Hernandez v. Mesa
U.S. Supreme Court · decided June 26, 2017 · Supreme Court Database (Spaeth)
- Decided
- June 26, 2017
- Docket
- No. 15-118
- Argued
- February 21, 2017
- Term
- October Term 2016
- Vote
- 5–3
- Issue area
- Criminal Procedure
- Disposition
- Vacated and remanded
- Outcome
- Petitioning party won
- Ideological direction
- Liberal
How the Justices voted
- Majority
- Chief Justice Roberts, Justice Kennedy, Justice Alito, Justice Sotomayor, Justice Kagan
- Dissenting
- Justice Thomas (wrote), Justice Ginsburg, Justice Breyer (wrote)
Oral argument transcript and advocates
Opinion excerpt
PER CURIAM. This case involves a tragic cross-border incident in which a United States Border Patrol agent standing on United States soil shot and killed a Mexican national standing on Mexican soil. The three questions presented concern whether the parents of the victim of that shooting may assert claims for damages against the agent under Bivens v. Six Unknown Fed. Narcotics Agents, 403 U.S. 388, 91 S.Ct. 1999, 29 L.Ed.2d 619 (1971) ; whether the shooting violated the victim's Fourth Amendment rights; and whether the agent is entitled to qualified immunity on a claim that the shooting violated the victim's Fifth Amendment rights. Because this case was resolved on a motion to dismiss, the Court accepts the allegations in the complaint as true for purposes of this opinion. See Wood v. Moss, 572 U.S. ----, ----, 134 S.Ct. 2056, 2067, 188 L.Ed.2d 1039 (2014). On June 7, 2010, Sergio Adrián Hernández Güereca, a 15-year-old Mexican national, was with a group of friends in the cement culvert that separates El Paso, Texas, from Ciudad Juarez, Mexico. Now all but dry, the culvert once contained the waters of the Rio Grande River. The international boundary runs down the middle of the culvert, and at the top of the embankment on the United States side is a fence. According to the complaint, Hernández and his friends were playing a game in which they ran up the embankment on the United…
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