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The purpose of qualified immunity is to permit officials to carry out their discretionary duties without fear of personal liability or harassing litigation. It

• jshen 6y ago
  So a police offer that kills someone will at worst be fired?
  • mike_d 6y ago
    Civil liability is not the same as criminal charges.
    • jshen 6y ago
      Thanks, I didn’t know it only applied to civil charges. “ civil suits are the only means by which individuals or their families can get compensation for the violation of their constitutional or civil rights. And, in practice, civil lawsuits are often the only means to seek justice at all because prosecutors—themselves government workers—are typically reluctant to bring criminal charges against their government colleagues, especially police officers who are crucial to the work prosecutors do on a daily basis.”
• enraged_camel 6y ago
  >> It applies to all parts of government. No, you are talking about something else, which is called sovereign immunity. Qualified immunity is a dumb concept the courts made up to protect police officers.
• adamsvystun 6y ago
  Isn't qualified immunity applies only to police? If not, then the solution should be to end qualified immunity for police only. There is a difference between health department inspector and police officer, no reason to apply the same standards in both cases.
  • torstenvl 6y ago
    > Isn't qualified immunity applies only to police No. > the solution should be to end qualified immunity for police only. There is a difference between health department inspector and police officer, no reason to apply the same standards in both cases. That makes no sense. A government official performing a government job because they are required to by the government should not then be ordered by the government's court system to pay restitution for damages caused by the government's ordered action. Beyond the principle of the matter, the pragmatic reality is that no sane person would ever work in law enforcement if their kid's college fund is subject to being raided for doing their jobs.
    • JumpCrisscross 6y ago
      > government official performing a government job because they are required to by the government should not then be ordered by the government's court system to pay restitution for damages caused by the government's ordered action There is a lot of grey area in qualified immunity. Government officials actions are protected so long as they are legal. If someone knowingly orders an illegal action, qualified immunity no longer applies. If someone knowingly follows an illegal order, they too may bear burden. (If they unknowingly follow an illegal order, we enter the greyer shades of grey.) (Edited.)
      • torstenvl 6y ago
        > There is a lot of grey area in qualified immunity Nope, not really. > Government actions are protected so long as they are legal. If someone orders an illegal action, they are no longer protected by being government agents because they weren't lawfully acting in their capacities as one This is not correct. It is not enough for there to be "an illegal action," the action has to have been in violation of clearly established law. Please stop spreading misinformation in this thread. Having strong feelings on a legal topic does not make you a lawyer.
• deleted 6y ago
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• barnaclejive 6y ago
  "without fear of personal liability" You see no issue with that, seriously?
  • JumpCrisscross 6y ago
    > You see no issue with that, seriously? Qualified immunity isn't a get-out-of-jail-free card. It is released, for example, when a government official breaks clearly established law. (Counterfactual: the courts have been very narrow in interpreting what "clearly established" means.)
    • stormbrew 6y ago
      To expand on just how absurdly narrow courts interpret "clearly established", there's this example from the wikipedia page on qualified immunity[1] for eg. > Critics have cited examples such as a November 2019 ruling by the United States Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit, which found that an earlier court case ruling it unconstitutional for police to sic dogs on suspects who have surrendered by lying on the ground did not apply under the "clearly established" rule to a case in which Tennessee police allowed their police dog to bite a surrendered suspect because the suspect had surrendered not by lying down but by sitting on the ground and raising his hands. The net effect of this appears to basically be that it's impossible to prove literally anything pierces qualified immunity unless it was ruled on prior to the establishment of qualified immunity as a defense. How exactly can you create precedent when you require nearly identical precedent to set it? It's a blatant catch-22. Like, literally something that could have been in the book Catch 22. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qualified_immunity https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qualified_immunity
      • deleted 6y ago
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      • gwd 6y ago
        Even better is the police who just stole stuff, because there was no "clearly established" law against stealing stuff: https://newrepublic.com/article/157342/supreme-court-police-qualified-immunity https://newrepublic.com/article/157342/supreme-court-police-...
• deleted 6y ago
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• devwastaken 6y ago
  Qualified immunity was made up by courts, their legislating from the bench should have no merit, and therefore revoking qualified immunity is the right thing to do under checks and balances. We need a replacement, one written in legislation, that puts fixed narrow limits on how immunity applies. If you break the law - you should receive no protections. There is no excuse for enforcers of law to not know the law. This will put the liability into officers And government workers/representatives hands and force them to respect the law.
