Free Republic

Courts have repeatedly ruled that colleges and universities violate the First Amendment rights of professors when they retaliate against them for having said things administrators dislike. Nevertheless, such cases continue to arise. Victories for freedom of speech have not stopped the abuse of power by intolerant officials. The reason why is that those officials don’t have to fear personal liability for their actions. The school might lose, but the officials won’t have to pay for the costs they caused. The money to pay damages comes from the school, not from them. And why is that? The answer is “qualified immunity.”...

An FBI SWAT team smashed the front door of a suburban Atlanta home in 2017, threw a stun grenade inside and held a family at gunpoint as they attempted to serve a search warrant. There was one problem: They had the wrong home. The traumatized family sued for damages in federal court, but the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 11th Circuit found in 2024 that they had no recourse. The federal government had broad immunity from being held liable for the error. The Supreme Court said Monday it will review that decision, in a case that could have broader...

Qualified Immunity is a controversial legal principle that “protects a government official from lawsuits alleging that the official violated a plaintiff’s rights, only allowing suits where officials violated a ‘clearly established’ statutory or constitutional right.” The bottom line for those of us who believe in civil liberties is that Qualified Immunity makes it very difficult to hold public officials accountable, especially police officers even in cases of horrific brutality, and it’s grating to think that this doctrine was invented by the Supreme Court in 1967. There’s a tension between the Bill of Rights, especially the Second Amendment, and Qualified Immunity....

Did you know that a doctrine known as “qualified immunity” shields local and state police from accountability? Federal cops enjoy an even broader, absolute immunity based on recent Supreme Court rulings that have eroded an earlier 1971 Supreme Court decision that allowed some lawsuits. Each of the federal circuit courts interprets prior high court rulings in its own way. In several cases, judges have shown common sense, allowing citizens to find a remedy when a federal cop violates their rights. Still, the weight of the law favors the feds. Bizarre rulings in the Fifth and Eighth Circuits establish that, unless...

The Onion — a satirical publication known for poking fun at everything from popular culture to global politics — is taking a stab at a serious issue. On Monday, it filed an amicus brief to the U.S. Supreme Court in support of an Ohio man who faced criminal charges over a Facebook page parodying his local police department. Anthony Novak, an amateur comic from Parma, a Cleveland suburb, was arrested and briefly jailed after creating a fake social media page in 2016 styled after the Parma Police Department’s Facebook page. His lawyers argue it was an obvious parody, and he...

The sheriff's deputies are also not entitled to qualified immunity because the First Amendment right to offend police has been repeatedly upheld. *snip* They eventually arrested Wood and charged him with disorderly conduct and obstruction. Prosecutors later dismissed both charges. Wood filed a civil rights lawsuit against all six sheriff's deputies, alleging false arrest and violations of his First Amendment rights. The deputies argued that Wood's arrest was lawful under the "fighting words" doctrine established by the Supreme Court's 1942 ruling in Chaplinsky v. New Hampshire. That doctrine still lives on, but its application has been significantly limited over the...

The U.S. Supreme Court has delivered two major rulings that are favorable to police officers. The nation’s highest court overruled two decisions and handed law enforcement big wins in a pair of cases over qualified immunity. Republicans overwhelmingly support qualified immunity, arguing that if it was taken away officers would be subject to lawsuits for nearly every difficult call they are faced with on the job. This would make it nearly impossible to recruit or retain good officers, they say. The justices reversed two federal appeals courts that allowed excessive force lawsuits to proceed against officers in separate cases in...

The Supreme Court on Monday sided with law enforcement in a pair of cases that implicated “qualified immunity,” the controversial legal doctrine that gives police broad protection from lawsuits. In a pair of unsigned summary rulings issued without noted dissent, the justices reversed two federal appeals courts that had permitted excessive force lawsuits to proceed against officers in separate cases arising from California and Oklahoma. The justices ruled the officers should be granted qualified immunity, which shields government officials from liability unless it is proven they violated a “clearly established” right, a difficult legal hurdle. Both lawsuits dealt with police...

Here is a recurring situation on American college and university campuses—an official acts in a way that violates the constitutional rights of students or faculty members, usually by trampling on the First Amendment. The aggrieved party then sues, naming the institution and the officials who approved the actions as defendants. Those lawsuits often succeed, with the court declaring that the conduct in question was indeed illegal and requiring that the school pay damages and attorney’s fees to the plaintiff. All right, but what about the individual defendants? They are almost never held personally liable for their actions. That is because...

The world’s largest municipal police union, the Police Benevolent Association (PBA), quietly admitted to its members this month what civil rights advocates have long argued: Getting rid of qualified immunity will encourage government officials to obey the law. New York City made national headlines in March by limiting qualified immunity for police officers accused of violating New Yorkers’ rights. Pointing to this recent change, the memo “strongly caution(s)” police officers to limit their searches of individuals or private property to cases where the officer is “clearly and unequivocally within the bounds of the law.” In other words, when you remove...

