Officer Involved Shooting in Kerrville

Last week a Kerrville police officer fatally shot a 17 year old man named Tommy Hranicky who refused to drop a knife. Details are sketchy but based on the news reports I think it was a justifiable shooting. If the decedent’s survivors are thinking about filing a law suit they will have an uphill battle. Just looking at a picture in the Kerrville Daily Times, Tommy looks like a nut. 

According to police, Hranicky approached the officer while threatening him with the knife. After backing up and issuing multiple commands to stop and drop the knife, the officer fired his sidearm, authorities said.

In a somewhat similar case, Andrew Kisala v. Amy Hughes, 584 U.S. ___ (2018) the Supreme Court held that an officer was justified in shooting a woman who refused to drop a knife. She was on the other side of a fence and not approaching the officers.

Citing precedent, the court said that the question of whether an officer used excessive force hinges on the specifics of each case, including whether the suspect posed an immediate threat, and that the reasonableness of a use of force must be judged from the officer’s perspective. Officers were entitled to qualified immunity as long as no similar precedent existed showing a specific use of force was unlawful.

In Graham v. Connor, 490 U. S. 386, 396 (1989), the Court held that the question whether an officer has used excessive force “requires careful attention to the facts and circumstances of each particular case, including the severity of the crime at issue, whether the suspect poses an immediate threat to the safety of the officers or others, and whether he is actively resisting arrest or attempting to evade arrest by flight.” “The ‘reasonableness’ of a particular use of force must be judged from the perspective of a reasonable officer on the scene, rather than with 20/20 vision of hindsight.” Ibid. And “[t]he calculus of reasonableness must embody allowance for the fact that police officers are often forced to make split-second judgments—in circumstances that are tense, uncertain, and rapidly evolving—about the amount of force that is necessary in a particular situation.” Id., at 396–397.