Qualified Immunity

Billy Binion | 5.22.2024 5:32 PM

General skepticism toward qualified immunity, the legal doctrine that makes it difficult to sue rights-violating state and local government officials, has over the years brought together weird coalitions, to put it mildly, and challenged some of the stereotypes about traditional partisan fault lines. A federal judge this week floated one such alliance: If you hated Roe v. Wade, the Supreme Court precedent that enshrined abortion as a constitutional right, then you should really disdain qualified immunity.

Stay with me here. That connection came nestled in an opinion concerning a police detective who allegedly cost an innocent man almost two years of his life by using a nearly-incomprehensible statement from someone in jail, who was reportedly under the influence of meth, and then guiding that same person to pick her chosen defendant, Desmond Green, out of a photo line-up—after her witness explicitly picked someone else. As a result, Green was arrested for capital murder and spent 22 months in the Hinds County Detention Center, which he claims was infested with rodents and where his cellmate was stabbed.

He sued. Detective Jacquelyn Thomas of the Jackson Police Department countered that she was entitled to qualified immunity, which shields state and local government employees from civil suits if they violated the law in a way that has not been "clearly established" as unconstitutional in prior case........

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