Page:City of Escondido, California, et al. v. Marty Emmons.pdf/5

Rh right unless the right’s contours were sufficiently definite that any reasonable official in the defendant’s shoes would have understood that he was violating it.” Id., at ___ (slip op., at 5) (quotation altered). In this case, the Court of Appeals contravened those settled principles. The Court of Appeals should have asked whether clearly established law prohibited the officers from stopping and taking down a man in these circumstances. Instead, the Court of Appeals defined the clearly established right at a high level of generality by saying only that the “right to be free of excessive force” was clearly established. With the right defined at that high level of generality, the Court of Appeals then denied qualified immunity to the officers and remanded the case for trial. 716 Fed. Appx., at 726.

Under our precedents, the Court of Appeals’ formulation of the clearly established right was far too general. To be sure, the Court of Appeals cited the Gravelet-Blondin case from that Circuit, which described a right to be “free from the application of non-trivial force for engaging in mere passive resistance….” 728 F. 3d, at 1093. Assuming without deciding that a court of appeals decision may constitute clearly established law for purposes of qualified immunity, see City and County of San Francisco v. Sheehan, 575 U. S. ___, ___ (2015), the Ninth Circuit’s Gravelet-Blondin case law involved police force against individuals engaged in passive resistance. The Court of Appeals made no effort to explain how that case law prohibited Officer Craig’s actions in this case. That is a problem under our precedents: “[W]e have stressed the need to identify a case where an officer acting under similar circumstances was held to have violated the Fourth Amendment…. While there does not have to be a case directly on