Defunding the police
is bad enough but the Bill that passed the Democrat controlled House completely
doing away with “qualified immunity” is worse. Why would any rational
person become or remain a police officer if Congress makes them personally
liable for a frivolous lawsuit by any criminal for any perceived slight and
risk losing their house and savings? With some of the crazy juries in these
Liberal Democrat run big cities where politicians have made a career out of
vilifying dedicated police officers, Cops would be playing Russian Roulette
leaving their financial futures in the hands of some of these Liberal runaway
juries. For an update on where all this
stands I have included below an 8 Oct 2021, Washington Post article: Dozens of states have tried to end
qualified immunity. Police officers and unions helped beat nearly every bill
Now George Floyd did
not deserve to die and a rogue Cop was justly convicted and punished for his
murder but why do Democrat politicians insist on honoring him by even going so
far as to name the House bill “The George Floyd Justice in Policing Act.” Is
this an effort to beautify Mr. Floyd or conceal his long and distinguished criminal
rap sheet?
Some role model. Here
is how even the WaPo described Floyd’s hideous crime that got him 5 years in
prison: “Floyd’s longest period of incarceration followed a violent robbery in
August 2007. Aracely Henriquez was at
her Houston home with her children when a man knocked on her door ... When
she opened it, several men pushed her inside the home at gunpoint and pinned
her on the floor ...they ransacked her kitchen cabinets, children’s closets and
drawers. The men pistol-whipped
Henriquez before realizing they had the wrong house and running out ...”
https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/2020/national/george-floyd-america/policing/
I’m confident President
Biden will at some point invite Mr Floyd’s pistol whipped victim, Ms. Henriquez
and her children, to visit him at the White House, just like he did the Floyd
family. President Biden celebrating with the Floyd family was reminiscent of
President Obama celebrating with the Bergdahl family in the White House Rose
Garden the release of their traitor son who was later convicted of Desertion in
the Face of the Enemy in Combat and Dishonorably Discharged from the Service.
In the meantime, next
Dem legislative priorities: The Al Capone Tax Reform Act, the Bernie Madoff
Honest Security Act and the Dylann Roof Gun Safety Act? On second
thought, maybe the House should have named that Bill: “The Aracely Henriquez Justice in Policing Act.”
===================================================================
Politics
Dozens of states have tried to end
qualified immunity. Police officers and unions helped beat nearly every bill.
By Kimberly
Kindy, 8 October 2021
In the months
after George Floyd’s murder, state legislators across the country tried to undo
a legal doctrine that makes it virtually impossible to sue police officers for
violating a person’s civil rights.
Fueled by
outrage over the actions of former Minnesota officer Derek Chauvin, the efforts
to eliminate “qualified immunity” seemed poised to usher in a new era
empowering citizens who felt wronged by police.
But then, in
state after state, the bills withered, were withdrawn, or were altered beyond
recognition. At least 35 state qualified-immunity bills have died in the past
18 months, according to an analysis by The Washington Post of legislative
records and data from the National Conference of State Legislatures.
The efforts
failed amid multifaceted lobbying campaigns by police officers and their unions
targeting legislators, many of whom feared public backlash if the dire
predictions by police came true. Officers said they would go bankrupt and lose
their homes. They said their colleagues would leave the profession in droves.
While advocates
of overturning the doctrine argued that qualified immunity allows rogue
officers to brutalize citizens without paying a personal price, law enforcement
officials countered that it protects police from being financially destroyed
for the rapid life-or-death decisions they must make on the job.
So far, police
are winning the argument nearly everywhere.
Among at least
four bills that are still alive, three initially called for a complete ban on
qualified immunity. One of these, in Michigan, has since been amended to allow
use of the legal defense in many instances. And among the seven
qualified-immunity bills that have become law since last year, only Colorado
has completely barred the legal defense for officers. Iowa actually
strengthened qualified-immunity rights of its officers, and Arkansas did so for
its college and university police officers.
In New Mexico,
changes were made so quietly that many advocates didn’t know that the ability
to sue individual officers had been taken out as they testified for the bill.
Stephanie Maez,
a former state legislator, tearfully told lawmakers earlier this year in an
online hearing how a court granted qualified immunity to an Albuquerque
homicide detective she accuses of framing her 18-year-old son for murder.
“He was
released and vindicated, and the real murderers were caught and are serving
time,” the 41-year-old said of her son, “[but] there has been no accountability.”
But Maez didn’t
know at the time that the bill she was supporting, the New Mexico Civil Rights
Act, had been fundamentally altered days before to drop a provision allowing
people to sue officers in state court. And new language was inserted that
explicitly prohibited an accuser from naming an officer in a state civil rights
lawsuit.
