Background
Jonesboro police officer Corey Obregon encountered Jayden Prunty standing in a street at night while holding a plastic bag. Obregon identified himself, said he was conducting drug interdiction and community policing, and told Prunty that he smelled marijuana. Prunty disputed that assertion, ignored repeated instructions to “come here,” walked away, and then ran. Obregon caught him and pushed him to the ground.
During the ensuing struggle, Prunty resisted Obregon’s efforts to secure his hands. A click was audible after Prunty went to the ground, and Obregon warned him to stop reaching for whatever he was reaching for. When Obregon reached underneath Prunty to secure a suspected firearm, Obregon was shot in the leg. He then drew his own firearm and fired twice at the back of Prunty’s head, killing him. Sherry and Gregory Prunty, individually and as administrators of Prunty’s estate, sued under 42 U.S.C. § 1983, alleging Fourth and Fourteenth Amendment violations. The district court granted summary judgment to Obregon.
The Court’s Holding
The Eighth Circuit affirmed. It held that Obregon did not seize Prunty merely by telling him to “come here” because Prunty did not submit to that assertion of authority. The seizure occurred when Obregon applied physical force by pushing Prunty down. By then, the odor of marijuana, Prunty’s nervous and evasive behavior, his flight, and the high-crime location supplied reasonable suspicion of unlawful marijuana possession. Arkansas’s authorization of medical marijuana did not require Obregon to rule out lawful medicinal use before forming reasonable suspicion. The court also concluded that Prunty’s flight independently supplied probable cause to arrest him for fleeing under Arkansas law.
The court further held that Obregon’s force was objectively reasonable. Pushing Prunty to the ground was permissible because he ignored commands and attempted to flee. Deadly force was also reasonable after Obregon was shot during the struggle over the suspected firearm. Even assuming, as the plaintiffs argued, that Prunty’s firearm discharged accidentally, a reasonable officer could have believed Prunty had fired and continued to pose a significant threat of death or serious injury.
Key Takeaways
- A command to stop or “come here” is not itself a Fourth Amendment seizure when the person does not submit; the seizure here began with the officer’s application of physical force.
- The odor of marijuana can support reasonable suspicion in Arkansas despite legalized medical use because an officer need not first eliminate the possibility that possession is authorized.
- An officer who was shot during a struggle over a suspected firearm acted objectively reasonably in using deadly force, even assuming the discharge was accidental.
Why It Matters
The decision applies the Supreme Court’s submission-or-force rule to distinguish an attempted detention from an actual seizure and confirms that limited medical-marijuana legalization does not necessarily eliminate the evidentiary significance of marijuana odor.
It also illustrates that deadly-force reasonableness turns on what an officer reasonably perceived during a rapidly unfolding encounter. The possibility of an accidental discharge did not create a triable excessive-force claim where the circumstances gave the officer probable cause to believe the armed suspect posed a grave threat.