Mace Davis v. City of Elgin

In the
United States Court of Appeals
For the Seventh Circuit
____________________
No. 25-1299
M ACE DAVIS ,
Plaintiff-Appellant,
v.
C ITY OF ELGIN , et al.,
Defendants-Appellees.
____________________
Appeal from the United States District Court for the
Northern District of Illinois, Eastern Division.
No. 18-cv-05108 — Martha M. Pacold, Judge.
____________________
A RGUED M AY 21, 2026 — DECIDED J ULY 9, 2026
____________________
Before K IRSCH , PRYOR , and M ALDONADO, Circuit Judges.
K IRSCH , Circuit Judge. Mace Davis threatened to shoot his
ex-wife and her nephew. In a subsequent standoff with the
police, he did not obey orders and threatened to commit sui-
cide and harm the officers. To subdue Davis, officers shot him
four times with non-lethal ammunition. Davis sued, alleging
that the officers used excessive force against him. But because
he cannot point to any clearly established law showing that
the officers’ behavior violated the Constitution, we affirm the

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2 No. 25-1299
district court’s grant of summary judgment for the defend-
ants.
I
A woman called the police to report that Mace Davis
threatened his ex-wife and roommate with a shotgun while
under the influence of alcohol. Dispatch called the ex-wife,
and she confirmed that after an argument, Davis went into his
bedroom, reappeared with what seemed to be a rifle, laid it
on the kitchen table, and remarked that he should shoot her
and her nephew. Though the gun was covered with a blanket,
the ex-wife saw enough to see that his finger was on the trig-
ger. She then said, however, that Davis claimed he had been
joking.
In response, the City of Elgin sent patrol officers, four dif-
ferent S.W.A.T. teams, an armored vehicle, a robot, negotia-
tors, snipers, and high-ranking members of the police depart-
ment to Davis’s home. The police surrounded the house but
were unaware that Davis had left, gone to his neighbor’s, and
fallen asleep.
A police negotiator eventually reached Davis by phone,
but Davis hung up. On a later call, Davis threatened to harm
himself with a knife, and the negotiator relayed over the radio
to the other officers that Davis was threatening to slit his own
throat. As a result, the officers worried that Davis was armed
with knives. And based on the calls with Davis, the negotiator
believed that Davis threatened to hurt the officers, that he
would release dogs on them, and that he would use knives
against them, though Davis denies that he threatened the of-
ficers over the phone.

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No. 25-1299 3
At this point, Sergeant James Lalley authorized the use of
non-lethal impact weapons to subdue Davis if and when he
came outside so that he would not retreat into the house.
Eventually, Davis came outside. A negotiator asked him to
come down from the porch, but Davis refused. In accordance
with Sergeant Lalley’s plan, Sergeant Todd Pavoris fired at
Davis with plastic ammunition; the expected outcome from
such a shot is blunt force trauma or maybe broken bones. And
indeed, the shot hit Davis’s right forearm and snapped the
bone in half. Davis went back into the house.
About ten minutes later, Davis reemerged. He stepped
onto the front porch and attempted to demonstrate that he
was unarmed. But he then shouted at the officers: “[s]o I want
to know who’s that [expletive] was who shot me because I
want to [bust or punch] his … face in.” In response, officers
shot him two more times, hitting his thigh. Then, as Davis be-
gan to lower himself to the ground, an officer fired one more
shot, which also hit him.
Davis eventually pled guilty to disorderly conduct. He
then filed this lawsuit under 42 U.S.C. § 1983, alleging that the
officers used excessive force against him in violation of the
Fourth Amendment. The district court granted summary
judgment for the defendants, and Davis appealed.
II
We review a grant of summary judgment de novo, King v.
Hendricks Cnty. Comm’rs, 954 F.3d 981, 983–84 (7th Cir. 2020),
construing all facts and making all reasonable inferences in
favor of Davis. See Miller v. Gonzalez, 761 F.3d 822, 826 (7th
Cir. 2014).

