Here's why SCOTUS needs to act on qualified immunity
When police do their jobs and do it correctly, I think they should get some kind of protection from lawsuits. We live in a litigious society these days and people doing their jobs shouldn’t have to spend out a fortune in legal fees defending themselves for just and lawful actions.
But there are a lot of times when we see police and prosecutors do some clearly shady stuff and they get away with it.
Why? Something called “qualified immunity.”
Over at Reason, they have a story about just how much of an issue this really is.
In 2014, [James] King was walking from one job to the next when [FBI agent Douglas] Brownback and [Grand Rapids detective Todd] Allen, who were not in uniform, accosted him without identifying themselves as law enforcement. "Are you mugging me?" King asked. He then ran. The two officers, who were part of a police task force, responded by tackling him to the ground, beating his face to a pulp, and choking him unconscious. But they were looking for someone named Aaron Davison, who had been accused of stealing alcohol from his former employer's apartment, and who, perhaps more importantly, looked nothing like King.
Even still, police arrested King and handcuffed him to a hospital bed as he received treatment, despite the fact that the only malfeasance here was committed against, not by, King.
What followed in the proceeding years is a case study in the level of protection given to rogue government actors and the byzantine obstacle course that victims of government misconduct have to navigate should they want the privilege of achieving any sort of recourse. Indeed, King's case has ricocheted up and down the ladder of the U.S. legal system, from the bottom to the top and back again.
The officers first received qualified immunity, the legal doctrine that blocks victims of government misbehavior from seeking recourse in civil court if the precise way the state violated their rights has not yet been "clearly established" in a prior court precedent. In practice, that means clearly unconstitutional conduct—like, say, beating an innocent person—may not be a sturdy enough basis for a lawsuit unless the court has evaluated a case with near-identical circumstances. It is, for example, why two men in Fresno, California, were not allowed to sue the officers who allegedly stole over $225,000 during the execution of a search warrant. We should all know stealing is wrong, the thinking goes, but without a court precedent scrutinizing a similar situation and expressly spelling that out, can we really expect the government to know for sure?
King’s case is now set to go before the Supreme Court, and that’s the good news. It means the Court has an opportunity to set things right.
The question is, will they?
The problems here are many. One is that the reasoning seems rather circular to me. You can’t sue if there wasn’t a previous suit that established precedent, yet you can’t establish precedent if you’re not allowed to sue.
It’s like getting a first job when everyone wants experience but no one will hire you without it.
At least there are ways around that. With qualified immunity, there aren’t, and that’s a huge problem.
Over at Reason, they have a picture of the victim and the suspect. Other than being white males, the two don’t seem to have much else physically in common. Unless the argument is that the officers were justified because all white people look alike or something equally ridiculous, it should be a slam dunk.
It’s not, though.
Again, as Reason explains:
Victims of federal misconduct have long faced an onerous road to recourse. As a teenage girl, Hamdi Mohamud found herself in a Minnesota jail, where she would remain for two years, after St. Paul police officer Heather Weyker filed bogus charges against her in connection with a sex trafficking ring Weyker fabricated. As a part of her "investigation," Weyker lied under oath, conjured fake evidence, and tampered with police reports. For that, she was denied qualified immunity. But because Weyker was working on a federal task force, Mohamud was prevented from suing, as federal officers are often afforded what amounts to absolute immunity. The Supreme Court further cemented that last year.
"Qualified immunity makes it very, very difficult to sue government officials," Patrick Jaicomo, who represents King at the Institute for Justice, told me in 2021. "This makes it impossible."
In other words, it doesn’t look good.
Yet one has to wonder how, if a blatantly illegal act is protected as if it were the hand of God Himself, then what is actually stopping law enforcement from running rampant over the American public?
The answer is, nothing, and I’m afraid that based on some of what we’ve seen out of the feds of late, they’re starting to catch onto this and take advantage of it, and we should all be terrified if that’s happening.
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There is one thing stopping them: an armed public. Legal immunity doesn't stop bullets, and sooner or later, they're going to figure out that denying people legal recourse eventually leads to lynch mobs and people deciding they didn't see a fucking thing when a federal agent is shot in the streets- or vanishes into thin air.