Tag: qualified immunity

No Charges for Cops Who Executed Innocent Grandpa on His Own Property—With a Bullet in His Back

Another day, another state-sanctioned killing swept under the rug. This time, it’s the story of Osvaldo Cueli, a 59-year-old grandfather who was shot and killed by two plainclothes Miami-Dade police detectives on his own land. There were no body cams, no warning, and no charges.

According to a closeout memo from the Miami-Dade State Attorney’s Office, detectives Mario Fernandez and Jorge Sanchez won’t face any consequences for killing Cueli. The memo claims there wasn’t enough “competent evidence” to determine whether the shooting was justified. That’s always the excuse, isn’t it?

Despite the nine bullet holes in the windshield of the officers’ unmarked truck, originally spun as proof Cueli had fired on them, it turns out those shots were fired from inside the truck. The cops fired through their own windshield. They were in unmarked vehicles with tinted windows and, according to the family, never announced themselves.

Cueli had walked out to the edge of his property with a firearm holstered at his waist. He thought he saw trespassers. His daughter said he rarely carried a gun but had grown concerned about safety. That day, two black trucks pulled up to the gate. According to his son, they blocked the entrance and opened fire without warning. His father never raised his weapon. They didn’t identify themselves. They didn’t turn on any lights. They just started shooting.

“They both came really close to the trees, and they blocked us in,” Osvaldo, Cueli’s son, told New Times. “They started shooting from inside the car, and they didn’t have any lights on. They didn’t announce themselves. They didn’t put down the windows, and the windows were blacked out.”

Cueli was shot in the back. The autopsy confirmed it. The bullet passed through his aorta and lung before lodging in his arm. The cops say they found a pistol two feet from his body. But the family says there was no gun near him in the video footage. Their attorney is calling out the memo for its omissions and contradictions.

As Cueli lay bleeding on the ground, one of the officers casually stepped over his body and said, “We identified ourselves.” His daughter captured the moment on video.

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A Federal Judge Says New Mexico Cops Reasonably Killed an Innocent Man at the Wrong House

Around 11:30 on a Wednesday night in April 2023, three police officers repeatedly knocked on the door of Robert Dotson’s house at 5305 Valley View Avenue in Farmington, New Mexico. They were responding to a report of “a possible
domestic violence situation,” but they were in the wrong place: They were supposed to be at 5308 Valley View Avenue, which was on the opposite side of the street. When Dotson, a 52-year-old father of two, came to the door with a gun in his hand, the cops shot and killed him.

That response, a federal judge in New Mexico ruled last week, was reasonable in the circumstances and therefore did not violate Dotson’s Fourth Amendment rights. The officers “reasonably believed that Dotson posed a severe risk of imminent harm” to them, U.S. District Judge Matthew Garcia writes in response to a federal civil rights lawsuit that Dotson’s family filed in September 2023. Garcia rejected the plaintiffs’ argument that the officers—Daniel Estrada, Dylan Goodluck, and Waylon Wasson—”recklessly created the need to apply deadly force by going to the wrong address.”

Garcia concedes that the defendants’ conduct prior to the shooting was “not a paragon of careful policework,” which is quite an understatement. When the cops were dispatched to 5308 Valley View Avenue, he notes, Wasson “utilized his service vehicle’s mobile data terminal” to “locate the address, incorrectly placing the [house] on the right (south) side of the street.” Meanwhile, Goodluck, who was in a separate vehicle, “searched Google Maps to locate the property,” and that search correctly located the house as “being situated on the left (north) side of Valley View Avenue.”

When the officers arrived at the scene, Goodluck “continued to question whether [they] were headed to the correct residence,” Garcia says, but “he deferred to Officer Wasson’s seniority and said nothing.” After Wasson knocked on the front door of Dotson’s house three times without getting a response, Goodluck “finally voiced his concern that the Defendant officers went to the wrong address.” Pointing across the street, he said, “It might have been 5308. Right there.” Wasson was puzzled: “Is this not 5308? That’s what it said right there, right?” No, Goodluck replied: “This is 5305, isn’t it?”

Wasson then asked the dispatcher to confirm the correct address. After the dispatcher said “5308 Valley View Avenue,” Wasson jokingly said, “Don’t tell me I’m wrong, Dylan.” By this point, the plaintiffs say, the cops “were realizing they were at the wrong residence and were laughing about it.”

