For cops who kill, special Supreme Court protection

[Elderberry]

Reuters By ANDREW CHUNG, LAWRENCE HURLEY, JACKIE BOTTS, ANDREA JANUTA and GUILLERMO GOMEZ 5/8/2020

The U.S. high court’s continual refinement of an obscure legal doctrine has made it harder to hold police accountable when accused of using excessive force.

Staff at the local hospital in tiny Madill, Oklahoma, called the police in the early evening of March 24, 2011, for help giving Johnny Leija an injection to calm him. Security cameras captured much of the ensuing encounter.

The officers, after shooting Leija with a stun gun, follow him down a corridor, shock him again, and wrestle him to the floor. One officer then straddles Leija’s back, trying to handcuff him as the others struggle to pull back his arms. They get one handcuff on. Leija goes limp. The officers step back. Hospital staff drop to Leija’s side and begin a futile effort to resuscitate him.

The Oklahoma Chief Medical Examiner’s Office determined that Leija, his lungs already compromised by pneumonia, was starved for oxygen in his struggle with the police and died from “respiratory insufficiency.”

The county sheriff and the Madill police chief defended the officers’ actions as appropriate to the situation. The cops were not charged with any wrongdoing.

More: https://www.reuters.com/investigates/special-report/usa-police-immunity-scotus/

[Elderberry]

Ask the author: Reuters on the consequences of qualified immunity for police officers

SCOTUSblog by Katie Bart 5/15/2020

https://www.scotusblog.com/2020/05/ask-the-author-reuters-on-the-consequences-of-qualified-immunity-for-police-officers/#more-293891

In the United States, police violence frequently dominates the news cycle. People who believe that police officers have subjected them to excessive force can bring civil suits for violation of their Fourth Amendment rights. But these lawsuits often run up against the legal doctrine of “qualified immunity,” which excuses officers from liability for official actions that do not violate clearly established law.

On May 8, Reuters published a special report, “For cops who kill, special Supreme Court protection,” that explains how the Supreme Court’s application of the qualified immunity doctrine has decreased the number of cases in which police officers have been held accountable for using excessive force. Lawrence Hurley, Andrew Chung and Andrea Januta, members of the Reuters reporting team, kindly agreed to answer a few questions about this report. Welcome, Lawrence, Andrew and Andrea, and thank you for doing this.

Question: When did your investigation into qualified immunity begin? Is there anything behind the timing of the release?

Reuters team: When the Supreme Court declined to hear an excessive force case in April 2017, a line in Justice Sonia Sotomayor’s dissent from denial caught our eye. In that case, Salazar-Limon v. Houston, she accused the court of handling appeals brought by plaintiffs less favorably than appeals brought by defendants. Justice Samuel Alito wrote his own opinion questioning Sotomayor’s conclusion, saying she had not shown any data to back it up. We thought it would be interesting if we could get a sense of who was right. With several qualified immunity appeals now pending at the Supreme Court, we worked to get the story out this term so that people better understand what is at stake.

Question: Your report spans multiple pieces and uses various mediums to showcase your data. Could you briefly summarize the key findings of your investigation?

Reuters team: Well, first – we’re not done yet! The story is just the first in a series. In terms of the data findings, there are three key takeaways:

Appeals courts are granting qualified immunity to police much more than they used to. We analyzed hundreds of appeals court rulings in Westlaw’s database from 2005 to 2019 and found a noticeable spike in grants in the last few years, in light of frequent Supreme Court interventions that favor defendants. In the first three years we looked at, appeals courts granted qualified immunity in 44 percent of cases, but by the last three years we looked at, that number had jumped to 57 percent.

More at link.

[Smokin Joe]

Sorry, and no disrespect intended to the Police, but it has been my experience that they should only be called when you absolutely need a BF hammer. Every problem will be treated like a nail.

Sure, there are exceptions, and I laud those officers who have the ability to ratchet a situation down rather than just 'take it to the next level' or 'to the ground', but I have noticed there aren't nearly enough of them.