It is indeed rare, if not unprecedented, to see a highly diverse group of organizations such as the conservative Alliance Defending Freedom, the liberal American Civil Liberties Union, the libertarian Cato Institute and the Reason Foundation on the same page as the NAACP Legal Defense and Education Fund on the same issue. But it is happening as the U.S. Senate takes up police reform. The issue is a legal doctrine known as qualified immunity. These diverse organizations all agree that qualified immunity is bad law and should end. The discussion is particularly high-powered today because it stands at the center...

New York City is set to become first major city in the nation to end qualified immunity for police officers after the city council voted on sweeping reforms after it slashed the NYPD's budget by $1 billion last year. The New York City Council voted on Thursday to end qualified immunity for police officers which will open the door for them to face civil lawsuits once the bill is signed by Mayor Bill de Blasio, according to a press release. 'Together, the State and federal versions of qualified immunity have effectively prevented countless victims of police brutality and their families...

The Supreme Court delivers another blow to a victim of egregious police abuse.On July 28, 2016, a group of Cleveland police officers dressed in plain clothes and driving in an unmarked car idled up to a house, where they spotted a man on the front porch. The man was named Shase Howse, and he lived in that house with his mother. The police proceeded to beat and arrest him. Last year a federal court ruled that those two cops were protected by the legal doctrine known as qualified immunity. And this morning, buried in the Supreme Court order, came...

A group of Democratic lawmakers, including Sens. Elizabeth Warren and Ed Markey and Rep. Ayanna Pressley, are introducing legislation to end qualified immunity and open up law enforcement officers to civil liability. The doctrine of qualified immunity “for too long has shielded law enforcement from accountability and denied recourse for the countless families robbed of their loved ones,” Pressley said. “There can be no justice without healing and accountability, and there can be no true accountability with qualified immunity.” Pressley first joined former Michigan Rep. Justin Amash to introduce a similar version of the legislation last year as an amendment...

After William Rainsberger was arrested for murdering his 88-year-old mother, he spent two months in jail before he was released on bail. A year later, prosecutors dropped the case, citing a lack of evidence. That decision was not surprising, because Rainsberger's arrest was based on a probable cause affidavit written by an Indianapolis detective who misrepresented crucial facts and omitted exculpatory information. The detective, Charles Benner, nevertheless argued that Rainsberger could not sue him under 42 USC 1983, a federal statute that allows people to seek damages when government officials violate their constitutional rights. In a 2019 opinion, the U.S....

The defendants in an ongoing federal lawsuit out of Kentucky got mixed results from recent motions to dismiss the case against them. Only part of the complaint is moving forward, but the court ruled against them—in no uncertain terms—for the strip search of six children who were each under age seven. U.S. District Judge Justin R. Walker, a soon-to-be appellate court judge and known admirer of Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh, offered a clear opinion in a document dated last Wednesday, Aug. 18.: Act One: An “attentive and loving” mother gets muffins for her children. Act Two: There’s a knock...

A radical, utterly sincere, and determined movement is on to abolish police departments. A radical, utterly sincere, and determined movement is on to confiscate our guns, to confiscate our right to defend ourselves. This is no accident. But first the facts… Links to mainstream Democrats calling for the police to be defunded, which will obviously result in the police being abolished, can be found here, here, here, here, here, here, here, and most especially here.

A group of Senate Democrats on Thursday introduced a resolution pushing for an end to "qualified immunity," a legal doctrine created by the Supreme Court with the aim of shielding government employees from frivolous lawsuits, but has been decried in recent years as allowing bad actors to escape accountability for violating peoples' rights. The Democrats' resolution was in reaction to the death of George Floyd while in the custody of the Minneapolis Police Department, an event that has reignited fury against the doctrine on both sides of the aisle. "Law enforcement should not be completely shielded from accountability when they...

For the last several years, Cato has been leading the campaign to abolish qualified immunity — an atextual, ahistorical judicial doctrine that shields state officials from liability, even when they violate people’s constitutional rights. The most immediate practical goal of this campaign has been to convince the Supreme Court to hear one of the many cases calling for qualified immunity to be either narrowed or reconsidered outright. And over the last seven months, I’ve written several times about how the Court has indicated that it’s preparing to consider several qualified immunity cases, given the manner in which it has repeatedly...

The Ninth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals held yesterday that a Los Angeles Police Department officer is entitled to qualified immunity in an action based on his nonfatal shooting of a 15-year-old boy who was in a group of four youths in an alley, one of whom was perceived by the officer to be holding a gun on one of the others. Officer Miguel Gutierrez fired his weapon, grazing the back of Jamar Nicholson Green, who was the boy believed to be holding a weapon (which was actually a toy pistol with an orange cap). Gutierrez participated in the decision...