836
Opinion of the Court
Justice Souter delivered the opinion of the Court.
The issue in this case is whether a police officer violates the Fourteenth Amendment's guarantee of substantive due process by causing death through deliberate or reckless indifference to life in a high-speed automobile chase aimed at apprehending a suspected offender. We answer no, and hold that in such circumstances only a purpose to cause harm unrelated to the legitimate object of arrest will satisfy the element of arbitrary conduct shocking to the conscience, necessary for a due process violation.
I
On May 22, 1990, at approximately 8:30 p.m., petitioner James Everett Smith, a Sacramento County sheriff's deputy, along with another officer, Murray Stapp, responded to a call to break up a fight. Upon returning to his patrol car, Stapp saw a motorcycle approaching at high speed. It was operated by 18-year-old Brian Willard and carried Philip Lewis, respondents' 16-year-old decedent, as a passenger. Neither boy had anything to do with the fight that prompted the call to the police.
Stapp turned on his overhead rotating lights, yelled to the boys to stop, and pulled his patrol car closer to Smith's, attempting to pen the motorcycle in. Instead of pulling over in response to Stapp's warning lights and commands, Willard
P. Orland, Timothy T. Coates, H. Peter Klein, Alan K. Marks, James B. Lindholm, Jr., Steven M. Woodside, James Rumble, and James P. Botz; for the Grand Lodge of the Fraternal Order of Police by Gary Lightman, Thomas T. Rutherford, and William J. Friedman; for the National Association of Counties et al. by Richard Ruda and Charles Rothfeld; and for the Criminal Justice Legal Foundation by Kent S. Scheidegger.
Briefs of amici curiae urging affirmance were filed for the Association of Trial Lawyers of America by Howard A. Friedman and Richard D. Haley; for Gabriel Torres et al. by Stephen Yagman and Marion R. Yagman; and for Solutions to the Tragedies of Police Pursuits (STOPP) by Andrew C. Clarke.
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