Ferris v. Scism
Petition for certiorari denied on October 3, 2022
Issues: (1) Whether the Fourth Amendment requires a
police officer to wait until an armed suspect points the barrel of his handgun in
the officer’s direction before the officer
can deploy lethal force to protect himself and innocents in the area; (2) whether the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 2nd Circuit erred in denying
Detective Brett Ferris qualified immunity without
even identifying what material facts defined the immunity questions; (3) whether the 2nd Circuit erred in deferring
the qualified immunity questions to the
“post-verdict” stage of the trial so that
immunity would only be addressed in
the event a jury issued a verdict against Ferris; and (4) whether the 2nd Circuit’s decision below
disregarded the Supreme Court’s repeated holdings that qualified immunity is immunity from suit, not merely immunity from
judgment, when it declined to define or
decide the immunity questions despite
a robust record containing undisputed
facts.