Writing for the majority, Justice Antonin Scalia said that despite the fact that the 19-year-old driver was suspected of nothing more than speeding, the decision to force him off the road was reasonable in light of the need to protect pedestrians and other drivers from “a Hollywood-style car chase of the most frightening sort.”
The justices took the unusual step — a first for the court — of posting on the court’s Web site the 15-minute video of the chase, recorded by a camera mounted on the squad car’s dashboard. A link to the video in the case, Scott v. Harris, No. 05-1631, is at supremecourtus.gov/opinions/06slipopinion.html.
Justice Scalia said the videotape demonstrated the danger posed by the efforts of the driver, Victor Harris, to elude the police on a narrow and winding Georgia road. Justice Scalia added that the federal appeals court in Atlanta, which ruled that Mr. Harris was entitled to a jury trial on his constitutional claims against the sheriff’s deputy who forced him off the road, should have viewed the tape with more care rather than accept Mr. Harris’s version of how the chase proceeded.
Mr. Harris’s benign description of his actions during the chase, which according to Justice Scalia gave the impression that he was “attempting to pass his driving test” rather than fleeing the police, was “blatantly contradicted by the record so that no reasonable jury could believe it,” the justice said.
The lone dissenter, Justice John Paul Stevens, said that to the contrary, jurors could well have concluded that the late-night chase endangered no pedestrians, since there were none, and no other motorists, since the police sirens warned other cars to pull off the road. “The Court has usurped the jury’s fact-finding function,” Justice Stevens said, adding that “whether a person’s actions have risen to a level warranting deadly force is a question of fact best reserved for a jury.”
With evident sarcasm, Justice Stevens referred to the other justices as “my colleagues on the jury.” He said that while Mr. Harris’s offense — speeding, refusing to stop and fleeing — was a serious one, “it was not, however, a capital offense, or even an offense that justified the use of deadly force rather than an abandonment of the chase.”
The constitutional issue in the case concerned the Fourth Amendment, which prohibits unreasonable searches and seizures. There was no dispute that Sheriff’s Deputy Timothy Scott “seized” Mr. Harris, in constitutional terms, when he rammed his car from behind, sending it down an embankment. The resulting accident left Mr. Harris a quadriplegic.
The question, as in any Fourth Amendment case, was whether the seizure was “reasonable” under the circumstances. Mr. Harris sued the deputy for damages, and the United States Court of Appeals for the 11th Circuit, in Atlanta, held that he was entitled to have his case heard by a jury. The appeals court said that a jury could find that the case was governed by a 1985 Supreme Court precedent on the use of deadly force by the police against a fleeing suspect and that the jury could reasonably find that the police behavior in this case was unreasonable.
In the earlier case, the Supreme Court found that the police acted unreasonably in shooting a suspected burglar in the back as he fled the crime scene. But that case could not govern this one, Justice Scalia said, because while the unarmed burglary suspect did not, in his flight, pose a threat to the public, Mr. Harris’s behavior posed “an extreme danger to human life.”
Originally clocked at 73 miles an hour on a 55 m.p.h. four-lane road, Mr. Harris led the police on a 10-mile chase over two-lane roads at speeds of up to 83 m.p.h.
Justice Scalia said the rule of the case was that “a police officer’s attempt to terminate a dangerous high-speed car chase that threatens the lives of innocent bystanders does not violate the Fourth Amendment, even when it places the fleeing motorist at risk of serious injury or death.”
In response to Mr. Harris’s argument that the police had his license number and could have avoided more danger by abandoning the chase, Justice Scalia said that such an outcome would give a “perverse incentive” to fleeing motorists who would “get away whenever they drive so recklessly that they put other people’s lives in danger.” In any event, Justice Scalia said, it was Mr. Harris “who intentionally placed himself and the public in danger” and gave the police “the choice between two evils” that they confronted.
It is obvious in the videotape that Deputy Scott and the other officers involved in the chase were taken aback by its devastating end. Worried voices can be heard calling to Mr. Harris and summoning an ambulance.
These were among the court’s other actions on a busy Monday.
By a 6 to 3 vote, the court held that a local government can constitutionally channel the disposal of all solid waste generated within its borders to a government-run landfill. The question in the case, from upstate New York, was whether such a requirement, often called a “flow-control ordinance,” amounts to an unconstitutional restriction on interstate commerce.
In 1994, the court ruled in a New York case that a flow-control ordinance was unconstitutional if its object was to channel waste to a private facility. Governments had attempted to do this to keep commercial landfills viable and to avoid having to make up any revenue shortfalls, as was usually called for in contracts. The court found then that these ordinances amounted to impermissible economic protectionism.
The question in the new case, United Haulers Association v. Oneida-Herkimer Solid Waste Management Authority, No. 05-1345, was whether it made a difference if the facility was government-run. It did, the court held in an opinion by Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. “Disposing of trash has been a traditional government activity for years,” the chief justice said, “and laws that favor the government in such areas — but treat every private business, whether in-state or out-of-state, exactly the same — do not discriminate against interstate commerce for purposes of the Commerce Clause.”
The decision affirmed a ruling by the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit, in Manhattan. A trade organization of trash haulers had sued the waste management authority, set up by New York State at the behest of Oneida and Herkimer Counties, for requiring them to dispose of their trash at much higher fees than they were being charged at other nearby facilities, $86 a ton compared with $37 to $55. Chief Justice Roberts said there were “compelling reasons” to find a constitutional protection for a government-run disposal program. He said the Commerce Clause “is not a roving license for federal courts to decide what activities are appropriate for state and local government to undertake, and what activities must be the province of private market competition.
In another action, the court turned, without comment, down the latest appeals by two Guantánamo detainees, Salim A. Hamdan and Omar Khadr. Justices Ruth Bader Ginsburg, David H. Souter, and Stephen G. Breyer dissented, as they had earlier this month. The case was Hamdan v. Gates, No. 06-1169.