Tennessee v. Garner: The Fleeing Felon Rule and Its Lessons for Training

Why Garner Matters Four Decades Later

Tennessee v. Garner is the case that took a 400-year-old common-law rule — that officers could use deadly force against any fleeing felon — and constrained it to the bounds of the Fourth Amendment. It is older than Graham v. Connor, and it governs the narrower but more consequential question of when deadly force specifically is constitutionally permitted.

For law enforcement agencies, Garner is not just a legal holding. It is a training obligation. Every officer authorized to carry a firearm must understand when lethal force is and is not lawful against a person who is running away. That understanding cannot be assumed. It must be taught, documented, and reinforced.

In training liability litigation, one of the most devastating findings an agency can face is that an officer fired at a fleeing suspect without the Garner predicate — and that the officer’s training file contains no evidence the officer had ever been instructed in the Garner standard. This is not a hypothetical risk. It is a pattern that appears in failure-to-train cases across jurisdictions.

The Facts of the Case

On the night of October 3, 1974, Memphis police officers Elton Hymon and Leslie Wright responded to a “prowler inside” call. A woman standing on the porch gestured toward the adjacent house and told officers she had heard glass breaking and that someone was breaking in next door. Officer Hymon went behind the house while Wright radioed dispatch.

Hymon saw someone run across the backyard. The fleeing suspect, Edward Garner, stopped at a six-foot chain-link fence. With the aid of a flashlight, Hymon could see Garner’s face and hands and was reasonably sure he was unarmed. Hymon called out, “Police, halt!” Garner began to climb the fence.

Convinced that Garner would escape if he made it over the fence, Hymon fired his service weapon. The bullet struck Garner in the back of the head. Garner died on the operating table. He was fifteen years old, 5’4”, and weighed about 100 pounds. Ten dollars and a purse taken from the burglarized home were found on his body.

Hymon had acted under the authority of a Tennessee statute that codified the old common-law rule: an officer, after giving notice of intent to arrest, could use “all the necessary means” to effect the arrest of a fleeing felony suspect. Memphis Police Department policy was slightly more restrictive than the state statute, but still permitted the use of deadly force in cases of burglary.

Garner’s father brought suit under 42 U.S.C. § 1983, alleging that the shooting had violated his son’s constitutional rights. The case worked its way to the Supreme Court, which granted certiorari to decide whether the Tennessee statute was constitutional.

The Old Fleeing Felon Rule — And Why It No Longer Worked

At common law, any felony was punishable by death, and any felon could be pursued and, if necessary, killed in flight. By the time Garner reached the Supreme Court, the logic supporting this rule had eroded almost entirely. Modern felonies include a vast range of non-violent offenses — from fraud to possession crimes — that bear no relationship to the deadly force the old rule authorized.

The Court noted that the common-law rule developed in an era before modern firearms. When the rule was articulated, “arrest” was typically effected hand-to-hand, and the felonies were overwhelmingly crimes of violence punishable by death. The rule made sense in that world. It made much less sense in a world where officers carried semi-automatic weapons and where felony conviction did not automatically mean a capital sentence.

By 1985, the Court observed, the rule had been modified or abandoned in a majority of states and by most major police departments. The question was whether it survived constitutional scrutiny under the Fourth Amendment.

What the Court Held

In a 6-3 decision authored by Justice White, the Supreme Court held that the Tennessee statute was unconstitutional insofar as it authorized the use of deadly force against apparently unarmed, non-dangerous fleeing suspects. The Court ruled that such force is a seizure within the meaning of the Fourth Amendment, and the reasonableness of that seizure must be evaluated by balancing the intrusion on the individual’s interests against the governmental interests at stake.

The Court found the balance clear. The intrusion — the taking of a human life — is the most extreme possible. The governmental interest in apprehending a non-dangerous suspect does not justify that intrusion. The Court wrote that it is “not better that all felony suspects die than that they escape.” Where a suspect poses no immediate threat to the officer or others, the harm resulting from failing to apprehend him does not justify the use of deadly force to prevent escape.

The Court then articulated the standard that would govern deadly force against fleeing suspects from that day forward: deadly force is constitutional only when the officer has probable cause to believe the suspect poses a significant threat of death or serious physical injury to the officer or others.

The Garner Standard: Probable Cause of Significant Threat

The Garner holding can be broken into its operational elements. Each matters for training.

Probable cause

The officer must have probable cause — not suspicion, not instinct — to believe the suspect is dangerous. Probable cause is an evidence-based standard. It requires articulable facts. An officer trained in Garner must be able to identify the facts that supported the probable cause determination after the fact.

Significant threat of death or serious physical injury

The threat must be significant, and it must be of death or serious physical injury — not property damage, not minor injury, not escape. This is the threshold that distinguishes lawful deadly force from unlawful deadly force under Garner.

To the officer or others

The threat may be to the officer, to other officers, or to members of the public. Garner does not require that the officer be personally at risk. It requires that someone be at significant risk.

Warning where feasible

The Court added that where feasible, a warning should be given before deadly force is used. This is not an absolute requirement — feasibility depends on circumstances — but it is an element that courts and expert witnesses consistently examine after a shooting.

