commanded him to put it down. Id. Standing at a distance of 20 feet from the officers,[1] Larsen lifted the knife above shoulder-level and pointed it toward them. Id. at 1258, 1260–61. After earlier commands to drop the knife, one officer warned Larsen to "[d]rop the knife or I'll shoot." Id. at 1258. Upon Larsen's taking one step toward him, the officer, on the sidewalk below, fired twice, striking Larsen in the chest and killing him. Id. at 1258–59.
On appeal, we said that the excessive-force claim "center[ed] on whether Larsen posed an immediate threat to the officers or the safety of others." Id. at 1260 (citing Jiron, 392 F.3d at 414). We noted that “[d]eadly force is justified under the Fourth Amendment if a reasonable officer in Defendants’ position would have had probable cause to believe there was a threat of serious physical harm to themselves or to others.” Id. (emphasis original) (quoting Jiron, 392 F.3d at 415 (citation omitted)). In addition, we said that “[i]ndeed, even ‘[i]f an officer reasonably, but mistakenly, believed that a suspect was likely to fight back . . . the officer would be justified in using more force than in fact was needed.'" Id. (quoting Saucier v. Katz, 533 U.S. 194, 205 (2001)). Then we recited and generally applied the factors based on Zuchel I and Walker, recognizing that "in the end the inquiry is always whether, from the perspective of a reasonable officer on
- ↑ As we routinely do in summary-judgment cases seeking qualified immunity, we construed the record in the light most favorable to the plaintiff, the non-moving party. 511 F.3d at 1259 (citation omitted). So even though the shooting officer estimated his distance from Larsen as 7 to 12 feet, that would not control, because other competing evidence must have supported the court’s finding that “the distance between [Officer] Murr and Larsen at the time of the shooting, though disputed, was somewhere between 7 and 20 feet." Id. at 1260–61.
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