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4 No. 25-1299
Qualified immunity offers police officers a shield to civil
liability when they do “not violate clearly established statu-
tory or constitutional rights of which a reasonable person
would have known.” City of Tahlequah v. Bond, 595 U.S. 9, 12
(2021) (per curiam). The shield is pierced when (1) officers vi-
olate the Constitution or a federal statutory right and (2) their
conduct is clearly established as unlawful. District of Columbia
v. Wesby, 583 U.S. 48, 62–63 (2018). As to the second step of
that analysis, “[t]he relevant inquiry is whether existing prec-
edent placed the conclusion that the officer acted unreasona-
bly in these circumstances beyond debate,” Mullenix v. Luna,
577 U.S. 7, 13–14 (2015) (per curiam) (citation modified), un-
less the conduct was “so egregious and unreasonable that,
notwithstanding the lack of an analogous decision, no reason-
able officer could have thought he was acting lawfully.” Ab-
bott v. Sangamon County, 705 F.3d 706, 724 (7th Cir. 2013).
Davis says that precedent clearly established that the of-
ficers’ conduct was unreasonable in these circumstances be-
cause our case law shows that using such a high level of force
against an unarmed subject who poses no immediate threat
to the officers is unconstitutional. As a preliminary matter,
Davis does not argue each shot as a separate occurrence. See
Margolin v. Nat'l Ass'n of Immigr. Judges, 146 S. Ct. 1285, 1288
(2026) (per curiam) (“[T]he rule that points not argued will
not be considered distinguishes our adversarial system of jus-
tice from an inquisitorial one.”) (citation modified). At best,
he splits the four shots into two groups: the first shot and the
last three. It is true that “[w]hen an officer faces a situation in
which he could justifiably shoot, he does not retain the right
to shoot at any time thereafter with impunity.” Ellis v.
Wynalda, 999 F.2d 243, 247 (7th Cir. 1993). But, in any event,
Davis waived any argument that the fourth shot, and only the

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No. 25-1299 5
fourth shot, violated the Constitution. See United States v.
Waldrip, 859 F.3d 446, 449 (7th Cir. 2017).
Regardless of whether we consider the four shots together
or the first one and the last three separately, Davis cannot
carry his burden to show that the officers violated a clearly
established right to be free from a particular use of force. See
Abbott, 705 F.3d at 725. The best case he offers is Phillips v.
Community Ins. Corp., 678 F.3d 513 (7th Cir. 2012). In Phillips,
police officers suspected Tamara Phillips of driving a stolen
vehicle and driving under the influence of drugs or alcohol.
Id. at 517. They commanded that she get out of her car, but
she did not follow the order. Id. at 518. She was so intoxicated
that the “officers knew they were dealing with an arrestee of
diminished capacity.” Id. at 524. Indeed, it was “clear that
Phillips was never actively resisting arrest.” Id. Nonetheless,
from 40 to 50 feet away, an officer shot her with an impact
weapon that had “force equivalent to a .44 magnum pistol.”
Id. at 518, 521. We granted her judgment as a matter of law,
reversing the district court and finding that the officers used
excessive force and were not entitled to qualified immunity.
Id. at 517, 524.
Davis argues that the district court erred in distinguishing
Phillips. But Phillips is nothing like this case. As to the first shot
(or all four shots taken together), the analysis is simple. The
officers had good reason not to want Davis to go back into the
house, perhaps out of fear that he would go back to grab a
weapon. See Brooks v. City of Aurora, 653 F.3d 478, 487 (7th Cir.
2011) (“An officer, faced with a suspect fleeing toward his
home and ignoring police commands, is not obliged to give
that suspect an opportunity to retreat into his home and, per-
haps, to fortify himself or to escape before the officer employs