According to the lawsuit, Dotson and his wife, Kimberly, were upstairs in their bedroom when Wasson knocked on the front door. “The knock was not loud, and his announcement ‘Farmington Police’ could not be heard” on the second story, the complaint says. “The police vehicles were parked down the street and did not have their lights on.” But the couple “believed that they heard a knock,” so Dotson “put on his robe and went downstairs.” For “personal protection,” he “picked up the handgun which was kept on top of the refrigerator in the Dotson residence, not knowing what he might encounter at that late hour.”

When Dotson “opened his front door,” the lawsuit says, he “was blinded by police flashlights.” At that point, “the police did not announce themselves,” and Dotson “had no idea who was in his yard shining bright lights at him.” According to the lawsuit, Wasson, upon seeing Dotson’s gun, “opened fire instantly,” and “the other officers, Estrada and Goodluck, immediately followed by firing their guns.” Dotson was struck by 12 rounds.

Hearing the shots, Kimberly Dotson rushed downstairs and “saw her husband lying in his blood in the doorway,” the lawsuit says. She “still did not know what had happened [or] that police officers were in her front yard.” She “fired outside at whoever had shot her husband,” and the officers “each fired at Mrs. Dotson—another 19 rounds. Fortunately, she was not hit.”

At that point, according to the complaint, the officers “finally announced themselves, and Kimberly Dotson told them that someone had shot her husband and requested their help.” She “did not realize even at that moment that the three police officers had killed her husband,” which she did not learn “until she was finally told eight hours later at the police station where she was detained.”

After the shooting, the lawsuit says, “the officers involved did not disclose to investigators that they were at the wrong address, which was the error leading to the tragic result and without which it would not have occurred.” The mistake “was discovered by other officers who arrived at the scene.”

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Supreme Court Rules Police No Longer Immune In Escalated Deadly Force Encounters

In a unanimous decision, the U.S. Supreme Court has rejected a legal doctrine that helped shield police from accountability for recklessly escalating confrontations and then using deadly force.

The Supreme Court’s ruling in Barnes v. Felix makes clear that when determining whether an officer’s use of deadly force was reasonable under the Fourth Amendment, courts must examine the entire sequence of events—not just the split second in which an officer claims to perceive a threat before firing a weapon. The decision strikes down the so-called “moment-of-threat doctrine,” which allowed officers to escape scrutiny for their own prior misconduct and reckless provocation. Going forward, judges must weigh all relevant circumstances, including the severity of the alleged offense, the officer’s actions leading up to the use of force, and the actual threat posed by the individual. The Rutherford Institute filed an amicus brief urging the Court to overturn the moment-of-threat rule, arguing that it violated longstanding constitutional principles and fostered a culture of impunity among law enforcement.

“For too long, our justice system has enabled a kind of legalized lawlessness, where police are empowered to escalate encounters and then respond with deadly force, knowing the courts will look the other way,” said constitutional attorney John W. Whitehead, president of The Rutherford Institute and author of Battlefield America: The War on the American People. “This decision is a powerful counterbalance to the Trump Administration’s efforts to shield police from the consequences of unconstitutional behavior. While the executive branch attempts to entrench a culture of impunity, the Supreme Court has hopefully drawn a constitutional line in the sand—one that signals a long-overdue shift in how police can use deadly force.”

On April 28, 2016, a police officer in Harris County, Texas, stopped Ashtian Barnes based on a report of unpaid tolls linked to his license plate. When asked for proof of insurance, Barnes explained that the car had been rented a week earlier by his girlfriend and the paperwork might be in the trunk. Claiming to smell marijuana, the officer ordered Barnes to open the trunk and exit the vehicle. Barnes opened his door but also turned the ignition back on. At that point, the officer shouted at Barnes not to move, stepped onto the driver-side doorsill, and shoved his gun into Barnes’s head. The car started to move, and the officer fired two shots into the car, killing Barnes. The incident was captured on video. Although Barnes’s mother sued, lower courts dismissed the case—ruling that the moment of threat during the two seconds when the officer was standing on the moving vehicle justified deadly force, without considering the officer’s role in creating the danger.

The Supreme Court’s decision sends the case back to the lower courts for reconsideration under the proper constitutional standard. The Barnes decision comes as the nation reckons with the 30-year legacy of the 1994 Crime Bill, which dramatically expanded the power and protection of law enforcement at the expense of constitutional rights. As The Rutherford Institute has warned, the Crime Bill ushered in an era of “zero tolerance” policing and mass incarceration, laying the groundwork for the militarized and unaccountable police culture we see today. “The Court’s decision is an overdue course correction. But it is only a first step,” Whitehead said. “Law enforcement should not be allowed to operate beyond the reach of the Constitution.”