  • mike_d 6y ago
    > Qualified immunity was made up by courts That is how our whole system works. The first amendment for example doesn't have an explicit "yelling fire in a movie theatre" exemption, yet the courts have defined tests that determine if speech is protected. > We need a replacement [...] If you break the law - you should receive no protections That is exactly how it works today. Once you have been found guilty in a criminal court, you no longer have any protections against civil cases.
    • stormbrew 6y ago
      > That is exactly how it works today. Once you have been found guilty in a criminal court, you no longer have any protections against civil cases. I don't think this is true? The test is much more narrow than this. You could potentially be convicted of a crime even if you didn't have a reasonable belief that you were doing so, but qualified immunity explicitly dictates that you have to be intending to break the law or that your actions both violate a law and that there is extremely clear precedent that they do so. That seems, unusually for civil cases, to be a much higher bar than criminal conviction requires.
    • nitwit005 6y ago
      If it's how the system is supposed to work, it's strange that members of the supreme court have complained about the lack of legal basis. Interpreting the law, such as what the first amendment is supposed to mean, is indeed what the courts are supposed to do. Making up new laws wholesale is supposed to be the legislature's job.
• tomc1985 6y ago
  Wait, are you sure? If someone is acting as an agent of an entity then the entity is who you sue I am definitely not a lawyer or even good at "law" but that would just be insane if the truth is otherwise
  • sneak 6y ago
    The problem is that then when a police officer breaks the law and harms you, and you later sue them, the taxpayers end up paying the settlement due to the fact that you have to sue the whole department rather than the criminal themselves. There are no consequences, criminal or civil, for the person who actually broke the law. New York City taxpayers pay $300M a year or so (IIRC) paying out civil judgements against the exceptionally violent NYPD.
    • jeltz 6y ago
      How is that a problem? It was after all the tax payers who voted for politicians who are in favor of violent policing. I feel the issue here is that the courts are corrupt and do not convict police for their crimes. Not that you cannot sue employees. I feel fixing a broken criminal justice system with civil lawsuits only creates more issues than it solves.
      • ceejayoz 6y ago
        > It was after all the tax payers who voted for politicians who are in favor of violent policing. It's often not so simple. The police retaliate against politicians who don't toe the line. https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/01/nyregion/chiara-de-blasio-arrest.html https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/01/nyregion/chiara-de-blasio... Bad cops often can't be gotten rid of: https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2020/jun/30/police-union-contracts-collective-bargaining-officers https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2020/jun/30/police-union... > A court in 2009 convicted Washington DC police officer Michael Sugg-Edwards of sexually assaulting a teenage woman in his squad car. After conducting its own internal investigation, the department quickly fired the then 35-year-old officer. > But, six years later, Sugg-Edwards was back on the force. A provision in the police union’s contract allowed him to appeal against the decision to a union-selected arbitrator who reversed the department’s firing and reinstated him – with back pay. > In San Antonio, an officer fired twice for challenging handcuffed suspects to fight him for their freedom was reinstated by an arbitrator both times. A second San Antonio officer who engaged in unauthorized car chases was also reinstated twice. In Columbus and Oklahoma, officers who kicked men in the head were rehired.
• AnthonyMouse 6y ago
  > The purpose of qualified immunity is to permit officials to carry out their discretionary duties without fear of personal liability or harassing litigation. This is a general problem with the US court system. People with more resources can use it to destroy people with fewer resources, because litigation is expensive and time consuming even if you ultimately prevail. This isn't a problem for the rich because they can survive the loss, and then the incentive to frivolously harass them isn't there when it costs you as much as it does them. It isn't a problem for government officials because of qualified immunity. It's a problem for everybody else. Maybe we should take the exception away from government officials, to increase their incentive to solve it for everybody else.
  • DocTomoe 6y ago
    Instead of creating yet another special case for government officials, the solution for the US problem is to go and take some ideas from Europe. In Germany, all costs associated with a lawsuit have to be paid/reimbursed by the losing party. This quickly solves the "I know I won't win, but lets ruin the other guy" problem.
