Ronald Smith is seen sitting on the ground while a sheriff’s deputy points a gun at him (WXAN).
Two police officers are asking the nation’s most conservative appeals court to grant them immunity from an excessive force lawsuit filed by a man they shot in the head with pepper bullets while he sat cross-legged on the ground on a patch of grass outside a Texas cemetery.
The entire incident was caught on body camera video, but the officers insist their actions were reasonable and protected by law.
Law&Crime spoke at length with Andres Cano, the attorney for Ronald Smith.
Cano said that his client was an avid exerciser who, during the COVID-19 pandemic, liked to go out into the countryside for several hours at a stretch to work out and clear his head. According to Cano’s recent filing, on June 27, 2021, Smith had been exercising along a grass easement bordering Highway 46 in Guadalupe County, Texas, when a police officer in an official car “veered off the road and almost clipped [him].”
Smith, Cano said, gave the officer a “one finger salute” — otherwise known as raising his middle finger — in response, then went about exercising without concern. However, Cano said Smith noticed that afterward, the officer passed him multiple times in his police cruiser. Smith later sat down on a grass embankment in front of a cemetery to call his wife for a ride home when, according to Smith’s brief, he “observed 2 portly Peace Officers approaching him with guns drawn and pointed at him.”
The deputies — Guadalupe County Sheriff Deputies Hunter Saenz and Jimmy Gonzales — allegedly “menaced Smith with pointed firearms, struck Smith with a pepper round in the head, football smashed Smith on the ground, and leaped on his back with their knees on his neck and head,” all while Smith sat cross-legged on the ground with one hand in the air and the other working his cellphone.
Cano told Law&Crime that when Smith saw the officers approach him with guns drawn, he called 911 dispatchers on his cellphone.
“I have two people pulling a gun on me,” Smith can be seen yelling in the video. The officers then switched to pepper guns, and one shot Smith in the head with pepper balls.
