Reuters – The shooter was Fort Worth, Texas, police officer Hugo Barron. He and his partner had been looking for two shirtless Black men wanted for an armed robbery involving tennis shoes. When the cops spotted David Collie, they pulled into the apartment complex, got out of the squad car and started shouting commands at him.
Police dashboard camera video shows that Collie was walking away from the two cops as he pulled his hand out of his pocket and raised his arm. That’s when Barron fired his gun. A hollow-point bullet slammed into Collie’s back, punctured a lung and severed his spine, leaving him paralyzed from the waist down.
In the four years since then, Collie, now 37 years old, has lived in nursing homes, afflicted with infections, pressure sores, and bouts of crushing depression. As he talked about the July 2016 shooting and what it took from him, wails from an elderly patient echoed down the corridor. The odors of urine and excrement wafted in from the hall. Collie closed his eyes and exhaled. “Paralyzed over some tennis shoes? Come on, man,” he said. “You’re playing with a human life here.”
To many Americans, the outlines of Collie’s encounter with police have become dismayingly familiar in recent years — and all the more so since the May 25 death of George Floyd, a Black man, under the knee of a Minneapolis cop sparked mass protests against racism and aggressive police tactics. The fate of Collie’s attempt at redress has become familiar, too, and now underpins demands that police be held accountable when they kill or seriously injure people.
In a lawsuit filed in federal court in Fort Worth, Collie accused Barron of excessive force, a civil rights violation under the Fourth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution. He thought that any money from a settlement or jury award would give him some measure of independence after the shooting cost him his job and derailed his plans to return to college. He also thought Barron should be held responsible for what he did.
Collie didn’t get very far. Barron, who hadn’t been disciplined or charged with any wrongdoing for the shooting, argued that he had acted reasonably on a fear that Collie was about to shoot his partner. Collie said he took his hand from his pocket to point to where he was going when Barron shot him. The judge sided with Barron — though Collie had nothing to do with the robbery the cops were investigating, had no gun on him, and was 30 feet away with his back to Barron when the cop fired.
The judge ruled that Barron was entitled to qualified immunity, a legal doctrine meant to protect police and other government officials from frivolous lawsuits. A federal appeals court, saying the case “exemplifies an individual’s being in the wrong place at the wrong time,” upheld the lower court’s decision.
“You shoot me, paralyze me, put me in a nursing home, ruin everything, and I can’t get no type of compensation?” Collie said. He leaned back in his bed. “This ain’t justice.”
Collie would have stood a much better chance of getting the justice he sought if he had been able to sue elsewhere. That’s because, in excessive force lawsuits, courts in some parts of the United States are more likely to deny cops immunity than others.
