Guest Post By Itiel Wainer – Barnes v. Felix (2025)
My sincere gratitude to David Oscar Markus and John R. Byrne for allowing me to submit this guest post. In it, I briefly examine the Supreme Court’s recent ruling in Barnes v. Felix, one of two SCOTUS cases that were the focus of the 2025 Gibbons National Criminal Procedure Moot Court Competition. My teammate, Sydney Stark, and I were honored to represent the University of Miami School of Law at that event. You can read Sydney’s discussion of the competition’s other issue here. I also want to extend a heartfelt thank you to our exceptional coaches, Adam Stolz, Esq. and Luis Reyes, Esq. whose support continues to be immeasurable.
Barnes v. Felix is SCOTUS’ latest opinion on excessive force cases and reinforces that there are no short cuts for considering the “totality of the circumstances” when evaluating whether one’s use of deadly force was reasonable under the Fourth Amendment. The case arises from a routine traffic stop that turned fatal. The police officer, Roberto Felix, pulled over Ashtian Barnes in a rental car for unpaid toll violations. When, moments later, Barnes tried to speed away, Felix drew his weapon, stepped onto the moving vehicle’s doorsill, and within seconds fired two shots, killing Barnes. The body camera footage of the incident is available here for those who wish to personally witness the encounter.
Barnes’ mother filed suit under § 1983 against Officer Felix for using excessive force against her son in violation of his Fourth Amendment rights. The district court ultimately granted the officer summary judgment. It did so under a theory that the court’s reasonableness inquiry of the officer’s conduct must be limited to the precise moment an objectively reasonable officer would have perceived a threat. In effect, the court limited its “reasonableness” inquiry to the two seconds before Officer Felix fired his gun and did not consider other factors, like the officer’s decision to jump on the moving car or the basis for pulling over Barnes being mere toll violations.
The Fifth Circuit affirmed on appeal, explaining that the circuit has adopted a “moment of threat doctrine,” which narrows the Fourth Amendment reasonableness inquiry in deadly force cases. Interestingly, the judge who authored the majority opinion also filed a separate concurrence criticizing the doctrine, arguing that the moment of threat doctrine conflicts with the totality of the circumstances standard that has long governed Fourth Amendment reasonableness.
The Supreme Court granted certiorari to address the validity of the moment of threat doctrine and the supposed circuit split on the doctrine. Yet, in both his briefing and oral arguments, the respondent, Officer Felix, declined to defend the moment of threat doctrine. Instead, Felix argued that the moment of threat doctrine, as defined by the Fifth Circuit, does not actually exist. Felix pointed to a circuit split over whether courts may consider an “officer-created danger” as part of the totality of the circumstances as the real issue in the case. He framed the Fifth Circuit’s moment of threat doctrine, to the extent it exists, as a shield against an officer-create danger theory: that Officer Felix’s decision to jump onto Barnes’s car rendered Felix’s subsequent use of force unreasonable.
In a succinct, nine-page unanimous opinion penned by Justice Kagan, the Court rejected the moment of threat doctrine. The Court clarified that while “the situation at the precise time of the shooting will often be what matters most,” there is no hard and fast time limit on the totality of the circumstances inquiry. Thus, the Court explained, the moment of threat doctrine applied by some courts directly contradicts the mandate that trial courts examine the totality of the circumstances. Because the Fifth Circuit’s time-restricted analysis foreclosed scrutiny of Officer Felix’s decision to leap onto Barnes’ car, the Court declined to consider his officer-created-danger argument and left that question open for another day—i.e., whether an officer’s use of force could be deemed excessive if the officer’s conduct “unjustifiably” creates or escalates a situation that leads to a deadly confrontation, even if the force used was objectively reasonable at the time it was deployed.
Ultimately, the Supreme Court’s decision in Barnes v. Felix is a narrow holding clarifying that the totality of the circumstances inquiry has no temporal restriction. Ordinary principles of relevancy and causation likewise guide the analysis, further necessitating a result that continues to afford leeway to trial courts in conducting such a fact-specific, contextual inquiry. The narrow holding is also one way to avoid the morass of whether the moment of threat doctrine even exists. Nevertheless, by sidestepping the officer-created danger question, the Court left the most significant question unanswered for the time being.
Thank you!
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