Now, she has
little doubt why the Democratic-controlled legislature — facing heavy pressure
from police unions — assented to changing the bill, which was signed into law
by Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham (D) in April.
“If a lawmaker
is concerned about police coming out and endorsing their opponent in the next
election cycle, they will think twice before they do the right thing,” Maez
said. “With crime being such a huge issue here, lawmakers don’t want to look
soft on crime.”
Such statehouse
battles have become even more important as qualified-immunity changes have
stalled out in Congress. The House has passed the George Floyd Justice in
Policing Act, which would restrict the use of the legal doctrine nationwide.
But bipartisan Senate talks broke down last month.
Police
officials say they have a right to assert themselves to retool or defeat bills
that they believe might weaken their ability to maintain a strong force.
“If we are
going to improve the criminal justice system, it is not going to be by scaring
away the best and brightest,” said Patrick Yoes, president of the National
Fraternal Order of Police. “All of these attacks on law enforcement are not
helping. Quality candidates can take a job anywhere.”
But these
police victories are happening despite strong public sentiment in favor of
changing the doctrine. A July study by the Pew Research Center found two-thirds
of Americans are opposed to use of qualified immunity by police.
Experts say
that new bills are likely to be introduced as most statehouses resume in
January. However, because of police lobbying, any successful efforts are more
likely to resemble the New Mexico law than the one enacted in Colorado.
“It would be
better if officers had a little skin in the game, but that’s the nature of
legislation,” said Barry Friedman, founding director of New York University
School of Law’s Policing Project. “It’s too bad, but it’s not always truth and
justice. It is often just what’s possible.”
Stephanie
Maez’s son, Donovan, spent months in custody after being charged with murder.
She later sought to sue a police detective she accused of framing him, but he
was protected by qualified immunity. (Adria Malcolm for The Washington Post)
Floyd's death reignites debate
In 2017, police
in Texas responded to a suicidal man who had doused himself with gasoline. One
officer later said in a written report that he warned his colleagues, “If we
Tase him, he’s going to light on fire.” Two officers used a Taser on him
anyway, and then the man burst into flames and died, according to court
records.
Yet this
summer, a federal court ruled that the man’s family couldn’t sue the officers.
They had qualified immunity.
Activists who
seek to end the doctrine can point to a litany of similarly shocking cases.
There’s the 2019 federal court ruling granting immunity to a Georgia deputy who
shot a 10-year-old boy lying face down on the ground while aiming at a
nonthreatening family dog. Or the ruling that same year protecting California
police who had been accused of stealing $101,380 in cash and $125,000 in rare
coins in 2013 as they searched a local business and the owners’ homes. While
the police may have been “morally wrong,” they were still protected from
lawsuits by qualified immunity, the court found.
“People are
holding up picket signs that say, ‘End qualified immunity’ because officers are
doing things that we as a society agree are outrageous,” said Joanna Schwartz,
a qualified immunity expert and researcher at the University of California at
Los Angeles. “They are getting by with it on a legal technicality and that
really has people upset.”
The debate over
whether Americans can sue individual police officers began more than a century
ago. An 1871 statue first provided a legal path to collect damages from
officers and other government employees who violate constitutional rights. The
law was commonly referred to as the Ku Klux Klan Act because it was designed,
in part, to protect freed enslaved people from racist government workers.
However, a 1967
U.S. Supreme Court ruling on a Freedom Riders bus desegregation case in
Mississippi created qualified immunity, and the legal doctrine was strengthened
in subsequent federal decisions, making it nearly impossible to challenge in
court.
After Floyd’s
death, an eclectic mix of organizations — from the American Civil Liberties
Union and Sierra Club to several libertarian groups including the Cato
Institute — came together to fight for a ban on qualified immunity.
Dozens of state
legislatures took up the issue last year. Although states do not have the power
to abolish the federal doctrine, they can ban its application in state civil
lawsuits against officers, creating a new legal path for victims seeking monetary
damages.
Police
responded swiftly with public and private lobbying campaigns. Police unions
bought ads in local newspapers warning that officers would hesitate to go after
criminals for fear of lawsuits. In opinion pieces they claimed crime would run rampant.
Individual officers flooded inboxes of state legislators, saying officers would
go bankrupt. They repeated these arguments as they testified before panels and
committees.
In New Mexico,
a sheriff last fall testified to a civil rights commission that ending
qualified immunity would mean officers could “lose everything they have,
including potentially losing their homes and displacing their families.” A
retired deputy sheriff wrote an opinion piece for an Albuquerque newspaper that
said the bill would make “policing the most undesirable job in America.”