    • nindalf 6y ago
      This rule change makes it potentially very expensive to sue large corporations. They are already more likely to win because they can afford larger, better resourced legal teams. Now the little guy also needs to pay for that legal team when they lose? You might see most people opting not to sue Comcast, McDonalds, Amazon to avoid being financially ruined. It’s probably just best to leave it to the discretion of the courts to decide whether one side pays the costs of the other. Better than legislating that the loser always pays.
      • matsemann 6y ago
        It's not black and white. If the court takes the case in Europe, it probably has some merit. If the little guy then loses, the court will then often decide it needed to be tried and both parties will cover their own expenses.
• Cthulhu_ 6y ago
  You're not including the reasons why qualified immunity is bad though, is this a "devil's advocate" post? I mean the examples you mentioned would get thrown out by a judge because the examples cited are people doing their jobs. They're getting rid of qualified immunity because the police is abusing their power to assault and murder people. I'm not even going to soften that one by saying 'some' police, because inaction is complicity. If one in ten cops are bad, the other nine are complicit for not acting and correcting the one.
  • lawnchair_larry 6y ago
    Qualified immunity does not allow assault or murder.
    • klmadfejno 6y ago
      Well it does protect your from civil penalties for law and murder
      • austincheney 6y ago
        Not in the case of criminal law violations. Civil suits should not be used as a blunt weapon to end run criminal complaints only because they set the bar lower. This is antithetical to tort reform.
        • Ceezy 6y ago
          Most police officers don't get murder charges anyway. Civil court exist for something. Saying that people should sue criminal instead of civil is up to the victim team not you. If people don't want to be sued civil they should do a better job first. Removing bs laws that don't regulate anything anyway would be good also. Laws are meant to be respected not to be dodge because your job is important. Everybody job is.
          • austincheney 6y ago
• twhb 6y ago
  > Didn't get the building permit for your kids horse barn? Sue the planning commission members individually. Animal control writes you a citation for Puddles not being on a leash? Unleash the lawyers. Health department gave your wine bar a bad rating? Sue the inspector personally. That’s exactly the way it should work! If an animal control guy has it in for you and writes you off-leash citations every week while you’re in your own back yard, if the health inspector says he won’t permit black people to stay in business, then you absolutely should be protected by the law. Anything else is plain classism: an implicit assumption that members of a certain class are always in the right, and a requirement to deal with conflict with them not from a position of equal power and rights, but only by hoping to convince them to have mercy. Certainly getting sued over every little thing would be impracticable, too. But that’s also true for citizens. If the laws that protect us aren’t good enough, then the solution is better laws, not to exempt some classes from the law!
  • brnt 6y ago
    It's undemocratic, because unless all lawyers are great and free for all, this path is a matter of money. Now, you may have bought into the libertarian marketing of freedom without democracy, after all so many Americans have, but there are extremely good reasons for why this is problematic, which are actually not that difficult to cobble together with some spare time.
    • twhb 6y ago
      Please try to stay civil. In response to your assertion that the courts don’t work: > If the laws that protect us aren’t good enough, then the solution is better laws, not to exempt some classes from the law!
      • johnmaguire 6y ago
        Nothing the parent said was uncivil. (I say this having largely agreed with your original comment.)
        • 6y ago
• TaylorAlexander 6y ago
  And then they will need to buy private liability insurance, and bad cops will get their rates hiked until they can't afford to keep being cops, instead of just getting transferred to a new district to offend again.
• mschuster91 6y ago
  > The purpose of qualified immunity is to permit officials to carry out their discretionary duties without fear of personal liability or harassing litigation. > It applies to all parts of government. Didn't get the building permit for your kids horse barn? Sue the planning commission members individually. Animal control writes you a citation for Puddles not being on a leash? Unleash the lawyers. Health department gave your wine bar a bad rating? Sue the inspector personally. In Germany, police officers (and other government officials) only have personal liability if they intentionally act against the law or are grossly negligent in following their duties. The scenarios you describe would lead to all these lawsuits being thrown out in court as frivolous. The correct way to appeal against executive decisions (the denial of building permit, the citation for your unleashed poodle or the bad health rating for the bar) is to file a suit at an administrative court ("Verwaltungsgericht"). Plead your case there and the court can override the executive decision.
• bloak 6y ago
  Other countries don't have a problem with officials getting sued. In the UK there doesn't even seem to be a problem with employees getting sued; cases always seem to end up being against the employer. So why does only the US need "qualified immunity"? (That's a real question, not a rhetorical one.)
