It was just announced that SCOTUS ruled that police can not be sued for gunning down a citizenGiven that Atty Gen. Sessions just expanded the powers of Police to seize property and cash that they personally suspect is from drug money - without any evidence or charges filed and without recourse for a citizen, this latest grant of despotic power to agents of the state ought to give you the warm fuzzies.
Because alongside making law enforcement Highwaymen of their own authority - today they can shoot to kill for any reason they deem necessary to keep themselves safe - without any legal repercussions to the one who guns down a citizen.
Essentially this ruling enforces the growing belief that government can do what it wants and when it wants with absolutely no accountability or repercussions. The courts and this government have laid the foundations for a truly evil and despotic government to do whatever it pleases to whomever it pleases.
SCOTUS Gives Police a Permission To ‘Shoot First and Think Later’
The doctrine of qualified immunity prevents government agents from being held personally liable for constitutional violations unless the violation was of ‘clearly established’ law.†If any reasonable judge might have deemed the action permissible, the law is not “clearly established.†Essentially, if you want to sue a police officer who you think violated your constitutional rights, you first have to convince the court that what happened to you was so outrageous that no reasonable person could have thought it was okay.
This makes excessive force cases a steep uphill battle. Such cases turn on the Fourth Amendment — a constitutional right that is notorious for its murky and context-specific contours. So proving a Fourth Amendment violation is hard enough on its own. When you have to prove a “clearly established†violation, the task becomes all but impossible because the Supreme Court keeps raising the bar.
...the doctrine of qualified immunity has no legal basis in the first place — the courts simply made it up. So how can it possibly be justified?
The Supreme Court has told us that the doctrine “balances two important interests—the need to hold public officials accountable when they exercise power irresponsibly and the need to shield officials from harassment, distraction, and liability when they perform their duties reasonably.†That maybe sounds okay in theory, but Hughes’ case is just the latest to show us that in reality, there is no balance and there is no accountability.
I do not usually agree with the ACLU - but they and the dissent has got this one right.
We are abject morons and idiots to entrust government with such power as to absolve itself from actions perpetrated upon us without any accountability.
The Unintended Consequences of BLM - is this kindof shit - and we and our posterity are going to be royally effed by TPTB when and where they decide it is necessary to shoot us.
