Wow! If he is anything like his father, you are one cool cat. I heard about "qualified immunity" in 1982, after my partner and I got back from a months long trip to Europe, and then promptly forgot about it. Your son did an excellent job describing Q.I. and, like he said, it is outrageous and should make any American's blood boil. Heck, that's an understatement. It gives "clever" and even not so clever cops license to steal from damned near anyone, whether you committed a crime or not. How any court could let that stand boggles the mind. That the Supreme Court invented it out of whole cloth is simply incredible. I am gobsmacked!
Yeah...i forwarded this story to him in case he hadn't seen it. His response was "thanks for raising my BP"
After watching the video I am more confused. The real issue is that they were never criminally charged to begin with and then they have no civil recourse. Interested to see what happened to those cops and his supervisors. Edit This happened to one of the cops They filed a civil lawsuit in 2015 after they discovered one of the officers, Kumagai, was arrested on a federal charge of taking a $20,000 bride from a drug dealer. He later pleaded guilty, and is no longer a Fresno police officer.
QI has nothing to do with criminal charges. QI stops them from being sued for their actions while on the job.
The video says it protects police and elected officials. Are there any (non Trump or any President) examples of elected official QI?
https://reason.com/2020/07/04/editorial-notes-on-police-brutality/ excerpt: At the core of Friedlander's argument is the notion that law enforcement officials—like everyone in a free society—must be answerable for their actions. "As it stands in America today, the police aid in the trampling of rights on such a massive scale that there is hardly a word sufficiently descriptive," he writes. "Limited liability? The price of retribution due to the victims of the crimes committed by police on any single day would be beyond calculation, yet not only do these crimes go undenounced (for the most part), and the perpetrators, police and politicians, unpunished, but, even worse, the victims are forced through taxes to finance the operation and salaries of the criminals." This tracks neatly with several of the most promising avenues for reform in 2020. The first is the elimination of qualified immunity, a legal doctrine that shields police and other government officials from liability in civil rights lawsuits unless the illegality of their specific actions was "clearly established" at the time of the offense. At press time, the only Libertarian Party member of Congress, Michigan Rep. Justin Amash, had just introduced a bill to eliminate that protection. He was joined in the effort by one of his most progressive colleagues, Rep. Ayanna Pressley (D–Mass). "The brutal killing of George Floyd by Minneapolis police is merely the latest in a long line of incidents of egregious police misconduct," they wrote. "This pattern continues because police are legally, politically, and culturally insulated from consequences for violating the rights of the people whom they have sworn to serve." "Several of the things that allow police to stand above the law," Friedlander goes on, "include the secrecy and tightknit quality of the police force, the personnel rules that characterize departments, and the comparative homogeneity of outlook among police (due to preselection, attrition, and assimilation)." The undue influence of police unions on the disciplinary process for officers accused of misconduct, and on the political officials who often have the final say in such matters, is a major and hitherto underappreciated barrier to reform. Breaking the police unions would align the incentives of officers better with the citizens they are meant to serve. We must seriously revisit the scope of the powers and duties of police. While the movement to defund police forces is the simplest and most symbolic of these notions, the nitty-gritty list offers more to chew on: terminating 1033, the program that funnels surplus Department of Defense equipment to local police departments; eliminating techniques such as the chokehold from the police playbook; requiring officers to report inappropriate use of force by their colleagues. more at the link
"Dallas Cops Who Joked About Pinning a Man to the Ground Until He Stopped Breathing Get Qualified Immunity": https://reason.com/2020/07/09/dalla...-he-stopped-breathing-get-qualified-immunity/ excerpt: Dallas Cops Who Joked About Pinning a Man to the Ground Until He Stopped Breathing Get Qualified Immunity The decision vividly illustrates how the doctrine shields police from accountability for using excessive force. Jacob Sullum | 7.9.2020 3:55 PM On a Monday night in August 2016, Tony Timpa, a 32-year-old Dallas resident, called 911 to report that he was "having a lot of anxiety" about a man he feared would harm him. Timpa mentioned that he had received several psychiatric diagnoses—schizophrenia, depression, bipolar disorder, and anxiety disorder—but had not taken his medication that day. After police arrived in response to that call and other reports of a man behaving erratically near 1728 West Mockingbird Lane, Timpa yelled, "You're gonna kill me!" He was right. Timpa, who had already been handcuffed by a security guard, died while being pinned to the ground face down by several police officers for about 15 minutes, during which time he pleaded with them to stop and cried for help over and over again. The officers, while intermittently showing signs of compassion, joked about Timpa's predicament and the possibility that they had killed him. This week, in a decision that vividly illustrates how difficult it is to hold cops accountable for misconduct under a federal statute that authorizes lawsuits against government officials who violate people's constitutional rights, a federal judge granted qualified immunity to those officers. Whether or not they violated Timpa's Fourth Amendment rights, U.S. District Judge David Godbey ruled, the law on that point was not "clearly established" on the night he died. The circumstances of Timpa's death are broadly similar to what happened when George Floyd was suffocated by Minneapolis officers on May 25, a horrifying incident that provoked nationwide protests and calls for police reform. One of the proposed reforms is the abolition of qualified immunity, a court-invented doctrine that blocks federal civil rights claims when plaintiffs cannot identify sufficiently specific precedents. Godbey's decision shows how formidable that barrier is. Timpa's family argued that the Dallas officers' use of force was clearly unconstitutional under Gutierrez v. City of San Antonio, a 1998 case involving a man who died while restrained face down in the back of a patrol car. In that case, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 5th Circuit, which includes Texas, allowed an excessive force claim to proceed. In both cases, the lawsuit filed by Timpa's relatives notes, police knew the detainee was under the influence of cocaine. The 5th Circuit in Gutierrez held that the use of force can be excessive "when a drug-affected person in a state of excited delirium is hog-tied and placed face down in a prone position." Godbey noted that Timpa, although restrained on his stomach while his hands and feet were shackled, was not hog-tied, which in his view was enough to make Gutierrez inapplicable. He cited three subsequent cases in which the 5th Circuit had blocked excessive force claims against officers who allegedly used deadly prone restraints against resisting detainees. Godbey likewise was unimpressed by decisions in which five other federal appeals courts had ruled that prone restraints causing death or severe injury did or could qualify as excessive force. Those rulings, he said, did not amount to "a 'robust consensus' of persuasive authority," because the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 8th Circuit reached a different conclusion. more at the link
