4 ms·
Prosecutors and police should simply not have qualified immunity. ANY type of immunity is going to be expanded and abused over time. If more police and prosecut
by Molitor5901 2y ago
Prosecutors and police should simply not have qualified immunity. ANY type of immunity is going to be expanded and abused over time. If more police and prosecutors faced real legal jeopardy for violating the rights of people the problem would solve itself. Until then there is really zero consequences for stealing from a person pulled over on the side of the road, withholding evidence, fabricating witnesses, overcharging, or just outright murdering people.
- UncleMeat 2y agoProsecutors actually get an even stronger version of immunity. Cops get qualified immunity (which is a stupendously easy bar to cross) but prosecutors get absolute immunity. It's horrifying and clearly not the right way of handling the "well we don't want everybody suing the DA that prosecuted them" problem.
- highcountess 2y ago[dead]
- LorenPechtel 2y agoI think this could to some extent be resolved by explicitly not giving criminal immunity and dispensing with any immunity upon conviction (and the clock starts on conviction.) You don't get the officials buried in lawsuits and you establish a hard boundary as to when you're allowed to sue so you don't get problems with suits testing the edge.
- Bender 2y agoI would personally never want any level of legal immunity. If the citizens know I can not be charged then their only recourse at best is vigilante justice or worse removing everything and everyone I love from my life.
- dudeinhawaii 2y agoThis means that the person with immunity simply has to keep the level of their crimes low enough that sane and rational people would not jump to vigilante justice. A bad actor could do quite a lot within those boundaries.
- krisoft 2y agoThat sounds reasonable on paper as a theory, but we do live in a universe where LEOs, prosecutors and judges have very broad legal immunities. And i can’t recall much vigilante justice hurting them. (Nor do i think it should, just stating for the record.) Definietly not happening as a kind of inevitable predicament as your description seems to imply. How do you square your comment with that observed reality?
- Bender 2y agoI am basing that theory on organized crime history and present in the USA. You don't hear about it much as the incidents are suppressed from most mainstream media to avoid copy-cats and that's not even getting into the excessive ways in which the cartels operate. It's one of the reasons judges usually have tunnels from the courthouses to a private secure parking area or why in rural areas the courthouse and sheriffs office is often in the same building.
- forgetfreeman 2y agoIf civil servants face the kind of adversarial pressure you're describing here why do sanitation workers have a higher per capita mortality rate? Are cartel hitmen really so bad at their job that they're less lethal than inanimate refuse?
- LinuxBender 2y agoI do not have an answer for your query. That said I would not want to be a sanitation worker either. The foods we eat are unhealthy even prior to reaching the other end and the rodentia that attracts carry a myriad of diseases.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- duxup 2y agoI have no problem with some sort of good faith immunity where through some factors it was determined they were in the wrong but were operating in good faith / honest mistake. Yeah it will be vague, but I think it is required to be able to do things where ... you do get to infringe on people's rights (legally or not). Having said that the example, there was no warrant and the sheriff had no reason to do what they did within the normal function of the job (sharing people's nudie pics...) ... that should be EASILY outside the bounds of QI This case seems like the poster child where IQ enters he realm of of absurdity and degrades people's lack of trust in institutions. It also seems like an example where a more reasonable form of QI would thrive.
- lkjdsklf 2y agoReading the article it sounds like the problem is the previous supreme court rulings on QI. It requires that a court had previously ruled that the specific action was a violation of constitutional rights. It had not done that on this specific action previously, but did in this case. So they get QI here because of a lack of a previous ruling, but if the someone were to do the same thing in the future, they would not be given the benefit of the doubt.
- dsr_ 2y agoQualified immunity got expanded from an immunity to lawsuits over doing your job appropriately to immunity from prosecution over anything you did while holding the job. Why do we need QI for, e.g., city clerks? Because otherwise every permit issuing decision that they make as part of their job that pisses someone off would result in a lawsuit. Why do we need QI for police committing murder? We don't.
- wat10000 2y agoIt would be better to discourage frivolous lawsuits in general rather than giving certain people immunity.
- PaulDavisThe1st 2y agoWhy not both?
- wat10000 2y agoBecause giving some people special legal privileges is bad.
- victorbjorklund 2y agoHow without at the same time discouraging legitimate lawsuits?
- wat10000 2y agoI don't know, but that exact same problem also applies to giving immunity to officials.
- hippocombinator 2y agoIs it so bad to discourage legitimate lawsuits? I think there are plenty of legitimate things that we are ok with having some amount of difficulty in order to discourage abuse.