Appeals Court: Permanently Injuring A 13-Year-Old Because He Wouldn’t Take His Hand Out Of His Pockets Isn’t A Rights Violation

Here we go again. Another cop given a free pass on brutality because established law had yet to inform Deputy Vincent Castoro that body-slamming a 13-year-old weighing less than 120 lbs. to the ground might violate the minor’s right to be free of immediate and permanent injuries simply because he didn’t immediately comply with an officer’s demands.

And, to ensure law enforcement officers avoid having to think twice before pulverizing children, the Eleventh Circuit Appeals both (1) declined to establish this as a rights violation going forward and (2) issued this as an unpublished decision to prevent it from being used to establish similar rights violations in the future.

It’s an altogether depressing affair. It all starts with the sort of thing that should never have involved law enforcement: a momentary interaction between a parent (of other children) and a couple of (normally) rude teens. From the decision [PDF]:

On January 4, 2019, H.S., a 120-pound thirteen-year-old boy, and R.S., his twelve-year-old friend, were walking through a residential neighborhood in Jensen Beach, Florida. As the boys were walking, H.S. and R.S. picked up a ball from a ditch across the street from a home and started to play with it. At the same time, a mother and her children were outside of the home. The mother told the boys that the ball was hers and they needed to return it. Instead, H.S. cursed at the mother, gave her the middle finger, let the ball go, and left.

That should have been that. A parent claiming (without facts in evidence) that a ball found in a ditch belonged to her kids demanded its return. That demand was rebuffed in the rude, but incredibly harmless, delivery of the middle finger by the older of the two kids. Rather than just wait for the boys to move on and reclaim the ball the mother swore was rightfully hers, she did this instead:

The mother called the police, reported the incident, and provided a description of the boys.

This is America and you’re absolutely free to be an absolutely vindictive piece of shit. But law enforcement presumably has larger crime fish to fry, so — at best — calls about middle fingers and balls in ditches should be treated with every last bit of condescension they deserve.

But this is America. More specifically, this is Florida. So, rather than pretend to type up a report, a sheriff’s deputy decided this was exactly the sort of crime he should be expending his considerably limited resources on. Not only did he rush to the sound of middle finger deployment, he decided the only narrative that mattered was the one told by the parent, which (at this point in the pleadings) was just a bunch of lies.

Deputy Castoro of the Martin County Sheriff’s Office, a 250-pound man, responded to the dispatch call. The dispatcher told the deputy that two boys entered the mother’s yard, took her children’s toy, and, when the mother told them to return it, the boys either threw or kicked the toy back and then cursed at her.

Deputy Castoro not only outweighed the alleged teen perp 2-to-1, but it’s probably not unfair to assume he outweighed both minors combined. (We should also assume he was twice their age — again, possibly combined.) So, not only was he bigger, he was older. And, as a public servant he should have known better than to address this absolute non-crime (even if there was arguable trespass, it only resulted in an angry mom and the extremely temporary loss of control of an extremely inexpensive object) with the amount of force he chose to deploy when the two kids decided (correctly) this wasn’t the sort of thing a law enforcement officer should be getting bent out of shape about.

Neither of the kids did anything to escalate this confrontation. All of the confrontation was on the officer’s part, as was all of the escalation.

Deputy Castoro pulled up to the boys in his marked patrol car and got out. He was wearing his uniform. H.S. recognized Deputy Castoro as a law enforcement officer but he did not try to flee. Instead, the three of them—Deputy Castoro, H.S., and R.S.—talked while standing on the side of the road near a grassy area about six to ten feet apart from each other. Deputy Castoro explained why he was there and asked for the boys’ names.

R.S. gave his name to Deputy Castoro but H.S. did not. Deputy Castoro asked several more times for H.S.’s name but H.S. refused, again and again, to identify himself. As Deputy Castoro and H.S. were going back and forth, H.S. put his hands into his hoodie pocket. (H.S. was wearing a pullover-style hoodie with a single large pocket.)

