Today's "dog bites man" story from the Supreme Court is a summary reversal in Kisela v. Hughes, the latest reversal of a Ninth Circuit opinion that had denied qualified immunity to a police officer. An Arizona police officer shot a woman who was holding a kitchen knife because he (seemingly mistakenly) believed that she was a threat to her roommate, who was standing about six feet away. In a per curiam opinion, the Supreme Court held that the police officer could not be held liable for the unreasonable use of deadly force, because it was "far from an obvious case" in light of the urgency of the situation and the woman's strange behavior. By my count, this is the fifth such summary reversal in the past four years. (It also means that a list of qualified immunity cases in an article I published in February is already out of date.)

However, I was somewhat heartened to see a dissent by two Justices (Sotomayor and Ginsburg). The dissent argued that the majority had "misapprehend[ed] the facts and misapplie[d] the law," and that a jury could have found that the use of deadly force was clearly unreasonable. The dissent also went on to make a second point, however, one that I think is quite important to emphasize:

For the foregoing reasons, it is clear to me that the Court of Appeals got it right. But even if that result were not so clear, I cannot agree with the majority's apparent view that the decision below was so manifestly incorrect as to warrant "the extraordinary remedy of a summary reversal." Major League Baseball Players Assn. v. Garvey, 532 U. S. 504, 512–513 (2001) (Stevens, J., dissenting). "A summary reversal is a rare disposition, usually reserved by this Court for situations in which the law is settled and stable, the facts are not in dispute, and the decision below is clearly in error." Schweiker v. Hansen, 450 U. S. 785, 791 (1981) (Marshall, J., dissenting); Office of Personnel Management v. Richmond, 496 U. S. 414, 422 (1990) ("Summary reversals of courts of appeals are unusual under any circumstances"). This is not such a case. The relevant facts are hotly disputed, and the qualified immunity question here is, at the very best, a close call. Rather than letting this case go to a jury, the Court decides to intervene prematurely, purporting to correct an error that is not at all clear.

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