One Taser Deployment, a Fatal Fall, and Qualified Immunity: The Fifth Circuit Draws the Line Between Passive and Active Resistance
Navejas v. City of El Paso, No. 25-51061 (5th Cir. Oct. 8, 2026)
United States Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit
Affirmed — Summary judgment in favor of the officer and municipality.
TL;DR
The Fifth Circuit upheld qualified immunity for an El Paso police officer who deployed his Taser once against a 70-year-old man suffering from dementia and Alzheimer's disease during a domestic violence investigation. Although the man died after falling following the deployment, the court concluded that the officer's actions did not violate clearly established federal law.
The court emphasized that the individual repeatedly ignored police commands, threw multiple objects at the officer, struck him with one, and remained unsecured when the Taser was deployed. Those actions went beyond passive resistance.
Importantly, the Fifth Circuit did not decide whether the Taser deployment actually violated the Fourth Amendment. Instead, it assumed a constitutional violation for purposes of its analysis and held that existing precedent did not clearly establish the deployment was unlawful under the particular circumstances.
The court also rejected the claims against the City of El Paso, finding insufficient evidence of deliberate indifference concerning officer training, supervision, discipline, or crisis intervention resources.
The takeaway: A suspect's age, mental impairment, or confusion is relevant to a force assessment, but those circumstances do not automatically transform physically aggressive conduct into passive resistance. At the same time, qualified immunity does not necessarily mean an officer's tactics were optimal or that a particular deployment complied with departmental policy.
Facts
On October 24, 2021, at approximately 2:14 a.m., El Paso Police Officer Steven Jaso responded to a reported domestic violence incident involving 70-year-old Armando Navejas.
Navejas suffered from dementia and Alzheimer's disease, conditions that caused confusion, disorientation, and memory loss. His family had previously contacted police for assistance when he wandered away from home. In fact, approximately six hours before the incident, officers had located Navejas after he went missing and returned him to his residence.
Later that night, Navejas's wife called police and reported that her husband had become violent when she attempted to give him his medication. According to the call, he had attempted to strangle her, and she was concerned he might strike her again.
The incident was classified and dispatched as a family violence assault in progress. Dispatch information also indicated that Navejas had no access to weapons, no medical attention was necessary, and his wife was not then in immediate danger.
When Officer Jaso arrived, he encountered Navejas outside the residence near a neighboring property.
According to Jaso, Navejas ignored his commands to stop and speak with him. Jaso claimed that Navejas picked up an object, charged toward him, and threw it, striking the officer in the shin. Despite additional commands, Navejas continued picking up objects and throwing them in the officer's direction.
Jaso believed at least one of the objects was part of a broken brick. However, the precise circumstances were disputed.
The plaintiff maintained that Navejas was moving slowly rather than charging and that the objects were not necessarily bricks. Evidence suggested that at least one object may have been a lightweight piece of wood or shrubbery.
Surveillance footage from a neighboring residence captured portions of the encounter. The video showed Navejas walking through the neighboring property, picking up an unidentified object, and making a throwing motion. Shortly afterward, Navejas picked up a significantly larger object, apparently a potted plant, and threw it toward Jaso. The object landed on the hood of a parked vehicle.
Within seconds, Jaso ran around the vehicle and deployed his Taser once into Navejas's back.
Navejas fell forward, lost consciousness, and was subsequently handcuffed by assisting officers. He was transported to a hospital, where he later died.
His daughter, Debbie Navejas, acting on behalf of his estate, filed a federal civil rights lawsuit alleging excessive force against Jaso and municipal liability against the City of El Paso.
The district court granted summary judgment in favor of both defendants, and the plaintiff appealed.
Issues
The Fifth Circuit considered several questions:
Whether Officer Jaso violated clearly established Fourth Amendment law by deploying a Taser once against an elderly, mentally impaired individual who had ignored commands and thrown objects at him.
Whether the City of El Paso could be held liable under Monell for allegedly inadequate training, supervision, discipline, crisis intervention staffing, or ratification of unconstitutional conduct.
Holding
The Fifth Circuit affirmed summary judgment in favor of Officer Jaso and the City of El Paso.
As to Jaso, the court held that the plaintiff failed to identify clearly established law prohibiting a single Taser deployment under the circumstances confronting the officer.
The court specifically declined to resolve whether the deployment itself constituted excessive force under the Fourth Amendment.
As to the City, the court held that the plaintiff failed to establish deliberate indifference necessary to support municipal liability.
