A Las Vegas police officer could “reasonably” decide to squeeze the testicles of a violent suspect during an arrest, a judge has ruled in throwing out a $180,000 jury award in an excessive force case.

Robert Engle was the only one of three officers that a federal jury found liable for violating the civil rights of Christopher Tortu in July 2001. Tortu, who was arrested at the McCarran International Airport, alleged that Engle punched him in the head and, while he was seated in the back of the patrol car, reached between the front seats and squeezed his testicles.

The jury's award to the plaintiff included $175,000 in compensatory damages and $5,000 in punitives.

But granting the defense's motion for a new trial, U.S. District Judge Robert C. Jones noted that a mobile computer terminal was mounted between the seats and so “it would have been physically impossible for someone of Officer Engle’s short stature to reach through the vehicle and grab Plaintiff’s testicles as alleged.”

“Photographs taken later at the substation show that Plaintiff was able to sit with his legs together,” Jones said in his order, apparently relying on some personal insight into the effects of a testicle-squeezing.

Even if Tortu did suffer such an injury, the judge continued, Engle was entitled to legal mmunity

because there is no well established law indicating that a police officer can never squeeze a violent suspect’s testicles in order to subdue him in a situation like the one giving rise to this case.

Faced with a suspect who was “much larger” than him and had injured his fellow officers while resisting arrest, Jones concluded, Engle “could reasonably determine that squeezing Plaintiff’s testicles was a necessary and constitutionally acceptable course of action,” and

it was certainly preferable to the alternatives, namely the use of a choke hold, stun-guns, mace, or batons.

If only those Los Angeles cops had shown such restraint when they arrested Rodney King.

By Matthew Heller
9/6/06