So what, most people would reasonably ask? A kid refused to identify himself and put his hands in the pockets of his hoodie. Jensen Beach, Florida isn’t exactly Miami. It’s a small-ish community of 12,000 residents. It’s 87% white. Its crime rate is lower than most other locales in Florida and lower than many other places in the United States. There’s no reason any cop there would reasonably believe a teen with hand in his hoodie — especially when being accosted out of the blue over alleged bird-flipping — posed a threat to the officer or anyone else in the area.

None of this content mattered to Deputy Castoro, who can only blame himself and his inadequate training for his response to H.S.’s action/inaction.

Deputy Castoro, based on his law enforcement training, knew that “any sort of weapon[] can be kept in pockets” and “anybody can be a threat.” And he believed that “where [he] can’t see . . . [a subject’s] hands,” it creates “a potentially dangerous situation” because of “the access to what can be in those pockets.”

Cops are the best conspiracy theorists, capable of seeing known “threats” in an innocuous situation. A hand in a pocket is just a teen dying to gun down officers who dare to trifle with their ball-troubling crime sprees. That’s the problem with courts: a cop says something literally unbelievable but because the the cop reference “training and experience,” it’s not the cop’s fault he’s so fucking stupid. In fact, he might actually be smarter than the regular-ass people who are victimized by abusive cops and whose lawsuits are rejected by regular-ass law experts who man the courts.

Deputy Castoro said a teen he outweighed by 130 lbs. posed a threat because at least one hand was hidden during this escalation of force. So, whatever happened to the teen, the teen had coming to him, says the Eleventh Circuit.

This is what happened to the teen:

While still trying to get H.S.’s hands out of his pocket, Deputy Castoro grabbed H.S. by the lower waist, lifted him into the air, and slammed him onto the ground in a way that resembled “a wrestling move.” H.S.’s body landed on the grass, but his head struck the paved road. After H.S. hit the ground, a pocketknife fell out of his hoodie.

As a result of the struggle, H.S. suffered a black eye, a brain bleed, and fractures to his skull, sinus bone, shoulder, collar bone, and ribs, as well as permanent injuries.

The weapon that was dislodged by this assault wasn’t illegal. And it certainly didn’t pose a threat to the officer, considering it was never removed from the teen’s pocket, nor brandished in a threatening fashion.

Nevertheless, the Eleventh Circuit — carefully threading the needle to both terminate this lawsuit and prevent establishing any new qualified immunity precedent — says this is all well and good under its particular interpretation of the Constitution… or, at least, the Qualified Immunity Doctrine, which has zero basis in the US Constitution.

H.S. was resisting when Deputy Castoro used the wrestling move to free H.S.’s hands from his hoodie pocket. And H.S. was not subdued. He refused to give his name and he refused to remove his hands from his pocket because he believed Deputy Castoro was trying to arrest him. Indeed, in similar cases where the plaintiff was resisting and was not subdued when the officer used force, we have found the officer’s conduct was not so egregious that it violated the Fourth Amendment.

[…]

As in Merricks, Deputy Castoro’s significant force to subdue H.S. was not “far beyond the hazy border between excessive and acceptable force . . . and every reasonable officer in [his] situation would [not] know that the force used was unlawful.”

While this all may add up when you consider nothing more than precedent and ignore the specifics of this incident, it doesn’t make any sense when you factor in what actually happened here, especially in light of the officer’s defensive claims.

A cop subduing someone roughly their size and age because they did not comply with orders is not the same thing as a cop brutalizing someone half their size and age just because they refused to remove their hands from their pockets. That sort of thing should matter in cases like this but it never does. A cop gunning down an armed person that presents a clear, immediate threat is indistinguishable from a cop beating or killing an unarmed person just because the cop claimed in court they thought the person might be armed. And, in this case, the balance of power — both physical and governmental — clearly favored the deputy. Because of that, any use of force should have been more restrained because the officer always had the upper hand. And yet, few judges are willing to recognize this disparity, instead pretending to believe that because all opinions are issued on white paper with black ink, anything previously printed in the same fashion negates any discussion about case specifics.