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Cops Denied Qualified Immunity After Arresting Sober Teenager for DUI

Two police officers who arrested an Iowa college student for driving while intoxicated—even though a breathalyzer test showed he was completely sober—do not get qualified immunity protections for their actions, a panel of federal judges ruled Friday. 

In 2022, then-19-year-old Tayvin Galanakis was driving in Newton, Iowa, when two police officers—Nathan Winters and Christopher Wing—pulled him over and began asking how much alcohol he had consumed. When Galanakis denied drinking, Winters replied, “What do you mean none?”

Body camera footage of the incident shows Galanakis repeatedly asking to take a breathalyzer test. However, instead of administering a test, Winters required Galanakis to undergo a series of complex field sobriety tests. When Winters finally administered a breathalyzer test, it showed Galanakis’ blood alcohol content was 0.00. Almost immediately afterward, Winters began accusing Glanakis of being high on marijuana.

“I’ve had no weed tonight,” Galanakis told Winters. “I blew a zero, so now you’re trying to think I smoked weed? That’s what’s going on. You can’t do that, man. You really can’t do that.”

The officers were undeterred and arrested Galanakis, taking him to a local police station, where additional drug testing revealed that Galanakis had not consumed marijuana—or any other substances—before driving. Galanakis sued the officers in February 2023, alleging that his arrest was a “gross disregard of [his] civil rights.”

A lengthy legal battle followed Galanakis’ suit. Winters and Wing filed a counterclaim—arguing that several derogatory comments Galanakis left on the lightly edited footage and social media posts defamed them, though most of those claims were dismissed in May 2023. Last year, a district court judge denied the officers qualified immunity. They appealed, and last week, the 8th Circuit Court of Appeals reaffirmed the district court’s ruling that the pair were not eligible for qualified immunity. 

“No officer could reasonably conclude that there was a substantial chance that Galanakis was under the influence of marijuana,” wrote Judge Jane L. Kelly of the 8th Circuit Court of Appeals in an opinion released Friday. “Galanakis evinced almost no indica of intoxication: no erratic driving; no odor of marijuana; no watery or bloodshot eyes; no staggering or physical instability; no refusal to take sobriety tests—rather, he twice asked to take a breathalyzer test.” 

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The FBI Raided This Innocent Woman’s House. Will She Ever Get Justice?

On an early morning in 2017, Curtrina Martin inadvertently attended a pyrotechnic exhibit she compares to the Fourth of July. Except it was October, and it was inside her home in Georgia.

The source was considerably less joyful. The FBI detonated a flash grenade in the house and ripped the door from its hinges in a raid to arrest a man, Joseph Riley, accused of gang activity, who lived in a different house approximately one block over.

The agents would not realize their mistake until after they made their way into Martin’s bedroom, where they found her and her then-fiancé, Hilliard Toi Cliatt, hiding in the closet, which the couple had retreated to when they were jolted awake by the commotion. An officer on the SWAT team dragged Cliatt out and handcuffed him, while another officer screamed and pointed his gun at Martin, who had reportedly fallen on a rack amid the chaos.

“I don’t know if there is a proper word that I can use” to describe her fear that night, Martin tells me. She says she initially had no idea it was law enforcement that had broken into her home. Her 7-year-old son was in a different room she couldn’t get to.

The leader of the SWAT raid, Lawrence Guerra, who was then a special agent with the FBI, noticed that Cliatt did not match the physical description of Riley, while Michael Lemoine, another FBI special agent, saw a piece of mail with a different address than the target. Guerra ultimately ended the raid. 

Almost seven years have gone by, and Martin and Cliatt are still trying to find recourse for what happened that night. A federal lawsuit they filed continues to wind its way through the judiciary, although the courts have thus far immunized the government from having to pay any damages.

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A SWAT Team Blew Up This Innocent Couple’s Home and Left Them With the Bill. Was That Constitutional?

A federal court yesterday heard arguments in an appeal concerning an area of law that, while niche, has seen a streak of similarly situated plaintiffs pile up in recent years. At stake: When a SWAT team destroys an innocent person’s property, should the owner be strapped with the bill?

There is what I would consider a commonsense answer to that question. But in a reminder that common sense does not always guide law and policy, that is not the answer reached by several courts across the U.S., where such victims are sometimes told that “police powers” provide an exception to the Constitution’s promise to give just compensation when the government usurps property for public use.

