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SALT LAKE CITY — A federal judge has found a Morgan County sheriff's sergeant acted reasonably when he shot a driver in the eye who he believed had run over another deputy.
Sgt. Daniel Peay fired his gun at Kristine Biggs Johnson as she tried to ram her pickup truck into officers who had blocked her in during a high-speed chase in November 2012.
U.S. District Judge Tena Campbell's ruling came as the result of a lawsuit the Colorado woman filed against Peay and Morgan County.
Johnson refused to stop when an officer tried to pull her over on I-84 for driving without the headlights on and led police on a chase through Weber Canyon.
After exiting the interstate onto a frontage road, Johnson stopped her vehicle, turned it around and drove at officers who were out of their vehicles trying to apprehend her. Believing that Johnson had hit one of the officers, Peay fired his gun at Johnson, according to the court record.
"It is clear from the (police dashcam) video that when Ms. Johnson stopped and turned around, she had changed from flight mode to aggressive mode when she drove toward the cars and struck them," Campbell wrote.
The judge wrote that looking at the situation from the perspective of a reasonable officer in all of the circumstances, Peay's use of force was reasonable.
Yet in 2013, Davis County Attorney Troy Rawlings found that the shooting was not legally justified. He said then that the use of deadly force didn't "squarely fit" U.S. Supreme Court statute in the moment he pulled the trigger. Rawlings, however, declined to prosecute the officer.
Prosecutors charged Johnson with aggravated assault and failure to respond to an officer's signal, as well as misdemeanor charges, including DUI. She pleaded guilty to failure to respond to police commands and DUI. The other charges were dropped.