Typical circumstances

The Court identified two common fact patterns that satisfy the standard. First, when the suspect threatens the officer with a weapon. Second, when there is probable cause to believe the suspect has committed a crime involving the infliction or threatened infliction of serious physical harm. These are illustrative, not exclusive — but they are the fact patterns most frequently found to support lawful deadly force under Garner.

How Garner Works With Graham

Garner and Graham are often taught together, but they do different work. Graham provides the general framework for evaluating any use of force under the Fourth Amendment’s objective reasonableness standard. Garner specifically constrains deadly force against fleeing suspects.

In practice, the two cases layer. Every deadly force incident is evaluated first under the Graham factors — severity of the crime, immediate threat, active resistance or flight — and then, if the suspect was in flight, additionally against the Garner threshold. An officer’s conduct may be reasonable under Graham’s totality-of-circumstances analysis and still fail under Garner’s specific requirement for probable cause of significant threat.

For training purposes, this means officers must understand both standards and when each applies. Documented training should reflect this dual framework: the Graham lens for all force, and the Garner threshold specifically for lethal force against a person who is running away.

What Garner Requires of Your Training Documentation

Garner is straightforward as a legal rule. Its training implications are where agencies frequently fall short. Your training records must show not only that officers can shoot accurately, but that they understand the constitutional threshold that governs when they may shoot at all — particularly in the high-stakes moment when a suspect is fleeing.

Classroom instruction in the Garner standard

Every sworn officer should receive documented instruction explaining Garner’s holding, the probable cause standard, the “significant threat” threshold, and the warning-where-feasible element. This is foundational, and it should be captured in the record with the same specificity as any other qualification: date, duration, instructor, curriculum reference, attendance.

Scenario-based decision training

Classroom knowledge alone is insufficient — as Zuchel v. Denver made clear. Officers must have documented practical experience applying Garner in scenarios: fleeing suspect decision drills, armed versus unarmed flight scenarios, force-on-force exercises that test the officer’s ability to recognize the Garner predicate in real time. Each scenario event should be documented with the circumstances presented, the decisions required, and the evaluation of the officer’s performance.

Agency policy alignment

Your agency’s deadly force policy should explicitly reflect the Garner standard. Officers should be trained to the policy, and the policy should be referenced in training documentation. A disconnect between policy language and the constitutional standard is a liability risk in itself.

Post-incident review documentation

After any deadly force incident, the agency’s review should explicitly evaluate the decision against the Garner standard when the suspect was in flight. That review, and its conclusions, should become part of the training record — both for the officer involved and for agency-wide learning.

Operationalizing Garner in Your Training Records

The practical question is how to build training documentation that demonstrates Garner compliance. Here are the five elements of a defensible approach.

Include Garner in the academy curriculum — and document it by officer. Every new hire should complete documented Garner instruction during academy. This creates the foundational record that follows the officer through their career.

Refresh Garner at annual in-service. Deadly force instruction is not one-and-done. It should be refreshed annually, with updated case law and scenario applications. Each refresher should generate its own record entry.

Tie Garner to scenario training explicitly. When officers complete scenario training involving fleeing suspects, the debrief documentation should reference Garner by name and by standard. This creates a linkage that expert witnesses can verify.

Align policy documentation with training records. The agency’s deadly force policy, policy acknowledgments, and training records should all reference the same constitutional framework. Any policy update should trigger a corresponding training event and a corresponding record.

Use after-action reviews as a training document. Every deadly force incident — whether involving flight or not — should generate a post-incident review that evaluates the decision under the Graham and Garner frameworks. That review, properly documented, demonstrates ongoing institutional learning, which is the opposite of deliberate indifference under Canton.

Frequently Asked Questions

What did Tennessee v. Garner establish?

Tennessee v. Garner (1985) held that the Fourth Amendment prohibits the use of deadly force against a fleeing suspect unless the officer has probable cause to believe the suspect poses a significant threat of death or serious physical injury to the officer or others. The decision struck down common-law fleeing felon rules that had authorized deadly force against any fleeing felony suspect, regardless of dangerousness.

When is deadly force against a fleeing suspect constitutional under Garner?

Under Garner, deadly force against a fleeing suspect is constitutional only when the officer has probable cause to believe the suspect poses a significant threat of death or serious physical injury to the officer or others. Typically this means the suspect has threatened the officer with a weapon, or there is probable cause to believe the suspect has committed a crime involving the infliction or threatened infliction of serious physical harm. Where feasible, a warning should be given before deadly force is used.

How should Garner be reflected in firearms training documentation?

Training records should show that officers received specific instruction in the Garner standard and can articulate when deadly force against a fleeing suspect is and is not permissible. Documentation should include classroom instruction in the legal standard, scenario-based training that tests decision-making in flight situations, and evidence that agency policy incorporates the Garner limitations. Training that covers marksmanship without covering when deadly force is lawful leaves officers unprepared for the constitutional standard they will be judged against.

For the broader constitutional framework, see our analysis of Graham v. Connor on objective reasonableness, and City of Canton v. Harris on deliberate indifference in training. For the documentation framework that operationalizes these standards, see the training documentation pillar guide.