Reported / Citable
Background
In June 2023, Medina County deputy sheriff Jonathan Nunemaker stopped a vehicle in Castroville, Texas after learning it had been reported stolen and connected to an aggravated robbery. He handcuffed the driver — seventeen-year-old Branden Sanchez — and placed him in the back of his patrol cruiser. Over the next 45 minutes, Nunemaker searched the vehicle and found drugs, a pellet gun styled as a rifle, and other items. Four additional officers arrived on scene during this time.
Sanchez was disruptive throughout the detention, kicking the cruiser doors and yelling demands to be taken to jail. After Sanchez began moving around on his knees rather than sitting back in his seat, Nunemaker grabbed his arm and twisted him into the seat, causing Sanchez’s head to strike the cage partition. When Sanchez continued kicking and refused to remain seated, Nunemaker opened the opposite door and fired a Centurion Law Enforcement Deployment System (CLE) pepper-spray device at Sanchez’s face from approximately 3.6 feet — roughly half the seven-foot minimum safe distance specified in the manufacturer’s instructions. The high-velocity jet of pepper spray struck Sanchez’s left eye and permanently blinded it.
Sanchez filed suit under 42 U.S.C. § 1983, alleging that Nunemaker used excessive force in violation of the Fourth Amendment. Nunemaker moved to dismiss on qualified immunity grounds. The U.S. District Court for the Western District of Texas denied the motion, finding that Sanchez had adequately pled both a constitutional violation and a violation of clearly established law. Nunemaker appealed.
The Court’s Holding
The Fifth Circuit affirmed, concluding that Sanchez plausibly alleged both elements required to overcome qualified immunity at the pleading stage. On the constitutional violation prong, the court applied the Graham v. Connor totality-of-the-circumstances test and found the force objectively unreasonable. Although the underlying suspected crimes were serious, Sanchez — a slightly built, handcuffed teenager secured by a seat belt and surrounded by five officers — posed no immediate threat to anyone’s safety and was making no attempt to flee. His disruptive behavior at most threatened damage to the cruiser, not harm to any person.
On the clearly established law prong, the court found that Ramirez v. Martinez, 716 F.3d 369 (5th Cir. 2013), put a reasonable officer on notice that deploying pepper spray against a handcuffed, restrained suspect who posed no immediate threat was unlawful. In Ramirez, the court held unconstitutional an officer’s use of a taser on a suspect who had merely pulled his arm away and was then fully restrained on the ground surrounded by officers. The court found the factual parallel sufficiently close: just as the taser was excessive against a restrained Ramirez, the CLE discharge was excessive against a restrained Sanchez.
The court distinguished Nunemaker’s cited authorities — Brothers v. Zoss and Baldwin v. Stalder — on their facts. In Brothers, officers were extracting a non-compliant suspect who could have accessed a weapon or driven a truck into police; in Baldwin, an officer faced nineteen inmates in an unsecured area near an armory. Neither scenario resembled five officers controlling one handcuffed teenager in a locked cruiser. The court also declined to resolve whether the CLE discharge at half the safe distance constituted deadly force, noting that the qualified immunity defense failed under the lesser standard in any event.
Key Takeaways
- A handcuffed, seat-belted suspect surrounded by multiple officers who is kicking and yelling — but not threatening any person or attempting to flee — does not present the level of threat that justifies discharging high-velocity pepper spray directly into his face.
- Firing a pepper-spray device at half the manufacturer’s specified minimum safe distance, causing permanent eye injury, supports a plausible excessive-force claim that survives a Rule 12(b)(6) motion to dismiss.
- Ramirez v. Martinez (5th Cir. 2013) clearly established that using significant force against a handcuffed, restrained suspect who poses no immediate threat violates the Fourth Amendment, and applies beyond the taser context to chemical spray weapons.
- Qualified immunity does not shield an officer at the motion-to-dismiss stage when the plaintiff pleads specific facts that plausibly establish both a constitutional violation and notice under clearly established law.
Why It Matters
This decision reinforces that qualified immunity has limits when officers use disproportionate force against fully restrained suspects, even those who are being verbally or physically disruptive. By drawing an explicit parallel between Ramirez‘s taser scenario and the use of a CLE pepper-spray device, the Fifth Circuit signals that the principle — no significant force against a restrained, non-fleeing suspect who poses no immediate threat to persons — extends across weapon types and does not require a case on all fours to supply fair notice.
For practitioners, the opinion illustrates how product-safety specifications can become relevant in excessive-force litigation: the seven-foot manufacturer minimum gave the court a concrete benchmark against which to measure the unreasonableness of firing at 3.6 feet. Officers and their counsel should expect plaintiffs to invoke manufacturer guidelines and training materials as evidence that the officer knew, or should have known, the risk of serious injury posed by a given use of force.