Mathews: Trapped in a 50-year-old chokehold

On October 6, 1976, LAPD pulled over 24-year-old Adolph Lyons for a burnt-out tail light. Four white officers, guns drawn, ordered him out of the car.

Lyons, unarmed, did not resist. Nevertheless, an officer put him in a chokehold so tight Lyons lost consciousness. He woke up on the ground, his underwear soiled, spitting blood and dirt. The police wrote him a traffic ticket and let him go.

But that wasn’t the end of the case.

Fifty years later, California remains trapped in that same chokehold.

The city of Los Angeles, by defending the officers’ violence against Lyons in the U.S. Supreme Court decades ago, created a legal precedent that the Trump administration now uses to justify the attacks by federal agents on Californians who look like immigrants.

After the 1976 encounter, Lyons, who was Black and a military veteran, found a lawyer and investigated what happened. He soon realized  how lucky he was to be alive. The LAPD used chokeholds often. In an eight-year period during which they brutalized Lyons, Los Angeles police killed 16 people using chokeholds, 12 of them Black, according to court filings.

Lyons sued the city of L.A. in 1977, seeking damages and an injunction to prevent such abuses from ever happening again.  Towns said chokeholds should be barred “except in situations where the proposed victim of [the chokehold] reasonably appears to be threatening the immediate use of deadly force.”

Lyons won in lower courts. But the city government appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court, claiming that the motorist wasn’t entitled to an injunction that limited police policy.

The high court agreed, in a 5-4 decision with Kafkaesque logic. The Supreme Court said that it did not matter that Lyons or others had been choked, and thus injured or killed. No person could get an injunction against police abuse, the court ruled, unless they could show a “realistic threat” that they, personally, were likely to be choked again in the future.

In dissent, Justice Thurgood Marshall said the precedent would protect police agencies from accountability for constitutional violations. “Since no one can show that he will be choked in the future, no one—not even a person who, like Lyons, has almost been choked to death — has standing to challenge the continuation of the policy,” Marshall wrote.

Marshal proved right. Since 1983, law enforcement agencies have routinely invoked the City of Los Angeles v. Lyons precedent to defend themselves against accusations of systematic rights abuses.

So has the Trump administration in defending its violent deportation campaign. Last summer, after a federal judge blocked federal immigration raids in Southern California as rights violations, the U.S. government appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court, which relied explicitly on the Lyons precedent:

“Like in Lyons, plaintiffs here allege that they were the subjects of unlawful law enforcement actions in the past,” Justice Bret Kavanaugh. “Like in Lyons, plaintiffs seek a forward-looking injunction to enjoin law enforcement from stopping them without reasonable suspicion in the future. But like in Lyons, plaintiffs have no good basis to believe that law enforcement will unlawfully stop them in the future.”

This judicial unwillingness to stop systematic federal abuses means that radical local measures should be on the table — including replacing today’s police departments with new law enforcement agencies with explicit powers to fight rights-violating federal agents.

It’s also time for L.A. to repudiate its legal victory — and apologize to Lyons and all those harmed in his name.

Recently I went to Lyons’ last known address in Inglewood. But neighbors informed me that he was killed by a car in January 2022, as he walked in a crosswalk on Van Ness Avenue. He was 70.

Lyons’ neighbors didn’t know about his role in legal history, but they knew him as someone who helped people in trouble. One volunteered that, if Lyons were alive today, he would be assisting immigrant neighbors targeted by the federal raids.

Joe Mathews writes the Connecting California column for Zócalo Public Square.