A Time To Kill: The Thinking Of Samuel Alito

This is a link to an article by Emily Bazelon at Slate entitled Shoot To Kill: Alito's blank check for cops.

Late on an October night in 1974, Memphis, Tenn., police officer Elton Hymon responded to a call about a breakin. At the scene, a neighbor said she'd heard glass shattering and pointed to the house next door. Hymon went behind it. He heard a door slam. Someone ran into the yard and stopped at a 6-foot-high chain-link fence at the yard's edge. Hymon shined his flashlight at the person and saw a teenager who he could tell was unarmed. Hymon called, "Police, halt." The teen started climbing the fence. Hymon shot him in the back of the head, fatally. Edward Garner was a 15-year-old black eighth grader. He was 5 feet 4 inches tall and weighed about 110 pounds. A purse and $10 were found on his body.

Garner's father sued. The case went to the U.S. Supreme Court, where it was argued on behalf of the police officer by Samuel Alito, now himself a member of the Supreme Court.

In a 15-page memo, he [Alito] argued in favor of letting states give police the power to shoot to kill at their discretion whenever a suspect flees, whether or not he poses a threat.
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To Alito, the case came down to this: If Officer Hymon shot, "there was the chance that he would kill a person guilty only of a simple breaking and entering; that is essentially what occurred. If he didn't shoot, there was a chance that a murderer or rapist would escape and possibly strike again." Hymon had no reason to think that Garner had done anything violent.
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By a vote of 6 to 3, the court ruled in favor of Edward Garner's father. "It is not better that all felony suspects die than that they escape," Justice Byron White wrote for the majority.
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Between 1969 and 1976, the Memphis police shot and killed eight white suspects and 16 black ones. Only one of the white suspects was neither armed nor assaulting a police officer. Thirteen of the black suspects were. The statistics were part of the evidence presented by Garner's father. Alito may well not have read that brief. And if he had, it probably wouldn't have mattered. His concern isn't the world of Edward Garner.