No Fourth Amendment “Seizure” from Force Used in Voluntary Law-Enforcement Training Exercises Absent Intent to Restrain

Introduction

In Danielle Arthur v. Douglas Krause (Sixth Cir. Aug. 11, 2026), the Sixth Circuit addressed whether injuries sustained by a prison employee during a hostage training exercise can support a Fourth Amendment excessive-force claim under 42 U.S.C. § 1983. Plaintiff-Appellant Danielle Arthur, a mental-health professional at Oaks Correctional Facility, volunteered to participate as a “hostage” in a controlled training scenario. During the simulated breach, officers Nolan VanderWeele and Nicholas Wemple (Defendants-Appellees) unintentionally pinned Arthur against an armchair, causing significant leg injuries.

The central legal question was whether Arthur experienced a Fourth Amendment “seizure”—a prerequisite to an excessive-force claim—given that the officers’ force was applied in training rather than in an actual law-enforcement operation. A second issue concerned whether the district court erred by granting summary judgment without first resolving Arthur’s pending sanctions motion alleging spoliation and false deposition testimony.

Summary of the Opinion

  • No seizure; no Fourth Amendment claim: The court affirmed summary judgment for Defendants because Arthur was not “seized” within the meaning of the Fourth Amendment. In the training context, the “objective circumstances” showed an intent to practice, not an intent to restrain, as required by Torres and related precedent.
  • No seizure by control (show of authority): Arthur’s voluntary participation and the immediate termination of the exercise when she cried out undermined any claim that Defendants acquired “actual control” or that she was not free to leave.
  • Sanctions issue harmless: Even assuming it was error to enter summary judgment without deciding sanctions, the error was harmless because no sanction could change the dispositive fact: the use of force occurred during a voluntary training exercise, defeating the seizure element.

Analysis

Precedents Cited

1) Standards of review and summary judgment framework

  • Hunt v. Sycamore Cmty. Sch. Dist. Bd. of Educ. and Thomas M. Cooley L. Sch. v. Kurzon Strauss, LLP: cited for de novo review and the core summary-judgment standard (no genuine dispute of material fact; entitlement to judgment as a matter of law).
  • Marshall v. The Rawlings Co. (quoting Laster v. City of Kalamazoo): cited for burden shifting at summary judgment—movant shows absence of genuine dispute; nonmovant must produce specific facts for trial.

2) Sanctions review standard

  • First Bank of Marietta v. Hartford Underwriters Ins. Co. and First Tech. Safety Sys., Inc. v. Depinet: establish abuse-of-discretion review and define when discretion is abused (wrong legal standard, misapplication, or clearly erroneous factfinding).

3) Fourth Amendment excessive force requires a “seizure”

  • Guptill v. City of Chattanooga and Slusher v. Carson: set the Sixth Circuit’s two-part structure for excessive force: (1) a seizure, and (2) unreasonableness. The appeal turned entirely on the first element.

4) What constitutes a “seizure”: force vs. control, and intent-to-restrain

  • Brendlin v. California: provides the canonical definition—freedom of movement is terminated or restrained “through means intentionally applied.” It also recognizes that unintended persons may be seized if the detention is “willful.”
  • Torres v. Madrid: is the opinion’s doctrinal engine. It distinguishes:
    • Seizure by force: physical force applied to the body with intent to restrain.
    • Seizure by control: show of authority plus acquisition of actual control.
    It also clarifies that accidental force is not enough, and that courts look to objective manifestations of intent rather than subjective motivations.
  • Campbell v. Cheatham Cnty. Sheriff's Dep't: supplies the Sixth Circuit’s two-path taxonomy (force with intent to restrain; or show of authority with acquisition of control), expressly tied to Torres.
  • Brower v. County of Inyo: anchors the requirement of “intentional acquisition of physical control” and the idea that a person must be stopped by the instrumentality set in motion to achieve that stop.
  • Ward v. Brotzke: reinforces that, for control-based seizures, an officer must actually take control of the individual.

5) The “unintended-target” line and the court’s pivot away from it

  • Kilnapp v. City of Cleveland: collects “unintended-target” scenarios (bystanders shot, hostages injured, unknown passengers, wrong-person canine bites) and notes the doctrine is “confused” with divergent outcomes. Critically, Kilnapp also includes the shooting-range hypothetical: training-range gunfire rarely shows intent to restrain, even if the weapon is intentionally fired. The Arthur panel used that reasoning to frame training conduct as categorically different from operational policing for Fourth Amendment seizure purposes.

6) Training-exercise cases directly supporting “no seizure”

  • Stewart v. City of Middletown (unpublished): treated accidental injury during a training session as non-seizure because the conduct was negligent/accidental rather than intentional restraint. The Arthur court relied on Stewart as the closest Sixth Circuit analogue and found it compatible with the later Brendlin/Torres framework.
  • Gorman v. Sharp (5th Cir.): no seizure where an instructor fatally shot an officer during a firearms demonstration; the intent was instructional, not to restrain.
  • Kennedy v. City of Arlington (5th Cir.): no seizure where a cadet died during defensive-tactics training; force applied for structured instruction, not restraint/harm.
  • Gray v. Kern (4th Cir.) (unpublished): no Fourth Amendment implication in tactical training because the incident was “unconnected from any criminal justice objective.” The court in Arthur highlighted Gray’s reliance on Gerstein v. Pugh’s statement that the Fourth Amendment is tailored to the criminal justice system.