It remains to be seen where the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 6th Circuit will fall as it evaluates the complaint from Mollie and Michael Slaybaugh, who are reportedly on the hook for over $70,000 after a SWAT team destroyed much of their home in Smyrna, Tennessee.

In January 2022, Mollie Slaybaugh stepped outside her house and was greeted by a police officer with his gun drawn. She was informed that her adult son, James Jackson Conn—who did not live with her but had recently arrived to visit—was wanted for questioning concerning the murder of a police officer, which she says was news to her. Although she offered to speak to Conn and bring him out of her house, law enforcement declined to permit that, or to let her re-enter at all, so she went to stay at her daughter’s house nearby.

The next day, police broke down the door and launched dozens of tear gas grenades into the Slaybaughs’ home, laying waste to nearly everything in the house. Their insurance declined to assist them, as their policy—like many policies—does not cover damage caused by the government. Yet both Smyrna and Rutherford County said they were immune from helping as well.

But despite Mollie Slaybaugh’s offer to coax Conn out sans tear gas, her complaint does not dispute that it was in the best interest of the community for law enforcement to do as they did that day. It merely contests the government’s claim that innocent property owners should have to bear the financial burden by themselves when police destroy their homes in pursuit of a suspect.

“Law enforcement is a public good. Through our taxes, we pay for the training, equipment, and salaries of police officers. We pay to incarcerate criminals. We pay for a court system and public defenders,” reads her complaint. “When the police destroy private property in the course of enforcing the criminal laws, that is simply another cost of law enforcement. Forcing random, innocent individuals to shoulder that cost alone would be as fair as conducting a lottery to determine who has to pay the police chief’s salary each year.”

That hypothetical is absurd. And yet the spirit of it is at the heart of several court decisions on the matter. That includes the U.S. District Court for the Middle District of Tennessee, which ruled last year that the Slaybaughs were not entitled to a payout because, in the court’s view, the Takings Clause of the Fifth Amendment does not apply when the state seizes and destroys someone’s property in the exercise of “police powers.”

The Slaybaughs are unfortunately not alone. The notion that “police powers” immunize the government from liability is what doomed Leo Lech’s lawsuit, which he filed after a SWAT team did so much damage to his home—in pursuit of a suspect that broke in and had no relation to the family—that it had to be demolished. In 2020, the Supreme Court declined to hear the case.

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78-Year-Old Grandmother Awarded $3.8 Million After Illegal SWAT Raid

A 78-year-old woman whose home was mistakenly raided by a Denver SWAT team will now receive a nearly $3.8 million payout. The large sum comes as a result of a 2020 Colorado law that banned qualified immunity protections for police officers in the state, making civil rights lawsuits against police significantly more likely to succeed. 

On January 4th, 2022, Ruby Johnson, a retired postal worker, was sitting in her Denver home when she heard a police airhorn loudly commanding that she leave her home with her hands up. Johnson, who had recently showered and was only wearing a bathrobe, left her house to find a Denver SWAT team gathered outside her door.

The SWAT team had been sent to Johnson’s home as part of an effort to recover a vehicle that had been stolen the previous day. According to Johnson’s lawsuit, the stolen car had an iPhone inside, and the Find My app feature indicated that the phone was near Johnson’s house. 

While the police officers had obtained a warrant to search Johnson’s home, they did so using an affidavit that allegedly provided “false characterization” of how reliable the Find My app is, overstating how sure the police could be that the iPhone—and the truck—would be at Johnson’s house.

According to Johnson’s lawsuit, after receiving this warrant, the SWAT team aggressively searched her home, causing considerable damage to her belongings. Making matters worse, even though Johnson gave police her garage door opener and told them how to enter the garage’s front door, police used a battering ram to enter the garage, destroying the door and door frame. Ultimately, the SWAT team found no sign of the truck or any other criminal activity. The officers left and later told Johnson’s children that the department wouldn’t pay Johnson for the considerable damage caused to her home.

Johnson filed a lawsuit with the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) of Colorado in December 2022, alleging that the search was unlawful under the Colorado Constitution.

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Qualified Immunity Is Not Limited to Police Brutality. It Protects a Wide Variety of Abusive Officials.

Conservatives who are leery of government power in other contexts often have a blind spot when it comes to police officers. Tough-on-crime instincts, coupled with anger at left-wing critics of police practices, frequently translate into a reflexive “back the blue” stance that is inconsistent with limited government, civil liberties, and the rule of law. Donald Trump’s promise to “restore law and order” by indemnifying police officers “against any and all liability” appeals to that sentiment, even as it underestimates the difficulty of successfully suing police officers and overlooks the fact that cops already are routinely indemnified against damages when plaintiffs manage to overcome the barrier created by qualified immunity.