Reasoning
1. Active resistance is materially different from passive noncompliance.
The central issue concerned whether Jaso's Taser deployment violated clearly established law.
The plaintiff relied heavily on several Fifth Circuit decisions involving excessive force against suspects who were compliant, minimally resistant, or already restrained.
In Newman v. Guedry, 703 F.3d 757 (5th Cir. 2012), officers repeatedly struck and tased an individual who posed no threat, did not resist, and had not disobeyed commands.
In Ramirez v. Martinez, 716 F.3d 369 (5th Cir. 2013), officers used a Taser against an individual who had already been subdued, including a deployment after he was handcuffed.
Similarly, Hanks v. Rogers, 853 F.3d 738 (5th Cir. 2017), involved significant force against a suspect whose resistance was characterized as passive.
The Fifth Circuit distinguished those decisions from the circumstances confronting Jaso.
Unlike the individuals in those cases, Navejas had reportedly assaulted his wife, repeatedly refused commands, thrown objects toward the officer, and struck him.
Further, he had not been handcuffed or otherwise brought under police control when Jaso deployed the Taser.
The court explained that these factual differences prevented the plaintiff's cited cases from clearly establishing that Jaso's conduct was unconstitutional.
The court also relied on Cloud v. Stone, 993 F.3d 379 (5th Cir. 2021), which recognized that active resistance may justify a Taser deployment.
The distinction is significant. Merely pulling an arm away, briefly refusing a command, or failing to immediately cooperate is not necessarily equivalent to actively attacking an officer.
Here, however, the court rejected the characterization of Navejas's actions as merely passive resistance.
For officers, the important distinction is not simply whether someone refuses commands, but what the person is actually doing, whether that conduct presents a threat, and whether force is objectively reasonable under the totality of the circumstances.
2. The number of Taser deployments matters.
The court also considered the limited nature of Jaso's use of force.
Jaso deployed his Taser once, rather than repeatedly cycling or continuing to use the device after Navejas fell.
Relying on Betts v. Brennan, 22 F.4th 577 (5th Cir. 2022), the court explained that a single deployment supported a reasonable relationship between the perceived need for force and the amount of force used.
This does not establish a rule that a single Taser deployment is always constitutional.
Instead, the number, timing, and duration of deployments are relevant circumstances in assessing the proportionality of force.
Likewise, officers must reassess the need for force as circumstances change. Resistance that initially justifies a particular level of force may no longer support additional force once an individual has been subdued or the threat has ended.
3. Mental impairment does not automatically eliminate an objectively reasonable safety concern.
Navejas's age and medical condition were important components of the plaintiff's argument.
He was 70 years old, weighed approximately 130 pounds, and suffered from dementia and Alzheimer's disease.
The plaintiff emphasized his confusion, the availability of de-escalation techniques, and the possibility that Jaso could have given him additional time before deploying the Taser.
The Fifth Circuit acknowledged these arguments but concluded that the plaintiff had not identified precedent clearly prohibiting the deployment under these circumstances.
The court's reasoning turned on Navejas's conduct, rather than his diagnosis alone.
He was not simply wandering, standing still, or failing to understand police commands. The undisputed evidence showed he had thrown objects at Jaso and struck him with one.
At the same time, the court did not hold that mental impairment is irrelevant to a use-of-force analysis.
Nor did it conclude that de-escalation was unnecessary or that Jaso employed the best available tactics.
It decided the narrower qualified immunity question.
For officers, this reinforces the need to consider both the individual's apparent capacity to understand commands and the objectively observable threat presented by the person's actions.
4. Criticizing training is not enough to establish municipal liability.
The plaintiff also sought to hold the City of El Paso liable under Monell v. Department of Social Services, 436 U.S. 658 (1978).
Her expert, Scott DeFoe, criticized the department's training in crisis intervention, de-escalation, verbal communication, situational awareness, and less-lethal force.
The district court assumed, for purposes of its analysis, that the expert's report raised a factual issue concerning whether Jaso's training was adequate.
However, the Fifth Circuit explained that demonstrating potentially inadequate training does not, by itself, establish municipal liability.
A plaintiff pursuing a failure-to-train claim must establish a deficient training program, a causal connection between the deficiency and the constitutional violation, and deliberate indifference.
Ordinarily, deliberate indifference requires evidence of a pattern of similar constitutional violations placing municipal policymakers on notice of a particular training deficiency.
The plaintiff identified two incidents involving mentally impaired individuals and El Paso officers, but both occurred after the Navejas encounter.
The court concluded that those later incidents did not establish that City policymakers had been on notice before the October 2021 event.