  • pjc50 6y ago
    UK lawsuits seem to be much rarer, but in this notorious case the lawsuit was against the police as an organization rather than the individuals involved: https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2020/oct/07/met-police-pay-compensation-to-man-fathered-by-undercover-officer https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2020/oct/07/met-police-p... (our own comparable issue is probably Northern Ireland, and the still-outstanding litigation around Bloody Sunday and "Soldier F" etc)
  • jeltz 6y ago
    Sweden basically has qualified immunity for all employees (our law is a bit different but offers almost as strong protections). So, no, I do not think the US is the only country which needs qualified immunity.
    • Ceezy 6y ago
      Well in the US. That's only for public official, not for your average Joe. So if you are a security you can be sued. And actually the two security guard that didn't help the older asian lady were fired(in NY). For doing nothing. Meanwhile a cop could not be sued for the same thing...
  • throwaway0a5e 6y ago
    You always sue the people with money. In the US the employer is always the one sued by default. Individuals only really get sued when the individual's actions are so squarely of their own doing that the employer can't possibly be held responsible. If a truck driver enraged about his wife's infidelity decides to drive his truck through the motel his wife is cheating in you don't sue the trucking company (well you probably do, but they lawyer up and their lawyers spell out why it's not worth your time), you sue the driver. The problem is that this pattern of action falls apart for agents the government because of qualified immunity. If a cop does something bad and the government says "hey, it ain't on us, we told him not to do that, heck, we even trained him to avoid getting into those situations" the plaintiff is out of luck (except for the existing narrow exception to qualified immunity). Getting rid of qualified immunity would put government employees in the same situation literally every other employee is in.
• wolfretcrap 6y ago
  In India also I can't sue officer, but officers will gladly use their powered to harass the F out of your life.
• chmod775 6y ago
  Excuse me but how are "officials" special here? By that logic any job should have these protections. They don't for obvious reasons. If people need protection from certain laws, then write that in the specific laws.
  • jeltz 6y ago
    In Sweden all employees have these protections and I feel our system works mostly fine. The employer is by default on the hook for all damages caused by employees. There are of course some exceptions like gross negligence, but in general all employees have qualified immunity here.
• kstenerud 6y ago
  Since other countries get by just fine without qualified immunity, one has to wonder what real-world calamity such a doctrine is defending against?
• jmull 6y ago
  > The purpose of qualified immunity is to permit officials to carry out their discretionary duties without fear of personal liability or harassing litigation. Shouldn’t we all be able to carry out our lives without undue fear of personal liability or harassing litigation? It makes no sense to provide a special civil liberty for government employees and no one else. If we need to reign in law suits, then let’s do that for everyone.
  • austincheney 6y ago
    Sure it does. I don’t want paramedics prematurely giving up on saving peoples lives because there is fear of a lawsuit. Software developers don’t have this fear, so we get to kill people through releasing buggy bloated applications without any fear of personal liability.
    • ramphastidae 6y ago
      Pure nonsense. Cite these cases where software engineers have built a decades-long track record of abusing power and murdering innocents under the guise of civil service and directly abusing qualified immunity to get away with it. Or maybe tone things down.
      • Workaccount2 6y ago
        You can't even do that for civil servants though. The actual number of "encounters gone wrong" vs total encounters is vanishingly small. People think there is an epidemic of police murdering minorities, but in reality the number of unarmed black men killed by police is somewhere between bear attacks and babies drowning in buckets in terms of annual deaths. That's not to downplay the horror of such killings, but to put it into perspective of the pervasiveness of the problem. The media and especially social media of turned it into a full blown public health crisis.
        • openasocket 6y ago
          I think you're underestimating the problem by limiting it to unarmed black men killed by police. There's a lot that a police force can do besides killing people. There's profiling and unlawful arrests and prosecution, cruel and unusual punishments in prisons and jails, along with general harassment. You should look at the results of DOJ investigations into the Ferguson and Baltimore police departments, they are absolutely scathing. In the Baltimore police department, there were incidents in which they arrested people just hanging out on a street corner for no reason (when they told their lieutenant they didn't have a valid reason to arrest them they were told "just make something up") in front of the DOJ investigators! I'd also recommend the book "Just Mercy" for examples of the horrors of malicious prosecution. Just one egregious example from that book: a mentally disabled woman was sentenced to life in prison for the murder of her child. The problem? The woman never had a child, and was in fact infertile!