After George
Floyd’s murder in Minneapolis by then-Officer Derek Chauvin, protesters
nationwide called for an end to qualified immunity, a legal doctrine that
largely protects officers from civil lawsuits. (Stephen Zenner/Sipa USA/AP)
In a full-page
ad last summer in the Boston Globe, a police union appealed to readers to call
Massachusetts legislators in opposition to the bill. The Connecticut Police
Chiefs Association wrote a letter to legislators last summer, threatening to
withdraw support for a 65-page bill if a ban on qualified immunity wasn’t
removed, saying it “will destroy our ability to recruit, hire, and retain
qualified police officers.”
The lobbying
efforts worked. The Massachusetts bill was soon altered to allow qualified
immunity in most circumstances. The Connecticut bill was rewritten to say
qualified immunity would be allowed as long as officers had an “objectively
good faith belief that [their] conduct did not violate the law.”
“It’s one of
the many loopholes that were inserted,” said Nick Sibilla, a legislative
analyst with the Institute for Justice. “You basically have to get inside the
mind of the officer to make your case.”
Similar
amendments were made to a bill in California, which passed the
Democratic-dominated legislature and was signed by Gov. Gavin Newsom (D).
Although qualified immunity isn’t used in the state, court rulings interpreting
a 1987 state civil rights law there have created a legal threshold for
plaintiffs that is similarly onerous.
In July, a
California Peace Officers’ Association official boasted about how the group’s
year-long effort was “able to chip away” at efforts to make it easier to sue.
In the online
post, Deputy Director Shaun Rundle said that “until recently, the bill lowered
the threshold for peace officer ‘misconduct’ to such a level that would open
the floodgates of litigation. . . .” That all changed, he wrote, thanks to “law
enforcement’s pushback.”
In New Mexico,
proponents of that state’s bill said it became clear it would fail if law
enforcement officers and other government employees were not indemnified from
lawsuits. Instead, a compromise bill created a path for victims to recover
monetary damages from cities and counties, rather than individual officers.
“It was the
hardest legislative effort I have been engaged in since I’ve been a speaker,”
said New Mexico House Speaker Brian Egolf (D), a lead advocate for the bill. “I
certainly understand why some members or advocates wanted individual officers
to be defendants, but my objective was to get the best bill possible. We have
made the road to justice much shorter.”
In public
comments, Grisham, New Mexico’s governor, said she supported the bill because
it would provide a path for victims to seek damages and make “our state
agencies accountable for their actions . . . and create a fairer state for
everyone.”
To observers,
the compromise was a perfect illustration of how police shifted the narrative.
While most bills began as efforts to directly punish and weed out “bad apples”
in the force, pushback by police officers changed the debate.
“The rhetoric
was all about individual responsibility, but that somehow got lost. It baffled
me,” said Grace Philips, an attorney for the New Mexico Association of Counties
who lobbied against the bill in her state, arguing that the law could bankrupt
counties. “This is taxpayer accountability, not law enforcement or officer
accountability.”
Colorado serves as test case
There’s one
state where the qualified-immunity push has played out differently: Colorado.
The state is
now serving as a litmus test for the alarming predictions by police nationwide
that eliminating qualified immunity would severely hamper their profession.
So far, few
negative effects on policing have been evident — and few lawsuits have actually
been filed.
Colorado’s
legislation started last year, when state Rep. Leslie Herod (D) introduced a
bill in response to the police killing of Elijah McClain. The 23-year-old died
in 2019 after Aurora police detained him without cause, put him in a chokehold
and injected him with a powerful sedative. The bill went nowhere.
But then Floyd
was murdered in May 2020. Protesters filled the steps of the Colorado Capitol,
invoking the names of Floyd and McClain and holding signs that said, “End
Qualified Immunity.”
Herod’s bill
was pulled from the shelf and given new life. A provision was added that banned
qualified immunity as a defense for officers named in state civil lawsuits.
With only 20
days left in the legislative session, the protests created a synergy inside the
Capitol that helped Herod’s efforts, according to six people involved in the
negotiations.
The death of
Elijah McClain spurs protests in Colorado, where legislators passed a bill
ending qualified immunity for officers and capping their liability in court at
$25,000. (Michael Ciaglo/Getty Images)
The bill’s
final version called for officers to pay 5 percent of damages awarded by a
court, but no more than $25,000. Their employers would pay the remainder.
Fifteen months
after the Colorado bill was signed into law, there is so far little evidence to
support any widespread negative effects on police retention or recruitment.
Data from
Colorado Peace Officer Standards and Training actually shows a slight decline
in the number of officers who have retired, resigned or were fired from their
jobs in the past two years. However, there is no way to know how many left the
profession in response to the new law because the group does not collect
information regarding why an officer retires or resigns.
The number of
police cadets in Colorado the year the bill passed also did not significantly
change, the records show, and data for this year is not yet available.
