Civil Wrongs is an ongoing collaboration between the Institute for Public Service Reporting and WKNO-FM. This story was reported by Laura Kebede-Twumasi, edited by Marc Perrusquia and produced and adapted for radio by Christopher Blank, with original music by Andrew J. Crutcher.
The Trump Administration’s surge of federal law enforcement agencies in Memphis -- the Memphis Safe Task Force -- comes as many residents demand a stronger response to crime.
But public officials and activists are urging caution. At a recent protest march, Rachael Spriggs, director of Powerbuilding for the Equity Alliance, was among those wary of past injustices.
“Here help has meant harm,” she said. “Here help has meant harassment. Here help has meant to erase and disappear us. This is not fear. This is fact.”
Another fact: Use of force policies nationwide are still governed by a landmark Supreme Court case.
That case began in Memphis.
Diana Garner was 11-years-old when her older brother was shot while running from a Memphis police officer.
In a photo yellow and aged with time, a skinny teenager can be seen playing with a relative. For its subject, Edward Garner, time stopped on the night of October 3rd, 1974.
“My brother, he was my hero,” said Diana. “He was so good to me. He took care of us.”
It still hurts Diana to think that her hero -- her protector -- was only characterized as a troubled kid. His own father had once turned him into the police for stealing. This family obeyed the law, respected police.
“You know, I don't know how he got caught up. I don't know why he was there. But he knew better,” she said.
She was at home the night that two Memphis police officers were investigating a possible break-in a few streets away.
Elton Hymon was one of them, an officer less than two years on the job. Splitting up from his partner, Hymon spotted the suspect on the side of the house, running toward the backyard fence.
Hymon’s path was blocked. The suspect ignored an order to stop and tried to jump. So, Hymon did what Tennessee law and police department policy trained him to do.
Even today, he feels the shooting was justified. Hymon said he was thinking about the occupants of the house when he fired. Had they been harmed? The bullet struck the 15-year-old boy in the head. Police recovered just $10 and a pendant watch. Edward Garner later died at the hospital.
Today, an incident like this might spark investigations, public protests and a host of legal repercussions. Except in rare cases, federal law forbids shooting unarmed suspects trying to escape. It’s a nationwide policy that begins with the family of Edward Garner, officer Elton Hymon and a local attorney, Walter Bailey.
“We called it the fleeing felon statue,” Bailey said.
At the time, officers could use whatever force they thought was necessary to stop a fleeing felon. For Bailey and the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, the policy was ripe for abuse.
“And Memphis was notoriously and known for that,” Bailey said. “I said, ‘Well, hell, I don't have to sit there and stomp my foot, you know, I can get up and take legal action.’”
The Garners’ civil case took more than a decade to reach the Supreme Court. By then, Bailey was joined by a young lawyer named Steven Winter. He says they were fighting against long-established precedent.
“Virtually every court that had ruled on the issue had ruled against us,” he said. “The question whether the common law fleeing felon rule that police could use deadly force to stop the fleeing felon had been a common law rule literally for centuries.”
Their case relied on the Fifth Amendment, which guarantees the right to due process.
“Common sense argument was, you know, the job of the police officers to arrest them and why do we arrest people? To put them on trial,” Winter said. “But if you shoot them, then you can't put them on trial. So, clearly, right, it's disproportionate.”
Support for this argument came from an unlikely source: Elton Hymon, the officer who killed Garner. As a Black police officer, he’d witnessed firsthand how Black suspects were treated by both his white police colleagues and the justice system.
“They were assumed guilty, you know, before anybody would even try,” Hymon said.
Even though Hymon felt he’d acted by the book, he saw the need for new standards. Government attorneys argued that fleeing suspects posed unknown threats that justified lethal force. But as a recording from the Supreme Court hearing shows, Steven Winter reminded justices of a previous constitutional ruling.
“They would premise the right to kill of a police officer on what the officer does not know,” Winter argued. “But this court has held, and I'm thinking of your honor's opinion for the court in Brown versus Texas, that the Fourth Amendment requires police actions to be governed by what the officer does know.”
That is, there needed to be an actual threat.
When the Supreme Court decision was announced in 1986, reporters interviewed Diana Garner. She found herself, once again, conflicted by that image of her brother depicted only as a criminal.
“I don't think the picture that the world see of him -- it’s not true,” she said.
Officer Elton Hymon hoped he’d never have to shoot another suspect. Until he retired in 2009, he never did.
“The grace of God for one thing, but I just never got into those situations again,” he said. “I don't, I don't, I don't know. I don't know how it happened that I can say other than grace.”
They are just two of the lives forever changed by the Supreme Court ruling. It prevents officers from using deadly force unless they have reason to believe that the suspect might kill or seriously injure the officer or others.
“Well, what has happened is that it's brought about a significant guardrail on the use of deadly force,” Bailey said.
That guardrail, said Steven Winter, has saved countless lives.
“Somebody did their PhD thesis on this question,” Winter said, “and they measured the statistics for the period and in 10 years after Garner, it was an average of 50 to 75 people per year who didn't die who would have been shot but for Garner.”
Diana Garner continues to mourn all the potential lost when her brother was killed. During the trial, some commented that his life wouldn’t have amounted to anything.
“To me, that was mean,” she said. “Man, you don't know [how] your life [will] turnout. We don’t know what’s going to happen from this day to the next.”
But 40 years later, new incidents -- including some in Memphis -- have renewed calls for change.
And more families struggle to find peace in a city where the present still has echoes of the past.
In recent years, elements of that Supreme Court ruling have been rolled back, blurring lines between legal law enforcement and excessive force. Memphis remains a place where residents experience violence at the hands of police.
Listen to our extended three-part podcast, "Undue Process," or check out our previous Civil Wrongs episodes here.