Radley Balko is a criminal justice reporter at the Washington Post. He
recently wrote a piece entitled “The Supreme Court has abdicated its duty to the Bill of Rights.”
His discussion of the Court’s rulings about “qualified immunity” for the police makes for chilling reading. Qualified immunity means that the police cannot be held liable, i.e. they cannot be prosecuted or sued for damages, by those they injure.
In other words, the police can violate your Constitutional rights with impunity whenever they like as they like. Leaving us, the citizens whose tax dollars finance our local police force, without any recourse for damages suffered during an encounter with the cops.
This is exactly what we can expect from conservative, pro-corporate judges who care more about the protection of institutional power than the rights and freedoms of anonymous individuals.
Pro-life my ass.
It is another example of the ongoing class warfare that characterizes American society — and why the working-class continues to lose.
For those who don’t think any of this is a big deal, remember the old definition of a liberal: a liberal is a conservative who just got mugged (in this case, by the police).
Below is an excerpt from Balko’s piece. He explains the contested history of qualified immunity; it is well worth some focused attention:
The Supreme Court, having created the problem of qualified immunity to shield
police from being held liable for their misconduct, keeps refusing to fix it.
This week, the court declined to review an especially outrageous ruling by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 10th Circuit involving a Denver man who was detained for recording a traffic stop, then had his computer confiscated and searched.
No one doubts the man, Levi Frasier, had the right to record the stop. To date, six federal appeals courts have ruled there is a constitutional right to record police officers in public, a sentiment shared by the overwhelming majority of constitutional scholars. No federal appeals court has ruled the other way. In fact, the law is so well established that the officers in Denver were trained that citizens have such a right, and to respect it.
Yet the 10th Circuit ruled that because that circuit had yet to rule on the matter, the right was not yet “clearly established.” In a truly remarkable sentence, the court added, “It is therefore ‘irrelevant’ whether each officer defendant actually believed — or even in some sense knew — that his conduct violated . . . the First Amendment.”
In my last column, I looked at the origins of qualified immunity, the court-created doctrine that makes it extremely difficult to sue police officers for abuse and other constitutional violations. . .
You can read the entire article here.
Don’t miss the last paragraph…ok, here it is:
George Orwell famously wrote, “If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face — forever.” In defiance of everything we know about violence and state power — and for that matter most of human history — somehow, the Supreme Court has decided that the boot deserves more protection than the face.
