SCOTUS has your back
by Tom Sullivan
No, not your back, innocent victim of law enforcement gone wrong. They’ve got law enforcement’s back. You’re on your own. The dean of the School of Law at the University of California, Irvine, Erwin Chemerinsky, explains. There’s not only immunity for cities for the misconduct of their employees — for, say, wrongful death or prosecutorial misconduct — but immunity for officials themselves against personal lawsuits, and “qualified immunity” for officials unless “every reasonable official” would have known the conduct in question was unlawful. Such as shooting Michael Brown in the head, assuming that was excessive or not self defense.
The Supreme Court has used this doctrine in recent years to deny damages to an eighth-grade girl who was strip-searched by school officials on suspicion that she had prescription-strength ibuprofen. It has also used it to deny damages to a man who, under a material-witness warrant, was held in a maximum-security prison for 16 days and on supervised release for 14 months, even though the government had no intention of using him as a material witness or even probable cause to arrest him. In each instance, the court stressed that the government officer could not be held liable, even though the Constitution had clearly been violated.
Perhaps like me, you’ve noticed a spate of videos surfacing in which a prone suspect is beaten or repeatedly tased as police mechanically scream “Stop resisting!” Or repeatedly yell “Stop going for my gun!” at a suspect with his hands up (as in this video). Make of that what you will. The Supreme Court, it seems, will not.
But in the wake of the police shooting of Michael Brown in Missouri and an Ohio Walmart patron shopping for a pellet rifle (both men black), one has to wonder whether we as a country haven’t created the conditions for these types of tragedies. In the wake of 9/11, Vice-President Cheney advised America that our response might take us to “the dark side.” He would know.
And with the post-9/11 deployment of military gear and chemical weapons against civilian protesters across the country, are we as a culture encouraging — recommending — their use? The famous Stanford Prison and the Milgram experiments showed how, when ordinary people are placed in a position of authority in an environment that encourages wielding imperious power, authoritarian tendencies surface where they might have remained latent. Not to deny the personal culpability of those deserving the accountability Cheney, et. al. have avoided, but given the commonalities in these police shootings and other violent encounters, we might consider whether, America having gazed “long into an abyss” is seeing the abyss gaze back.
Not to mention how, as I hear, black men are calling into radio talk shows complaining they cannot even enjoy driving the cars they worked hard to earn because of being regularly stopped by police in which the first words police utter are “Where are the drugs?” Or producer Charles Belk on his way to the Emmys this week being detained in Beverly Hills for six hours as a suspect in a bank holdup because, “Hey, I was ‘tall,’ ‘bald,’ a ‘male’ and ‘black,’ so I fit the description.”
Charlie Pierce at Esquire:
And there still will be people who will claim not to “understand” why black people dread the approach of the police.
… because it’s not about race because it’s never about race.
America needs to stop staring into the abyss and spend some time staring into the mirror.
.