I think you may have confused qualified immunity a bit. It has nothing to do with criminal proceedings and is only talking about civil penalties. The reason it

I think you may have confused qualified immunity a bit. It has nothing to do with criminal proceedings and is only talking about civil penalties. The reason it's such a big deal is that it can be very difficult to get prosecutors to charge a police officer that did something wrong, and then it can be difficult to get a conviction even if they are tried. In a civil trial you can win by a preponderance of the evidence. So if you go after a cop criminally, where you do a have a lot of evidence and fail, that's it, no further penalties, the cop walks. On the other hand, you probably don't want to loosen it too much or cops will be sued at every opportunity. I don't know what the right answer is, but it's not to make it nearly impossible to hold a cop civilly liable. I mean, that's how they got OJ, he was found not guilty in the criminal trial, but was found guilty in the civil trial brought by Nicole Brown's family. So allowing cops to get avoid the civil courts is wrong.