Editorial: Fix qualified immunity travesty letting police off the hook
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Congress must reform qualified immunity policing travesty
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Police Officers Never Learn “Clearly Established Law” SHARE
Most people would agree that police officers shouldn’t be punished for split‐second mistakes in judgment. That’s why the
Garner tests for whether or not an officer’s use of force amounts to a constitutional violation require an analysis of whether that use of force was reasonable with regard to the
particular circumstances the officer was in.
But qualified immunity goes beyond
Graham and
Garner with its maddeningly arbitrary “clearly established law” requirement. In effect, “clearly established law” adds a separate, completely illogical burden of proof to constitutional torts cases: proving the existence of a prior case with functionally identical facts.
It s Time to Get Rid of Qualified Immunity | Opinion Billy Binion
, Assistant Editor at Reason magazine On 4/28/21 at 11:00 AM EDT
On July 10, 2014, Michael Vickers, a deputy sheriff in Coffee County, Georgia, fired two shots. The first missed its target. The second also missed its target and hit an unarmed 10-year-old boy instead.
The sheriff and a few other officers were in pursuit of a fleeing suspect just before the shooting. To escape the police, the suspect ran onto Amy Corbitt s property, where six children including her own were playing, two of them under the age of three. The children found themselves caught up in the frenzied scene, allegedly ordered to lay face-down in the grass with loaded guns pressed into their backs.