Who knew? From Above the Law blog:
Police Can Legally Set You On Fire Because Someone In The 1800s Made A Copying Error
If the Reviser were alive today, maybe we'd give him qualified immunity for all the lives he's ruined.
Qualified immunity, the Supreme Court-approved doctrine that law enforcement can violate constitutional rights as long as it’s within the scope of their official duties and the right isn’t “clearly established,” covers everything from locking people up for satirical Facebook posts to tasing a man covered in gasoline to set him on fire to shooting unarmed 10-year-olds in their front lawn while aiming for a “non-threatening” dog.
You’d think, based on the word “qualified,” that this protection is relatively circumscribed, but you’d be wrong. Courts routinely shrug that violations are not “clearly established” rights because they’ve never had an opportunity to rule on them before… and therefore they cannot rule on them now. Nice little dystopian paradox!
But an upcoming article in the Cal Law Review has an extra layer of Kafkaesque news for you: the whole doctrine may be the result of a scrivener’s error.
While China and Russia are others in the Middle East are way behind on civil and human rights, it looks like we've still got a ways to go ourselves. Sovereign immunity is a problem. Political cowardice is a problem. Europe is ahead of the USA in many ways.
ReplyDelete