Читать книгу Evaluating Police Uses of Force - Seth W. Stoughton - Страница 51

Each state has its own statutes and common law doctrines that authorize officers to use force or protect officers from civil or criminal liability for doing so. Forty-two states regulate police uses of force by statute; thirty-six states have statutes that govern the use of both deadly and nondeadly force, while six states have statutes only for deadly force. The remaining eight states lack statutes to regulate police uses of force, doing so entirely through judicial decisions.

The forty-two states in which statutory law regulates at least some uses of force have a total of fifty-eight different statutes, with the earliest originally enacted in 1787 (Vermont), 1872 (California), 1858 (Tennessee), and 1863 (Georgia). Almost half of the statutes (twenty-eight, or 48 percent) were originally enacted in the 1970s; of the others, twenty (35 percent) were adopted prior to the 1970s and the remaining ten (17 percent) were enacted since 1970. The various states have taken very different approaches to amending these statutes. California’s “justifiable homicide” law, for example, went unamended for almost 150 years—from the time it was enacted in 1872 until its amendment in 2019—while Georgia’s law has been re-codified and amended some fifteen times since its original enactment in 1863. Of the fifty-eight total statutes, fifteen have never been amended, twenty-two have been amended only once, twelve have been amended two or three times, and nine have been amended more than three times.

In this subsection, we discuss several notable features of state law, focusing primarily but not exclusively on statutory law. We first explore the state statutes that set out the justifications for and limits of less-lethal force, then turn our attention to state statutes governing deadly force. In the Appendix of State Laws, we reproduce the text of state statutes and, when statutes are lacking, provide relevant quotations from judicial opinions regarding the regulation of police uses of force in all fifty states.