Nick Rogers,
president of the Denver Police Protective Association, said his department has
seen a slight uptick in retirements and a downturn in applications, but it is
impossible to isolate the cause to a single factor. He said morale, in general,
is down after political efforts to overhaul policing left officers feeling
under attack.
“There is no
way you can corollate what is going on based on one state law that passed,”
said Rogers, a 30-year veteran of the city’s police department who is opposed
to the qualified-immunity law. “That was just another form of degradation of
this profession. It’s not just one thing.”
Rogers said
most officers — at least for now — have little fear of the financial
implications of the new law because Colorado law requires that state and local
governments indemnify their employees in lawsuits.
Predictions by
police of a deluge of lawsuits have not come true so far. But some victims of
police violence are using the new law. After Brittney Gilliam was wrongly
accused of driving a stolen vehicle in August 2020, Aurora officers held her
6-year-old daughter, 12-year-old sister and two teenage nieces at gunpoint as
they lay face down on the hot pavement of a parking lot, records and video
show.
Gilliam has
sued the involved officers in state court in what’s believed to be the first
case brought under the new law.
The city of
Aurora declined to comment on the pending litigation. However, city spokesman
Ryan Luby said police have received new training for high-risk traffic stops
and noted that city officials have condemned the incident.
Gilliam, 30, said
she wants the police to be held to account.
“I still
remember the officers’ faces,” Gilliam said. “My little girl — all of us are
still traumatized.”
Widespread
changes unlikely
Although most
police organizations are steadfast in fighting attempts to end qualified
immunity, some national law enforcement organizations are campaigning in favor
of the idea.
The Law
Enforcement Action Partnership, a nonprofit group of police, prosecutors and
correctional officers, asked Congress in a March 23 letter to pass a law that
will ban the doctrine from being used as a legal defense, saying it had eroded
faith in police.
Ronald L.
Davis, an official with the National Organization of Black Law Enforcement
Executives, also called for an end to qualified immunity when he testified
before a congressional committee last year. Davis said the doctrine “prevents
police from being held legally accountable when they break the law.”
And the Major
Cities Chiefs Association in May modified its long-standing position in favor
of qualified immunity to say there are circumstances in which it should not
apply.
Still,
widespread changes on qualified immunity are unlikely to happen anytime soon.
In Congress,
even a proposal to take qualified immunity off the table wasn’t enough to bring
Democrats and Republicans together last month on a package to overhaul
policing.
The political
climate also has changed since 2020. Violent crime rates have risen, causing
many lawmakers to step back from legislative efforts that might allow them to
be cast as soft on crime. The momentum that followed Floyd’s death also has
waned. Proponents of the measures worry it might take another tragedy — as it
did in Colorado — to give qualified-immunity bills a second political life.
“Legislation
usually gets passed when things are salient,” said Friedman, the
qualified-immunity expert. “Especially now with high homicide rates, there is a
lot of worry that this moment will pass.”
George Floyd’s
brother, Philonise Floyd, testifies to Congress in 2020. Disputes between
Democrats and Republicans over qualified immunity helped sink bipartisan
negotiations on a bill to overhaul policing. (Michael Reynolds/Pool/Reuters)
Wisconsin state
Rep. Jonathan Brostoff, a Democrat who has a qualified-immunity bill pending,
said most civil rights laws have required multiyear efforts and he believes
this will be no different. “I cannot promise it will happen this legislative
session,” he said. “But I will see this through.”
But in other
states, supporters of the movement are discouraged. Like many advocates, Maez
began fighting to end qualified immunity after the doctrine touched her own
life.
Her son,
Donovan, was arrested on a murder charge months after a teenager was killed in
a 2015 drive-by shooting at a house party. Donovan had threatened to shoot up
the same home when he was kicked out of a party there weeks earlier, witnesses
claimed.
But he was
released 10 months later after three other men were charged instead. Several
witnesses who had pointed to Maez’s son later recanted their statements and
said they lied “out of fear and intimidation,” Maez’s family later said in a
lawsuit. The lawsuit also alleged that video showed a detective “coercing
witnesses” during interrogations.
The Albuquerque
city attorney’s office, which represented the detective, declined to comment.
It pointed toward portions of a ruling that said the court did not find
sufficient evidence to show the detective coerced witnesses. The ruling also
granted the detective qualified immunity.
Although Maez
can’t use New Mexico’s new law to file a second lawsuit in state courts —
because the incident predates the law’s passage — she believed when she
testified that the bill would help future victims by eliminating qualified
immunity.
Now, she said
she has little doubt that lawmakers caved to police opposition.
“It’s really
disappointing and frustrating. For me it was less about the money and more
about a means to hold individual officers accountable,” she said. “If there are
no consequences for them, how can we expect change?”
