Jerrel Perez v. Shawn Guetschow

── Jerrel Perez v. Shawn Guetschow ── Court: Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit Date: April 20, 2026 Category: General In the United States Court of Appeals For the Seventh Circuit ____________________ No. 25-1617 JERREL PEREZ and J.P., a minor, Plaintiffs-Appellees, v. SHAWN GUETSCHOW, Defendant-Appellant. ____________________ Appeal from the United States District Court for the Eastern District of Wisconsin. No. 23-cv-153-pp — Pamela Pepper, Chief Judge. ____________________ ARGUED NOVEMBER 13, 2025 — DECIDED APRIL 20, 2026 ____________________ Before EASTERBROOK, LEE, and MALDONADO, Circuit Judges. EASTERBROOK, Circuit Judge. A fight in a school’s cafeteria has led to this appeal from an order denying a motion for summary judgment based on qualified immunity. 2025 U.S. Dist. LEXIS 43547 (E.D. Wis. Mar. 11, 2025). One important principle governing such appeals is that our role is limited to applying clearly established rules of law. Any material dis- pute about the facts is for the district judge and, if necessary, 2 No. 25-1617 a jury. Resolving a factual contest is outside the scope of pre- trial appellate jurisdiction. Compare Johnson v. Jones, 515 U.S. 304 (1995), with Plumhoff v. Rickard, 572 U.S. 765 (2014). We must decide whether this appeal presents a legal or a factual question. In 2022 Shawn Guetschow, a police officer in Kenosha, Wisconsin, had a second job as a security officer at Kenosha Unified School District. On March 4 he was called to the cafe- teria, where two sixth-grade students, L.M. and J.P., were having a confrontation. (The pleadings and district court’s opinion refer to J.P. as “Jane Doe,” but Fed. R. Civ. P. 5.2(a)(3) calls for the use of initials.) Closed circuit TV shows that, within a span of 44 seconds, Guetschow took J.P. to the ground, knelt at least briefly on her neck, and placed her in handcuffs. She contends in this suit under 42 U.S.C. §1983 that Guetschow used excessive force, in violation of the Fourth Amendment (applied to the states by the Fourteenth). The district court denied Guetschow’s motion for summary judg- ment, and he immediately appealed. (The district court’s opinion resolved some issues concerning other parties, but the appeal concerns Guetschow alone.) Plaintiffs’ principal argument is that Guetschow applied substantial force after J.P. had stopped struggling. Guetschow concedes that this would have been improper but maintains that J.P. continued to resist his effort to bring her under con- trol. Guetschow asserts that he tried to apply a “three-point stabilization technique” that would have ended the confron- tation painlessly, had it succeeded—but it didn’t because (as Guetschow concedes) the technique was used improperly (which is why he landed with his knee and body weight on J.P.’s neck). He calls this an error; plaintiffs see a deliberate No. 25-1617 3 use of excessive force. The record includes the evidence of a police chief, testifying for plaintiffs as an expert witness, that the circumstances justified the three-point technique but that Guetschow went about it “completely wrong”. The chief thought that what happened turned into a chokehold. That would be excessive force, but Guetschow denies that this is the proper characterization of what occurred. The district judge summed up: The parties agree that Guetschow took Doe from a standing posi- tion to a prone position on the ground. They agree that Guetschow placed his knee on the back of Doe’s neck. They gen- uinely disagree over just about every other fact material to the ex- cessive force determination. They disagree about “any effort made by the officer to temper or limit the amount of force”—in other words, whether Guetscho