• high_byte 6y ago
  makes a lot of sense to me. if you sue someone for "bad ratings" as you mentioned, you likely have no case and incur court expanses, including penalty for wasting time... but at least you have that option for when you really have a case.
• MomoXenosaga 6y ago
  Making government worse is all part of the Republican plan. Their propaganda is that government is bad and incompetent.
  • ticviking 6y ago
    That is an unfair caricature of Republican. Who in turn make an unfair caricature of civil servants. The position of most on the US center right is that because of governments unique power over our lives we ought to be very careful about what we allow them to do.
    • ceejayoz 6y ago
      > The position of most on the US center right... The stated position, perhaps. It tend to disappear when talking about "a Unitarian church wants to perform a gay marriage", "California wants to legalize pot", etc.
  • sometimesbad 6y ago
    It often is bad and incompetent. Take one of the most left leaning cities in the USA, San Francisco. Not sure there is any metric where by it can be claimed they not bad and incompetent.
• freen 6y ago
  Qualified immunity for police officers includes immunity from criminal prosecution and is extremely different from the civil liability you are talking about.
• scrozart 6y ago
  > Invest in educational resources to teach communities how to deal with law enforcement. You have this exactly backwards. It's telling that instead of mentioning doing away with warrior training, for instance, you list things we, the people, need to do to deal with poorly trained cops with licenses to kill, which, in the case of the police, is exactly what this immunity grants. The police need better training to handle the people they serve and protect, period. The police need to perform better psychological evaluations of prospective cops. The police need to develop better community relations with the communities they serve. I agree with reforming the unions and installing more independent civilian oversight. I also agree that the U.S. needs major reform of metal health and drug rehab, but that particular issue is more of a left outer join with the issue being discussed; they overlap unfortunately, but the all-too-often grim outcomes of that overlap are due to the state of policing. The police and their unions acting in bad faith, and abusing their immunity, is why we're here. WE don't need to clean up our interactions with police. It's the other way around. Edited: typo, wording, and removed unnecessary emphasis
  • throwawaydeitz1 6y ago
    I agree with all of your points, except for your idea of "the people they serve and protect." If you read about the historical origins of the US police force, their (verifiably documented) lineage goes back to the days of English colonialism. Those original patrol groups were created to "protect" the damage/loss of property- namely to prevent runaway slaves from escaping their owner's control. The US police force has, quite literally, always been first and foremost a way for the richest upper class to protect their wealth, power, and assets. They are a way to keep the status quo. The fact that they (sometimes) help poor and working class citizens is merely a by-product of their primary goal.
    • zepto 6y ago
      > their (verifiably documented) lineage Where are these documents, and what do they verify? Saying that an institution today goes back to an institution from the past doesn’t mean that it shares the same traits. Institutions change over time. What you need to show is that the same purpose can be documented today as was there when the police were established.
• ric2b 6y ago
  Should we apply that logic to the private sector as well? Make all employees have qualified immunity, can't be sued for things you did while working, what could go wrong?
• AlexTWithBeard 6y ago
  > Sue the planning commission members individually. In case of their gross misconduct - sure. This is the same situation we have with non-government employees right now. Would you sue a club bouncer because he denied you entry? I guess no.
• billytetrud 6y ago
  You say "sue the inspector" like it's obviously a bad thing. If the inspector used their special government appointed powers to intentionally or negligently screw you over, they should be sued. Prohibiting individuals from being sued created two perverse incentives: 1. It emboldens those who do harm and allows that kind of behavior to become systemic (as it has in police culture) 2. It removes an incentive to improve our court systems and legal processes, because those closest to those legal systems have generally been immune. > If you are found guilty of a crime, then you can be sued. ?? Generally, people want justice to be served. If a police officer had already been found guilty, they've already been given a sentence. That rarely happens because police departments and their unions stonewall efforts to determine truth and charge appropriately.
• jshen 6y ago
  You think this type of lawsuit shouldn’t be allowed? https://abc7.com/lawsuit-virginia-police-threaten-pepper-spray-army-lieutenant-during-stop/10504779/ https://abc7.com/lawsuit-virginia-police-threaten-pepper-spr...