7) “Actual control” and free-to-leave authority

  • United States v. Mendenhall (quoted through Brendlin): supplies the “reasonable person would have believed that she was not free to leave” formulation relevant to control-based seizures.
  • Out-of-circuit training cases cited to reject control-based seizure where trainees voluntarily participate and instructors stop upon request/necessity: Feirson v. District of Columbia and Fournier v. Reardon, alongside Kennedy v. City of Arlington.

8) Sanctions, forfeiture, proportionality, and harmless error

  • Scott v. First S. Nat'l Bank: appellant forfeits arguments not raised in the opening brief (used to treat the attorney-fees request as forfeited on appeal).
  • Bank One of Cleveland, N.A. v. Abbe (quoting Reg'l Refuse Sys., Inc. v. Inland Reclamation Co.): default judgment is a last resort; lesser sanctions must be considered—used to deem default/striking pleadings disproportionate to alleged discovery misconduct.
  • Fed. R. Civ. P. 61: harmless-error rule; even if the district court should have addressed sanctions first, the omission did not affect substantial rights because the case failed on an independent, dispositive legal ground.

Legal Reasoning

1) The opinion’s core move: training context defeats “intent to restrain”

The panel avoided the doctrinal thicket of “unintended-target” seizure cases by selecting a clearer, threshold issue: intent. Under Torres v. Madrid, a seizure by force requires physical force “with intent to restrain,” and accidental or differently purposed force does not qualify. The Sixth Circuit reasoned that when force is used in a training exercise, the objective circumstances ordinarily manifest an intent to practice and prepare, not to restrain anyone as part of a criminal justice operation.

That framing did double work:

  • It treated the exercise as outside the typical Fourth Amendment domain—consistent with Gerstein v. Pugh (as quoted via Gray v. Kern) emphasizing the Amendment’s tailoring to criminal justice seizures.
  • It rendered irrelevant Arthur’s “unintended person” theory under Brendlin v. California and Brower v. County of Inyo, because the “willful detention” component was missing in the first place: the willful objective was training, not detention.

2) Rejection of seizure by control (show of authority)

Even if the officers’ entry looked authoritative, the panel held that a control-based seizure requires (a) intent to acquire control and (b) actual control. The training context defeated (a), and the record defeated (b): Arthur agreed to participate, and the scenario was halted immediately upon her distress—facts inconsistent with a reasonable belief that she was not free to stop participating.

3) Sanctions: even if mishandled procedurally, outcome unchanged

On sanctions, the court assumed arguendo the district court should have ruled first, but applied harmless error. The requested adverse inference concerned deleted messages and deposition dishonesty, yet none of that could alter the undisputed dispositive fact that the force occurred in a voluntary training exercise. Put differently: the case failed as a matter of law on the seizure element, not for lack of disputed facts about the incident’s details.

Impact

  • Clarifies (and effectively narrows) § 1983 excessive-force exposure in training settings: Within the Sixth Circuit, workplace injuries arising from voluntary law-enforcement training exercises will generally not qualify as Fourth Amendment seizures absent objective indicia that the force was applied to restrain a person as part of a criminal justice operation.
  • Shifts likely remedies toward workers’ compensation and state law: The panel explicitly noted that its Fourth Amendment holding does not foreclose recovery for workplace injuries and pointed to workers’ compensation—conceded by Arthur to have been successfully pursued.
  • Litigation strategy in training-injury cases: Plaintiffs will need to plead and prove something more than negligence, accident, or even reckless training conditions; they must overcome the intent-to-restrain barrier or pursue non-Fourth Amendment theories (where available).
  • Sanctions practice: The decision underscores that even serious discovery misconduct may not warrant reversal if the case fails on an independent legal prerequisite. It also reaffirms that default judgment remains a last-resort remedy.

Complex Concepts Simplified

  • “Seizure” (Fourth Amendment): Not every government-caused injury is a seizure. A seizure generally means the government intentionally restrains a person’s movement (by physical force intended to restrain, or by authority plus actual control).
  • “Intent to restrain” (objective): Courts look to what the conduct objectively communicates, not what an officer later says. In training, force usually communicates practice, not real-world restraint.
  • “Unintended-target” cases: These address whether someone accidentally struck by police force aimed at another person can still be “seized.” The court here largely sidestepped that debate by finding no qualifying intent in training at all.
  • “Show of authority” and “actual control”: Command presence alone is not enough. The person must actually be controlled (or submit), and the context must show an intent to control in the Fourth Amendment sense.
  • Summary judgment: A pretrial ruling that ends the case when, even viewing evidence favorably to the plaintiff, the law requires judgment for the defendant.
  • Spoliation / adverse inference: Spoliation is destruction of evidence; an adverse inference instruction permits a jury to infer the missing evidence would have been unfavorable. Here, even granting that inference could not create a Fourth Amendment seizure where the training context negated intent.
  • Harmless error (Fed. R. Civ. P. 61): Courts do not reverse for mistakes that do not affect substantial rights—especially where a separate legal ground independently compels the same result.

Conclusion

The Sixth Circuit’s decision establishes a clear, practical rule: injuries caused by force used in a voluntary law-enforcement training exercise do not amount to a Fourth Amendment seizure when the objective circumstances show an intent to train rather than an intent to restrain. By grounding its holding in the intent-to-restrain requirement of Torres v. Madrid—and reinforcing it through Stewart v. City of Middletown and persuasive out-of-circuit training precedents—the court forecloses a common pathway for § 1983 excessive-force claims arising from training accidents. The opinion also signals that sanctions disputes, even if procedurally mishandled, will not disturb judgment where the plaintiff’s claim fails on a dispositive legal element.