Tennessee V. Garner Case Study

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The Tennessee v. Garner case impacted law enforcement agencies today by utilizing the Fourth Amendment right of not using deadly force to prevent a suspect from fleeing unless the officer is in imminent danger of their life. Consequently, before this was set into place, an officer had the right to use deadly force on a fleeing suspect by all means.” The first time the Court dealt with the use of force was in Tennessee v. Garner, in Garner, a police officer used deadly force despite being "reasonably sure" that the suspect was an unarmed teenager "of slight build" who was running away from him” (Gross,2016). Whereas, with Graham v. Conner case was surrounded around excessive force which also has an impact on law enforcement agencies in today’s society as well. “All claims that law enforcement officers have used excessive force deadly or not in the course of an arrest, investigatory stop, or other “seizure” of s free citizen should be analyzed under the Fourth Amendment and its “reasonableness” standard” (Doerner,2016). …show more content…

However, if the officer is in immediate threat, he has the right to use deadly force to protect themselves from being the victim. “The Court held that the use of deadly force is subject to the Fourth Amendment's reasonableness requirement, and that the Tennessee statute was unconstitutional in so far as it authorized the use of deadly force to prevent the escape of all felony suspects, whatever the circumstances” (Gross,2016). Nonetheless, it also depends on the seriousness of the crime as to how excessive the force may be to control the civilian actively resisting apprehension. Conversely, “what Graham did was to set the tone for how officers should be trained to react in a given situation” (Doerner,2016). Therefore, there are variables set in place to control and monitor the law enforcement standards and training aspects

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