When the Courts Take Police Officers at Their Word
On a mild Friday evening in late October 2010, Ricardo Salazar-Limon was in his white Toyota pickup truck, driving west along Houston, Texas’s Southwest Freeway. After a long day painting and hanging sheetrock at NASA’s Johnson Space Center he stopped off at the modest gray rancher he shared with his young family and his friend Rogelio. The two men commiserated over a couple beers before setting out for the home of an acquaintance across town. On the way, they picked up a 12-pack of Bud Light and two of Rogelio’s friends. Salazar-Limon, who was 25 at the time, would recall it as “a common day, like any other.”
That is, until a siren and red-and-blue lights erupted behind Salazar-Limon’s truck just after midnight. He knew he had been speeding, and he eased onto the shoulder, pulling up alongside the scuffed Jersey barrier that marked the edge of a freeway overpass. Chris Thompson, a patrol officer with the Houston Police Department, parked his police cruiser behind the truck.
All parties agree that what began as a routine traffic stop ended with a bullet fired from Thompson’s service revolver lodged in Salazar-Limon’s spine, leaving him wheelchair-bound. But what happened in between—and how two federal courts later handled the -like duel of contested narratives that emerged from it—is a stark example of a problem that has come to vex plaintiffs who bring civil-rights lawsuits against police. With the Supreme Court declining to hear Salazar-Limon’s case—over a two-justice dissent—the judges of those two
