Police Reform

The Supreme Court is considering hearing “a group of nine cases that in one way or another all challenge current qualified immunity doctrine, under which law enforcement officials are not liable for discretionary actions that allegedly violated someone’s rights unless the actions violated ‘clearly established’ law.”

Both sides argue for an end to qualified immunity:

“When Floyd’s family goes to court to hold the officers liable for their actions, a judge in Minnesota may very well dismiss their claims. Not because the officers didn’t do anything wrong, but because there isn’t a case from the 8th Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals or the Supreme Court specifically holding that it is unconstitutional for police to kneel on the neck of a handcuffed man for nearly nine minutes until he loses consciousness and then dies. And such a specific case is what Floyd’s family must provide to overcome a legal doctrine called ‘qualified immunity’ that shields police and all other government officials from accountability for their illegal and unconstitutional acts…

“It requires a victim to identify an earlier decision by the Supreme Court, or a federal appeals court in the same jurisdiction holding that precisely the same conduct under the same circumstances is illegal or unconstitutional. If none exists, the official is immune… [In the past year] courts have granted qualified immunity to: officers who stole $225,000, a cop who shot a 10-year-old while trying to shoot a nonthreatening family dog, prison officials who locked an inmate in a sewage-flooded cell for days… When the Supreme Court conceived qualified immunity, it promised that the rule would not provide a ‘license to lawless conduct’ for government officials. Plainly, it has.”
Patrick Jaicomo and Anya Bidwell, USA Today