Qualified immunity bars federal civil rights claims unless they allege misconduct that violated “clearly established” law. A new Institute for Justice (I.J.) report on the consequences of that doctrine further complicates the conventional conservative narrative by debunking the assumption that qualified immunity mainly applies to allegations of police brutality.

In an analysis of 5,526 appeals involving qualified immunity that federal circuit courts heard from 2010 through 2020, I.J. researchers found that half involved lawsuits against other kinds of government officials, including “mayors and city managers, university and school officials, prosecutors and judges, and child protective services workers.” The report reinforces the complaint that qualified immunity frustrates meritorious claims of constitutional violations and casts doubt on the belief that it mitigates the burden of litigation for defendants.

“While police were the most common defendants, fully half of appeals featured other types of government officials, either alongside or instead of police,” data scientist Jason Tiezzi, I.J. deputy litigation director Robert McNamara, and I.J. attorney Elyse Smith Pohl report. “Prison officials made up the next largest share, but in more than one in five of all appeals, or 21%, defendants were neither police nor prison officials.”

Many of the appeals involved claims of excessive force (27 percent) or false arrest (25 percent). But nearly a fifth (18 percent) “encompassed violations of First Amendment rights, including speech, association, and religious liberty.” In total, “only 23% of appeals fit the popular conception of police accused of excessive force.”

What do the other cases look like? Based on a representative sample of 125 First Amendment cases, Tiezzi et al. found that three-fifths “involved plaintiffs alleging premeditated abuse by government officials in retaliation for protected First Amendment activity.” Nearly half involved government workers who “alleged retaliation from their superiors,” while nearly a third were filed by private citizens who “claimed they were targeted for retaliation by government officials.”

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Police Raid Man’s Home For Heating It With S9, Charged With Intentional Climate Change

The Bitcoin mining industry is being thrown into chaos as a Canadian man has been arrested for heating his home with an Antminer S9. The man posted a video of his setup on Twitter which lead to law enforcement visiting his home and arresting him. He faces up to 3 months in jail and $600 in fines for “Causing distress to the community” and “intentionally warming the climate.”

The officers raiding the home arrived heavily armed, and even shot the man’s dog who was barking in the hallway after they kicked the door down. Body cam footage shows police laughing after shooting the dog, and one officer exclaimed, “Wow I finally got my first one.” Unfortunately, in Canada, shooting peoples pets is a protected action under qualified immunity.

Canada has been a hotbed for Bitcoin mining, but now many miners are fearful they too will be charged with similar charges. The Canadian government has been unclear about what their intentions are and whether this applies to all Bitcoin miners or just people who post their miners on Twitter. There are also rumors that the Canadian government is going to be rolling out an emissions system to test miners for carbon production, and will be requiring registration.

Many have pointed out how similar Bitcoin miners are to other applications such as space heaters, large data center servers, and just about any application that consumes electricity. Bitcoin miners produce just as much carbon as electric vehicles, yet they are being treated very differently, suggesting the move is targeted. Despite that, the issue of climate change is of upmost concern. If sea levels rise, it will destroy all the billionaires beach front property and secret Caribbean islands.

Elizabeth Warren applauded the move and stated, “1 s9 running emits 4 units of climate change an hour. 1 Bitcoin transaction emits 16 units of climate change. We must be like Canada and stop the madness.” Senate Republicans are currently organizing to censor Warren’s comments on the subject until she passes a basic literacy test.

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Alabama Cops Who Arrested Mechanic for Not Giving Them His ID Denied Qualified Immunity

A federal court has sided with Roland Edger, an Alabama man who says he was wrongfully arrested after he declined to give police officers his driver’s license in 2019. While a lower court had granted qualified immunity to the officers, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 11th Circuit overturned that decision, ruling that the officers clearly violated Edger’s Fourth Amendment rights and that Edger’s suit against them may go forward.

In June 2019, Edger, a mechanic in Huntsville, Alabama, received a call from a customer, who told him that his wife’s car had broken down and asked him to come out to repair it. The car was in the parking lot of a local church, where the customer’s wife worked. The customer told Edger he could pick up her keys at the church’s front desk.

When he arrived at the church on June 10, a few days after the customer had called, Edger retrieved the keys from the church and began inspecting the car. According to the ruling, Edger says he believed something was wrong with the car’s steering or tires and that he’d need to return with the necessary tools to fix the vehicle.

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