Miguel Angel Delgado, Jr. v. United States

Whether a court applying the Fourth Amendment’s totality-of-the-circumstances framework to a prosecution under 18 U.S.C. § 242 may effectively confine its excessive-force analysis to the moments immediately surrounding the application of force while considering the broader factual context only in connection with the separate mens rea inquiry, notwithstanding this Court’s rejection of temporally constrained excessive-force analysis in Barnes v. Felix.

Whether the “willfulness” element of 18 U.S.C. § 242, as construed in Screws v. United States, requires proof of subjective criminal culpability, or whether a conviction may instead rest on evidence probative only of objective unreasonableness, such as training violations, policy deviations, emotional demeanor, and post-incident concealment.

Whether the phrase “bodily injury” in 18 U.S.C. § 242 requires injury greater than de minimis before a misdemeanor constitutional violation may be elevated into federal felony liability.

Whether a conviction under 18 U.S.C. § 1519 for falsifying a use-of-force report “in contemplation” of a federal investigation may be sustained where the inference that the defendant contemplated a federal investigation depends entirely upon predicate findings of unconstitutional and willful force reached through analytically defective Fourth Amendment and mens rea determinations.