On the heels of news that police in Buffalo, N.Y. would not be criminally charged for brutally shoving a 75-year-old protester to the ground came video of officers in nearby Rochester pepper-spraying an emotionally traumatized nine-year-old girl as she begged for mercy in the back of a squad car. Other horrific recordings show police methodically squeezing the life out of George Floyd, Daniel *****, and Tony Timpa — the latter after he called 911 for help while experiencing a mental-health incident.
And while public confidence in police has never been lower, the cause has never been clearer: qualified immunity. Qualified immunity is a judge-made legal defense that prevents police and other government officials from being held civilly liable for violating people’s rights. To overcome the defense, civil rights plaintiffs usually have to identify a prior case with identical facts as their own. In other words, it’s quite common for courts to say “Yes, your rights were violated — but there’s no prior case where someone else’s rights were violated in quite the same way, so you lose.”
#BLM #BlackLivesMatter #PoliceBrutality #PoliceMusconduct #Justice
Another good source of information about Qualified Immunity that is updated often, is The Cato Institute's UnlawfulShiled.com
It's a good source to share with your right leaning friends. Cato has good Cred in right wing circles. (or did last time i checked). The ACLU has some great info for your left leaning friends. The Institute for Justice (IJ.org) is out in the trenches fighting. They're a libertarian group. It's not very often you have Liberals, Libertarians, and Republican experts that can all agree something is messed up bigtime. It's a rare chance to have a conversation with people you normally disagree with, build some common ground.