Or really. Immunity statures protect municipalities and States from tort liability.
Originally Posted by TexTushHog
Yeah, and it wasn't passed into law by Congress. The judges gave this to the executive branch.
It was ruled by reason.com to be one of the five worst rulings by SCOTUS in the last 50 years.
https://reason.com/2018/11/18/the-5-...me-court-ruli/
2. Harlow v. Fitzgerald (1982)
What do libertarian-leaning federal Judge Don Willett and liberal U.S. Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor have in common? They both despise the modern doctrine of qualified immunity.
In Harlow v. Fitzgerald (1982), the Supreme Court held that government officials are entitled to immunity from civil suits so long as the specific conduct they're being sued over "does not violate clearly established statutory or constitutional rights."
What that means in practice, Willett observed in a 2018 opinion, is that "public officials [can] duck consequences for bad behavior—no matter how palpably unreasonable—as long as they were the first to behave badly."
Sotomayor concurs. The Court's "one-sided approach to qualified immunity," she wrote in a 2018 case, "transforms the doctrine into an absolute shield for law enforcement, gutting the deterrent effect of the Fourth Amendment."
Case in point: In 2017, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 6th Circuit concluded that a Michigan police officer violated the Fourth Amendment when he shot and killed a fleeing suspect. But the court gave the officer qualified immunity anyway, because the situation did not perfectly match anything found in prior case law and therefore "controlling authority at the time of the events had not clearly established the rights we identify today."
That case Willett commented on is being petitioned to the Supreme Court. Hopefully, SCOTUS will right this wrong.