If you follow the news a lot, more specifically about police encounters, you won’t be able to help but see a pattern there.
Something happens, it’s caught on video, and it blows up on social media and is viral for a couple of days. This is followed by relentless public outrage. And then, just as it appeared, it’s gone.
No lawsuits followed. How does that make sense?
Shouldn’t the evidence speak for itself? And if it does, how come the court never gets to the stage where anyone weighs what the officer actually did? It’s all very strange.
That’s ‘qualified immunity’ for you – a vague term used without full explanation. And the public is naturally left confused, and no one understands exactly why (or how) the judge saw the situation in such a different way from the public.
Are we talking about media manipulation (censoring, omission, disinformation, selective agenda, etc.)? Well no. Not exactly. Once the public is outraged, key facts usually aren’t considered, or are outright ignored. In the court of law, it’s facts that count, not emotion or how people ‘feel’ about a specific situation.
In this article, we’ll go a bit deeper into qualified immunity and the common misconceptions that surround it.
Qualified Immunity – What is it? How Does it Work?
Whenever someone files a civil rights lawsuit against a government official (e.g., a police officer, a firefighter, a teacher, etc.), you’ll see ‘qualified immunity’ coming up.
You’d think the court would ask whether the officer was in the wrong or not, but that’s not how it goes. What the court wants to know is whether the officer’s actions broke a clearly established constitutional rule.
Judges usually want to know two things: if the alleged action (if true) would violate a constitutional right and if that right was clearly established at the time of the incident.
This applies across the country, although the details can be different.
Here’s a quick comparison:
When you look at civil rights claims against police in Illinois, you see that the state of Illinois allows certain state-law claims that might move forward even if a similar claim in another state would be blocked. The state of Texas has stricter rules on immunity and narrower state protections.
Experienced attorneys such as those at Rosenfeld Injury Lawyers can give you more information on your particular situation if you ever find protect yourself in need of answers.
The Biggest Misunderstandings About Qualified Immunity
Qualified immunity is mentioned quite a lot, but a lot of the information you see on how it works is inaccurate.
Here are the most frequent (and most common) misunderstandings about qualified immunity:
Officers Are Always 100% Protected.
A lot of people are under the impression that police officers have some immunity and cannot be sued. But that’s not how it works. A police officer can still be subject to a civil lawsuit whenever there’s a case that the court finds that there’s a clearly defined constitutional rule already in place.
This also has nothing to do with criminal charges, so a prosecutor can still file them if there’s evidence to support it.
Qualified immunity pertains only to civil cases and only when the law wasn’t clear at the time of the incident.
Video Evidence Can Settle Everything
A video clip should decide the outcome when the footage looks obvious.
But courts don’t use videos as shortcuts. If a recording exists, it can be helpful to show what happened, but judges will still look for older cases with similar facts.
Without that earlier case, the lawsuit can still be dismissed, even if the video shows the situation clearly.
Excessive Force Automatically Wins the Case
It makes sense to think that proving excessive force is enough to move a case forward, but the law doesn’t agree.
Again, the judge will look for a past case with matching details. If there’s no such precedent, they can still agree that using force was wrong, but, at the same time, apply qualified immunity.
The focus isn’t on what’s ‘wrong’.
The thing that matters is whether the law was clearly set out before the incident happened.
A Policy Violation Proves a Rights Violation
Internal rules in the police departments are pretty strict, and they don’t always line up with constitutional standards. Just because an officer may have broken a department policy, it doesn’t automatically mean your rights are violated.
Courts look at constitutional law; that’s it.
Conclusion
Basically, qualified immunity applies when, for example, a police officer (or another government worker) acts while on duty. Even if what they did appears wrong, they can’t be sued for that right away. Not until a judge checks whether another court has already had a similar situation, and how that situation was handled.
Then, and only then, can your lawsuit move forward, or the person you’re looking to sue receive immunity (regardless of the public’s perception).
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