After Taking A Couple Of Steps Towards Trimming Back Qualified Immunity, The Supreme Court Regresses To The Mean
25 October 2021
25 October 2021
The Supreme Court spent decades making it all but impossible for citizens to successfully sue law enforcement officers for violating their rights. The Supreme Court created the doctrine of "qualified immunity" nearly 40 years ago and has spent most of the intervening years honing it into a nearly impenetrable shield for officers who violate rights. But over the past year, the Supreme Court seemed to recognize it had perhaps placed too many limits on lower courts, leading them away from examining the case at hand and towards affirming QI defenses because no precedential case had identical facts: i.e., excessive force ...
In one case (via the Ninth Circuit), police officers reporting to a call from two teens about their mother's drunk ex-boyfriend menacing them in their home arrested Ramon Cortesluna. According to the arrestee, his rights were violated when Officer Daniel Rivas-Villegas knelt on his back with his knee while he was already face down on the ground. The Ninth Circuit said this was excessive force, citing another case where an unarmed arrestee was seriously injured when he was restrained face down by an officer's knee. The Supreme Court, however, says the Ninth Circuit's cited precedent isn't on point enough. The ...
The second rejection is headed back to the Tenth Circuit. In this case, a woman called the cops on her ex-husband, who was drunk and wandering around outside of her house. Officers arrived and followed the man into the garage, where the man grabbed a hammer and held it over his head, ignoring orders to drop the tool. When he refused, the officers on the scene shot and killed the man. The entire confrontation was captured on the officers' body cameras. The Tenth Circuit said no immunity because the officers' decision to follow the man into the garage created the ...
After Taking A Couple Of Steps Towards Trimming Back Qualified Immunity, The Supreme Court Regresses To The Mean
The Supreme Court spent decades making it all but impossible for citizens to successfully sue law enforcement officers for violating their rights. The Supreme Court created the doctrine of "qualified immunity" nearly 40 years ago and has...
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