AMERICA! WHERE COPS MURDER WITH IMPUNITY
THUG COPS IN AMERICA HAVE MURDERED THOUSANDS OF AMERICANS, MANY UNARMED, MANY SHOT IN THE BACK.
THE CORRUPT LEGAL SYSTEM IN AMERICA'S ONLY AGENDA IS TO MAINTAIN THE STATUS QUO OF COPS ABOVE THE LAW.
EVEN WHEN WE SEE THE COPS MURDER ON VIDEO, JUDGES SET ASIDE THE INTERESTS OF THE VICTIMS, THE EVIDENCE AND THE LAW TO PROTECT THE MURDERING COP.
IN LOS ANGELES ALONE THERE ARE TYPICALLY TWO COP MURDERS WEEKLY.
NONE ARE EVER PROSECUTED. DESPITE THIS CITIES HAVE AND SHOULD BE FORCED TO PAY OUT MILLIONS IN DAMAGES CAUSED BY THESE THUG COPS.
Unanimous US Supreme Court insists on broad immunity for police
Unanimous US Supreme Court
insists on broad immunity for police
By Tom Carter
18 January 2017
On January 9, the US Supreme Court issued a
unanimous summary ruling reversing a decision by the Tenth Circuit Court of
Appeals and upholding qualified immunity for a police officer who shot and killed
Samuel Pauly in an attempt to investigate a traffic incident near Santa Fe, New
Mexico in October 2011.
Prior to the shooting, Samuel’s brother Daniel
was involved in a non-violent road-rage incident in which he stopped his car
and confronted two women who he claimed had been tailgating him. Daniel
subsequently drove home, where he lived with Samuel. Samuel was at home playing
video games and had not been involved in the confrontation. Meanwhile, the
occupants of the other vehicle called the police, who were able to locate the
house where the brothers lived.
At that point, no crime had been committed and
there was no legal justification to arrest anyone or to enter or search any
house. While the frequency of “road-rage” incidents is not a healthy sign, they
do constitute a fairly common occurrence in American social life.
According to Daniel, when two police officers
arrived at the brothers’ house they failed to identify themselves. Not
realizing that it was the police, and believing that they were being burglarized,
the brothers armed themselves with weapons. The brothers warned, “We have
guns!” The encounter escalated and there was an exchange of gunfire in which no
one was struck. Then a third officer arrived and, without warning, shot Samuel
dead.
The phrase “qualified immunity” refers to a
judge-made doctrine that has no basis in the text of the US Constitution,
notwithstanding the claims by various Supreme Court justices to be handing down
the Constitution’s “original” meaning. In recent decades, this doctrine has
quietly been built up to huge proportions within the judicial system, largely
without significant media commentary or public discussion. It now plays an
important role in blocking civil rights cases and encouraging the ongoing
epidemic of police brutality.
According to this authoritarian and
anti-democratic doctrine, a judge can unilaterally decide a case in favor of a
police officer—even if the officer’s conduct violated the Constitution—if the
judge determines that the police officer acted “reasonably” in light of
previous Supreme Court decisions. If qualified immunity is awarded to the
police officer, the case can be thrown out of court, never going before a jury,
and costs can be imposed against the victim or the victim’s survivors.
During American election campaigns, it is often
claimed by liberal commentators that the election of a Democratic president is
necessary to ensure that the Supreme Court is not stacked with ultra-right
judges. The fact that the decision in the Pauly case was unanimous highlights the role
of both official parties and the judiciary as a whole in the abrogation of
democratic rights and the drive towards a police state.
The Tenth Circuit Court of Appeals declined to
award immunity to the officers, instead opting to let a jury decide whether
their conduct was appropriate. The Supreme Court reversed that decision in an
unsigned eight-page opinion joined by all of the sitting justices, including
Obama appointees Elena Kagan and Sonia Sotomayor. While the court normally has
nine justices, the vacancy left by the death of Justice Antonin Scalia last
year has not yet been filled.
The text of the Supreme Court’s opinion
underscores the stunningly irrational character of the doctrine of qualified
immunity as it is applied in practice. The Supreme Court held that the officer
who killed Samuel “did not violate clearly established law” because “existing
precedent” had not “placed the statutory or constitutional question beyond
debate.”
In other words, there had not been a nearly
identical case decided against a police officer in the past, so the conduct of
the officer in this case could not be the subject of a lawsuit. However, since
the doctrine of qualified immunity prevents this case from being decided on the merits,
the Supreme Court’s Kafkaesque logic ensures that the outcome will be the same
in every future case.
Moreover, the Pauly case has far more sinister
implications then might be apparent from the facts of this particular case. In
the written opinion, the justices went out of their way to complain that the
lower courts were not granting qualified immunity to police officers often
enough.
The justices noted bitterly, “In the last five
years, this Court has issued a number of opinions reversing federal courts in
qualified immunity cases.” In other words, while the Supreme Court has been
routinely granting immunity to police officers, some lower federal courts have
not kept pace. The Supreme Court is signaling the lower courts that they must
fall into line.
With the full support of the Obama
administration, the Supreme Court over the past five years has routinely
insisted on broad immunity for police officers in civil rights lawsuits based
on police misconduct. In its May 2014 decision in the case of Plumhoff
v. Rickard, the Supreme Court—once again unanimously—awarded
immunity to three Arkansas police officers who fired 15 bullets at two unarmed
people who were trying to escape in a car. Both the driver and the passenger
were killed. (See: “Supreme Court
issues unanimous decision defending police in fatal shooting”)
In November 2015, the Supreme Court granted
qualified immunity in the case of a Texas trooper who climbed on an overpass
and used a rifle to assassinate a motorist who was being pursued by other
officers, even after his supervisor told him not to do it. (See: “US Supreme Court
expands immunity for killer cops”)
After killing his victim, the Texas trooper
boasted, “How’s that for proactive?”
In its decision last week in the Pauly case, the unanimous Supreme Court
emphasized the significance of the doctrine of qualified immunity, writing,
“The Court has found [that] qualified immunity is important to society as a
whole.”
While more than 1,050 people were killed by the
police in America in 2016, the unanimous Supreme Court thinks it is “important
to society” for the federal courts to ensure that more police officers enjoy
immunity from legal actions that base themselves on fundamental democratic
rights.
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