The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit on Wednesday asked New York’s highest court  to clarify the law surrounding a upstate city’s potential civil liability in the case of an unarmed man who was shot by police executing a “no-knock” search warrant.

The certified question, posed by a three-judge panel of the Manhattan-based federal appeals court, came in a lawsuit filed by Jesus Ferreira, who was shot in the stomach by an officer of the Binghamton Police Department during an early morning “dynamic entry” of a friend’s apartment in 2011.