The plaintiff also attempted to introduce different prior incidents on appeal, but those materials had not been presented to the district court in opposition to summary judgment.
The Fifth Circuit declined to consider that new evidence for the first time on appeal.
The court further rejected application of the narrow single-incident exception discussed in Connick v. Thompson, 563 U.S. 51 (2011).
The record demonstrated that Jaso had completed:
Seven general use-of-force classes at the police academy.
Twenty-five hours of less-lethal-force training.
Forty-four hours of mental-health training at the academy.
Three additional seven-hour mental-health refresher courses.
The court did not determine that this training was necessarily ideal.
Instead, the documented training defeated the plaintiff's argument that the case fell within the narrow exception applicable when the need for training is so obvious that deliberate indifference may be established without a pattern of previous violations.
The court also rejected the separate failure-to-discipline claim because the plaintiff failed to demonstrate a preexisting, widespread municipal practice of failing to discipline officers for excessive force.
5. Specialized crisis intervention officers are not constitutionally required at every encounter.
An additional component of the plaintiff's municipal liability claim concerned the department's Crisis Intervention Team (CIT).
At the time of the incident, El Paso's specialized CIT coverage did not include the period between midnight and 8:00 a.m.
Because the encounter occurred around 2:14 a.m., a specialized CIT officer was not available.
The plaintiff argued that this overnight staffing gap demonstrated systemic indifference to individuals experiencing mental-health crises.
The Fifth Circuit disagreed.
Citing Valle v. City of Houston, 613 F.3d 536 (5th Cir. 2010), the court explained that failing to deploy a CIT officer is not itself a constitutional violation.
The record also demonstrated that El Paso had evaluated demand for crisis intervention resources and allocated specialized staffing during periods when calls were most frequent.
Additionally, officers outside the specialized team received mental-health training, and Jaso had obtained a mental-health-officer certification.
The plaintiff presented no evidence of a prior constitutional violation resulting from the absence of overnight CIT coverage.
Under these circumstances, the staffing arrangement did not establish deliberate indifference.
The decision should not be interpreted as discouraging agencies from providing specialized crisis intervention services.
Rather, it illustrates the distinction between recommended operational practices and the minimum constitutional requirements governing municipal liability.
Street Takeaways
1. Articulate the conduct, not merely the failure to comply.
A report stating that someone "refused commands" provides limited information about the actual threat or resistance encountered.
Describe the person's movements, physical actions, proximity, objects involved, threatening behavior, and opportunities for compliance. Those details may become critical in distinguishing passive noncompliance from active resistance.
2. A suspect's mental condition matters, but so does the threat presented.
Dementia, Alzheimer's disease, mental illness, or confusion may affect a person's ability to understand and follow commands.
Officers should account for those circumstances when reasonably possible. However, cognitive impairment does not necessarily eliminate an immediate safety concern when the individual is engaging in physically aggressive conduct.
3. A Taser is not automatically justified whenever someone resists.
This decision does not authorize Taser use for every refusal to obey a command.
The Fifth Circuit relied on a combination of circumstances, including a reported violent offense, repeated commands, thrown objects, physical contact with the officer, and the fact that Navejas remained uncontrolled.
The totality of the circumstances remains essential.
4. Each additional application of force requires continued justification.
The court specifically noted that Jaso deployed his Taser only once.
Officers should continually reassess whether the person continues to present a threat or actively resist. Force justified at one moment may become unreasonable when circumstances change.
5. Consider the foreseeable risks associated with a fall.
Although the Fifth Circuit did not decide whether this particular deployment was constitutionally reasonable, the case illustrates the potentially serious consequences of an uncontrolled fall following a Taser deployment.
When circumstances permit, officers should consider the individual's age, physical condition, surroundings, elevation, and potential fall hazards when evaluating force options.
6. Training documentation matters for agencies and supervisors.
The City's documented history of use-of-force, less-lethal, and mental-health training was important to the municipal liability analysis.
Training records, course content, refresher programs, and documented qualifications can help establish what an agency actually provided and whether policymakers were deliberately indifferent to constitutional risks.
However, the existence of training records does not automatically establish that an individual officer acted reasonably or complied with policy.
Disclaimer
This article is provided by Stratvos Group for law enforcement training and educational purposes only. It is not legal advice and does not establish departmental policy. Court decisions are fact-specific, and the applicable law may vary by jurisdiction or change over time. Officers should consult their agency's policies, training, and legal advisors when applying legal principles to operational decisions.
