Tag: qualified immunity

Tony Timpa Wrongful Death Trial Ends With 2 Out of 3 Cops Getting Qualified Immunity

At the heart of the civil trial concerning Tony Timpa—who died during a mental health crisis after calling 911 in August 2016—was an appeal made to the jury by the lead defense counsel, Senior Assistant City Attorney Lindsay Wilson Gowin. “Justice here is truth,” she said. Then, invoking allegations that the Timpa family had not been transparent about various dark corners of Timpa’s life, she added: “That’s not how you find the truth.”

She had a point. But that statement, made during closing arguments Tuesday, was a bit ironic, particularly when considering the lengths the government went to in order to obscure basic transparency and keep the events of that summer night a secret. Indeed, the trial, which almost didn’t come to fruition, has come to symbolize how difficult it is for alleged victims of government abuse from stating their case, and the importance of allowing those claims a fair and public hearing, no matter the outcome.

Today, a federal jury rendered their verdict. The panel of eight found that Officer Dustin Dillard, Senior Cpl. Raymond Dominguez, and Officer Danny Vasquez did in fact violate Timpa’s constitutional rights during a roughly 15-minute interaction on Dallas’ Mockingbird Lane. But they gave Dillard and Vasquez qualified immunity, concluding that, while their actions were unlawful, a reasonable officer couldn’t have been expected to know as much. A fourth defendant, Sgt. Kevin Mansell, the highest-ranking officer supervising the scene that evening, was vindicated entirely.

The city will have to pay Timpa’s son $1 million in damages.

Keep reading

A Cop Jailed Her for 2 Years on Fake Charges. Will She Ever Get Justice?

A Minnesota woman has resuscitated her effort to sue a police officer who jailed her as a teenager for two years on false charges associated with a sham sex trafficking investigation that the FBI once billed as its largest human trafficking crackdown. The case is another example of the legal labyrinth victims are required to navigate when attempting to get recourse after the government infringes on their rights and once again raises the question: How inoculated should those government officials be from civil suits for violating the Constitution?

Hamdi Mohamud’s odyssey began over a decade ago when St. Paul police officer Heather Weyker had her arrested on witness tampering charges concerning a woman named Muna Abdulkadir, who allegedly attacked Mohamud and her friends at knifepoint. Abdulkadir was crucial to Weyker’s sex-trafficking case, which, as the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 8th Circuit conceded, was “plagued with problems from the start.” Some of those problems included Weyker lying under oath, coercing witnesses, editing police reports, and making up evidence.

The groundless charges against Mohamud were ultimately dropped, but not until she spent about two years in federal prison, where those accused of federal crimes are typically held pretrial.

When Mohamud sued, Weyker was denied qualified immunity, the legal doctrine that makes it difficult to sue state and local government actors unless their alleged misconduct was “clearly established” in a prior court precedent. Yet the 8th Circuit in 2020 overturned that decision, citing Weyker’s position on a federal task force. Government employees at the federal level receive an even more muscular immunity.

“Qualified immunity makes it very, very difficult to sue government officials,” Patrick Jaicomo, an attorney at the Institute for Justice (I.J.), told me in 2021. “This makes it impossible.” The U.S. Supreme Court further strengthened that protection in June 2022.

Keep reading

Qualified Immunity May Shield FBI Agents Who Abused the No-Fly List

Any inconvenience governments can impose will eventually be abused as a tool of arbitrary punishment. Take, for example, the no-fly list and related watchlists, which are supposed to contain the names of known and suspected terrorists so they can be monitored and their movements restricted. From day one, placement on the list has been misused to punish innocent people who won’t do what federal agents command. Now FBI agents caught abusing the system want qualified immunity to shield them from consequences as people they mistreated seek justice through the courts.

“Following the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, FBI agents unsuccessfully attempted to pressure a group of innocent Muslims, including Muhammad Tanvir, to become informants for the Bureau,” notes the Institute for Justice (I.J.), which filed an amicus brief in Tanvir v. Tanzin. “Tanvir and the others—who were all either American citizens or lawful permanent residents—declined to become informants, because doing so goes against their sincerely held religious beliefs. FBI agents then harassed the group and placed them all on the No-Fly List.”

The Center for Constitutional Rights acts as co-counsels for the plaintiffs alongside the CUNY School of Law’s CLEAR Clinic. They sued under the Religious Freedom Restoration Act (RFRA) on the grounds that the plaintiffs’ Muslim faith forbids them to inform on coreligionists. The defendants—FBI agents who put Tanvir and the other plaintiffs on the no-fly list—protested that the RFRA doesn’t provide for monetary damages against government officials who violate rights, but the U.S. Supreme Court ruled otherwise in an important 2020 decision written by Justice Clarence Thomas.

