defending federal law enforcement officers against charges of excessive force and prosecuting civil rights violations, said the “totality of the circumstances” should be considered.

What happened immediately before the moment of force would typically be most important because officers must make split-second judgments, the Justice Department said.

“But the circumstances in the moment of force cannot be completely divorced from the context in which they arose,” they wrote.

A decision in Barnes v. Felix is expected by summer.