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6 No. 25-1299
reasonable means of incapacitation.”). That issue wasn’t pre-
sent in Phillips, where we said that “any threat [Phillips] pre-
sented had already been substantially contained.” 678 F.3d at
525.
Even separating the last three shots from the first one, Da-
vis’s arguments fail. Davis says the district court inappropri-
ately distinguished his level of incapacitation from Phillips’s.
Yet Davis’s incapacitation differed both in degree and in kind.
Phillips was “very drunk” and had “very little memory of the
incident.” Id. at 518, 520. And the officers testified “repeat-
edly” that they knew Phillips was drunk and initially sus-
pected that she was “passing in and out of consciousness.” Id.
at 524. In short, she did not obey commands precisely because
she was so incapacitated. Davis, on the other hand, was re-
sponsive to the officers, walking around, and even behaving
in what he categorized as a verbally abusive manner. Davis
also argues that his broken arm incapacitated him in the same
way that Phillips was incapacitated. But he is mistaken: intox-
ication is entirely different from having a broken arm.
Davis also says the district court inappropriately distin-
guished the severity of his crime from that of Phillips’s.
Again, the district court did not err. The police in Phillips be-
lieved they were dealing with car theft, but after Phillips’s ve-
hicle didn’t match the reported stolen vehicle, that belief
quickly became objectively unreasonable. Id. at 522–23. So, at
the time they shot Phillips, the officers were only dealing with
a suspected drunk driver. Here, the officers were told that Da-
vis had threatened his ex-wife with a rifle. That his ex-wife
later said that Davis said he was joking doesn’t mean that the
officers should have felt they were looking to arrest a suspect
for a crime like drunk driving. See Graham v. Connor, 490 U.S.

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No. 25-1299 7
386, 396–97 (1989) (remarking that not all actions, even if they
“later seem unnecessary in the peace of a judge’s chambers,
violate the Fourth Amendment”) (citation modified). Since
the excessive force analysis requires us to consider the rea-
sonability of the officers’ actions in “proportion to the threat
posed,” Phillips, 678 F.3d at 529, the distinction is enough to
show that the officers’ actions were not clearly established as
unconstitutional.
Relatedly, unlike in our case, Phillips was no threat to the
officers, to herself, or to anyone else. In that case, we high-
lighted that she “never exhibited any sort of aggressive be-
havior toward the officers before or after they located her car,
nor did she make any attempt to escape.” Id. at 524. Even if
Davis didn’t threaten the officers, he exhibited aggressive be-
havior toward them, and he even admitted that he was ver-
bally abusive toward them. And regardless, the Supreme
Court has explained that
reasonableness must be judged from the per-
spective of a reasonable officer on the scene, ra-
ther than with the 20/20 vision of hindsight
and … the calculus of reasonableness must em-
body allowance for the fact that police officers
are often forced to make split-second judg-
ments—in circumstances that are tense, uncer-
tain, and rapidly evolving.
Ryburn v. Huff, 565 U.S. 469, 477 (2012) (per curiam) (citation
modified). From the officers’ perspective, Davis had made
threats with a gun earlier in the day, had knives during the
standoff, had threatened suicide, and had made threats to the
officers. Taken together, Phillips did not clearly establish that
the officers acted unconstitutionally.

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8 No. 25-1299
The only other Supreme Court or in-circuit case Davis
points us to is Omdahl v. Lindholm, 170 F.3d 730 (7th Cir. 1999).
But he uses that case only to stand for the proposition that the
use of impact weapons, in certain contexts, might be consid-
ered a “higher level of force along a ladder of escalating
force.” Id. at 733. He at no point explains why that case shows
that the officers should have known beyond debate that their
actions were unconstitutional.
To the extent that Davis argues that the force used by the
officers was so plainly excessive that they would have been
on notice that they were violating the Fourth Amendment,
that contention also fails. For his argument to succeed, Davis
“must show that a general constitutional rule already identi-
fied in the decisional law applies with obvious clarity to the
specific conduct in question.” Cibulka v. City of Madison, 992
F.3d 633, 640 (7th Cir. 2021) (citation modified). Davis identi-
fied no constitutional rule with any specificity at all. In this
case, holding the officers accountable without any clearly es-
tablished case law would risk punishing the officers for vio-
lating “extremely abstract rights.” Ziglar v. Abbasi, 582 U.S.
120, 151 (2017). Therefore, the officers are qualifiedly immune.
Davis also sued the City of Elgin. But in his brief, he only
argues that the officers acted unconstitutionally. Nowhere
does he suggest a theory of liability that could reach the City
of Elgin.
A FFIRMED

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