Keep reading

Law Profs Tout Qualified Immunity for Unconstitutional Gun Restrictions

Some ideas are so terrible that combining them into a cocktail of awfulness makes rotten sense. So it is with gun control and qualified immunity: Why not mix impunity for violating basic rights with denial of a specific right so as to maximize the harm? At least, that’s the inspiration that struck two law professors who propose qualified immunity for enforcing even overtly unconstitutional gun control measures. While the duo sees the idea as much as a means of weakening officials’ protections from liability as for promoting restrictions on private arms, it’s a dangerous innovation that could entrench authoritarianism.

“Gun regulation seems to have hit a legal brick wall,” complain Guha Krishnamurthi, associate professor at the University of Maryland Francis King Carey School of Law, and Peter Salib, assistant professor at the University of Houston Law Center in Notre Dame Law Review Reflection. “In New York State Rifle & Pistol Association Inc. v. Bruen, the Supreme Court threw out what had been the standard approach for applying the Second Amendment to gun laws.”

Krishnamurthi and Salib argue that Bruen impedes “regulatory innovation” and leaves lawmakers “shackled to the regulations of the distant past.” That’s an interesting way of regretting that government is bound to respect constitutional protections for individual rights. But the two legal thinkers have a fresh regulatory innovation to propose for bypassing such protections—or, at least, a fresh way of applying a controversial legal doctrine to achieve their desired ends.

Keep reading

Are Police Inherently Less Competent Than Citizens?

Qualified immunity says some people should be held to a lower legal standard than everyone else under Anglo-American common law, mostly government officials in their formal duties—but also stock holders for decisions made by their companies. The idea behind it is that stockholders and government officials generally don’t have management control over policy decisions and usually shouldn’t be held responsible for those general policies.

Qualified immunity for police is fundamentally different. It says that police aren’t responsible enough to be held to the high legal standard which we hold other citizen-amateurs in the exact same situations.

Consider the duel case of a police officer and a citizen with a concealed-carry license coming upon a woman being raped in an alley. Qualified immunity holds the police officer to a lower legal standard than the citizen in any intervention to stop the ongoing rape.

The argument for granting police qualified immunity from criminal prosecution and civil lawsuits is that they have to face deadly situations often, sometimes on a daily basis, whereas other citizens may only face the same split-second, life-threatening decision once or twice in a lifetime.

I’ve always found this to be a strange argument. Why is it that the more experience they have, the less competent a policeman becomes? In what other profession does a person become less competent as they gain more experience? Do carpenters become less competent with experience? Engineers? Doctors? Politicians?

Okay, you’ve got me there on that last one.

But it seems only when dealing with government employees does someone in a profession become less efficient and less competent as they obtain more experience.

Keep reading

Qualified Immunity Is Burning a Hole in the Constitution

The Supreme Court created qualified immunity out of thin air in 1967, just six years after the Court first recognized that people could sue police officers and other government officials for violating their constitutional rights. In that first qualified immunity case, Pierson v. Ray, the Court held that the officers were entitled to a “good faith” immunity in civil rights cases. Chief Justice Earl Warren, writing for the majority, explained that this immunity from suit was necessary because, otherwise, officers could be held liable when they mistakenly believed the law authorized an arrest. As Chief Justice Warren explained, “A policeman’s lot is not so unhappy that he must choose between being charged with dereliction of duty if he does not arrest when he has probable cause and being mulcted in damages if he does.”

Although a “good faith” defense was the impetus for qualified immunity, today, officers are entitled to qualified immunity even if they act in bad faith, so long as there is no prior court decision with nearly identical facts. For more than five decades, the Supreme Court has repeatedly strengthened qualified immunity’s protections, describing each additional layer of defense in increasingly terrified tones as necessary to protect officers from the unyielding power of civil rights lawsuits.

The first — and arguably most seismic — shift to qualified immunity came in 1982 in a case called Harlow v. Fitzgerald. In Harlow, the Court concluded that officers’ entitlement to qualified immunity should not depend on whether they acted in good faith. In order to prove good faith, officers would have to be deposed — questioned under oath — about their state of mind at the time they violated the Constitution, and a case would go to a jury if an officer’s good faith was in dispute. Justice Powell, who wrote the majority opinion in Harlow, reasoned that requiring officers to participate in discovery and trial in an “insubstantial case” was a burden to the officer, who would need to spend time defending himself instead of doing his job. And the Court feared that this type of distraction would harm not only the officer but also “society as a whole” by discouraging “able citizens from acceptance of public office” and “dampen[ing] the ardor of all but the most resolute, or the most irresponsible [public officials], in the unflinching discharge of their duties.” So, to protect officers from having to participate in discovery and trial in “insubstantial cases,” the Court held in Harlow that an officer’s intentions do not matter to the qualified immunity analysis. Instead, officers are entitled to qualified immunity so long as they do not violate what the Court called “clearly established law.”

Keep reading

Oklahoma Bill Would Create State Process to End Police Qualified Immunity

A bill introduced in the Oklahoma House would create a process to sue police officers and government officials in state court for the deprivation of individual rights without the possibility of “qualified immunity” as a defense.

