Qualified immunity is more nuanced. It allows the first offense to be absolved but it works like legal precedent where future offenses by _any law enforcement officer_ is not covered.
replyNow there’s plenty of loopholes where you can craft “unique defenses” based on nearly identical underlying offenses. But it’s important to have the distinction
How many instances of are there of qualified immunity actually resulting in an officer being found liable because of past precedent where someone else was considered to have had qualified immunity in the same circumstances? If it's not anywhere close to the number of times when they were found to be immune, then the distinction is theoretical only, and it's arguably more misleading to emphasize it as if it's a real limitation.
replyWell, I didnt bring it up but the other element of qualified immunity is that its purely for civil suits. So it would only show up if an officer was basically sued personally. It doesnt apply to criminal prosecution. Thats another can of worms though.
replySure, the issues there are also not particularly nuanced; prosectors rely on cops to arrest people and provide evidence for them to do their job, so they're incentivized to keep a good working relationship with them (i.e. by not prosecuting them, especially for things that end up helping them secure convictions, even if they're illegal)
replyI agree. The issues arent super nuanced (and are pretty "blatant")
replyBut I do think the nuance of "who/what should we point our finger at" is important. Because like we see in this thread, the finger is being pointed at qualified immunity when it almost never is the actual issue for a given injustice, and fixing it will not get rid of the thing you are mad about. Fixing it would go a long way to resetting some cultural precedence though in my opinion.
Fair enough. My instinct is that qualified immunity is such a common target because it's not an emergent property of the system that would potentially require structural changes to fix, and that lawsuits are often the only remedy people have for the structural problems like the ones we're talking about. Being able to "have your day in court" is at least theoretically the way that regular people can get justice when the system fails them, so when the system adds another layer of protection onto itself to prevent that with virtually no constitutional basis via judicial review (and therefore could also theoretically be removed in the same manner by a future court more sympathetic to victims of injustice perpetrated by law enforcement), it's kind of hard not to fixate on that.
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