Rep. Regina Goodwin (D) prefiled House Bill 1631 (HB1631) for introduction on Feb. 6. The legislation would create a cause of action in state courts to sue a police officer who “under color of law, subjects or causes to be subjected, including failing to intervene, any other person to the deprivation of any individual rights that create binding obligations on government actors secured by the Bill of Rights, Article II of the Oklahoma Constitution.”

The bill specifically prohibits “qualified immunity” as a defense.

Typically, people sue police for using excessive force or other types of misconduct through the federal court system under the U.S. Bill of Rights. But federal courts created a qualified immunity defense out of thin air, making it nearly impossible to hold law enforcement officers responsible for actions taken in the line of duty. In order to move ahead with a suit, the plaintiff must establish that it was “clearly established” that the officer’s action was unconstitutional. The “clearly established” test erects an almost insurmountable hurdle to those trying to prove excessive force or a violation of their rights.

In effect, the passage of HB1631 would create an alternative path to address violations of rights in state court with no qualified immunity hurdle to clear.

A similar law was passed in Colorado.

Keep reading

An engineer pretended to be a cop and detained 2 drivers. A court let him get away with it.

Defenders of qualified immunity often use on-duty police officers as the doctrine’s raison d’être. As the Supreme Court itself admitted when it created the doctrine, qualified immunity was intended to give police officers elbow room to make on-the-spot decisions, even at the expense of denying a remedy for constitutional abuses.

But what happens when a cop wannabe violates someone’s rights to settle a personal grudge and wastes police time in the process? Should he also be entitled to the elbow room?

According to a federal circuit court in Minnesota, the answer is yes. Just last year, in the case of Central Specialties Inc. v. Large, the court granted immunity to a county engineer who used his government vehicle to stop two trucks belonging to a company he disliked.

He then made them wait for three hours until one of the three law-enforcement agencies he called finally came and cited one of the vehicles for violating a last-minute weight change the engineer himself imposed.

The citation was dismissed the following day. But when the company sued, their case against the engineer was quickly dismissed because of qualified immunity.

Keep reading

Cop Found Not Guilty Despite Video of Him Killing Innocent Woman While Trying to Kill Her Dog

As readers of the Free Thought Project know, police killing or attempting to kill dogs is an all too common occurrence — happening so often that it is caught on video much of the time. Also, as the following tragic case our of Arlington, TX illustrates, all too often, police will attempt to kill a dog — miss the dog — and shoot and kill an innocent person instead.

In 2020, a Texas grand jury indicted a police officer after he was seen on video trying to kill a dog and killing an innocent woman instead.

Arlington police officer Ravi Singh was charged with criminally negligent homicide for killing Maggie Brooks, 30, the daughter of an Arlington fire captain. On Monday, however, he was found not guilty — despite overwhelming evidence against him. Naturally, this news upset Brooks’ family.

“You see the video for yourself,” Brooks’ father, Troy Brooks said. “There’s nobody that owns a gun that would ever take that shot. Ever. But if you’re a police officer, you’re covered in absolute immunity. You can do whatever you want, and there are no repercussions for you.”

Keep reading

Rogue Cops: The Supreme Court Is Turning America Into a Constitution-Free Zone

“No one should get used to their rights. Predicting with certainty which ones, if any, will go, or when, is impossible.”—Mary R. Ziegler, legal historian

The Supreme Court has spoken: there will be no consequences for cops who brutalize the citizenry and no justice for the victims of police brutality.

Although the Court’s 2021-22 rulings on qualified immunity for police who engage in official misconduct were largely overshadowed by its politically polarizing rulings on abortion, gun ownership and religion, they were no less devastating.

The doctrine of qualified immunity was intended to insulate government officials from frivolous lawsuits, but the real purpose of qualified immunity is to ensure that government officials are not held accountable for official misconduct.

In Egbert v. Boule, the Court gave total immunity to Border Patrol agents who beat up a bed-and-breakfast owner, in the process carving out a massive exception to the Fourth Amendment for border police (and by extension, other federal police) who unconstitutionally use excessive force. As journalist Ian Millhiser concludes, “Egbert v. Boule is a severe blow to the proposition that law enforcement must obey the Constitution.”

In Cope v. Cogdill, the Court let stand a Fifth Circuit ruling that granted qualified immunity to jail officials who watched a suicidal inmate strangle himself without intervening or calling for help. Likewise, in Ramirez v. Guadarrama, the Court let stand a lower court ruling granting qualified immunity to police officers who fired their tasers at a suicidal man who had doused himself in gasoline, causing the man to burst into flames.

Both Cope and Ramirez move the goal posts for the kind of misconduct that merits qualified immunity, suggesting that even sheer incompetence is excusable when it involves a cop.

It’s a chilling reminder that in the American police state, ‘we the people’ are at the mercy of law enforcement officers who have almost absolute discretion to decide who is a threat, what constitutes resistance, and how harshly they can deal with the citizens they were appointed to ‘serve and protect.”

This is how unarmed Americans keep dying at the hands of militarized police.

Keep reading