In 1871, following a few years of former slave states trying to re-enslave African-Americans using “sheriffs,” Congress passed the Civil Rights Act (14th Amendment) to address such injustice and disguised criminality by making it a federal cause, overriding states that wanted to re-enslave despite the outcome of the Civil War.
In a chapter titled, “A Perverse Irony,” Ben Cohen explains the Problem and the Solution:
In 1871, shortly after the end of the United States Civil War, Congress recognized a growing crisis for post-slavery Reconstruction: police and other public servants were discriminating against and brutalizing Black people. To address it, Congress passed a series of laws that came to be known as the Ku Klux Klan Acts—a reference to the fact that many of those police and public servants were members of the Klan. Officially titled the Civil Rights Act of 1871, the law provides that a person who was discriminated against or brutalized could sue the public employee who broke the law by violating their rights.
Thus, the racial profiling connected to QI is, at the least, a throwback to the slaver days. In this context, a cop might see George Floyd as ‘uppity’ instead of merely a suspect in an alleged counterfeiting transaction at a convenience store.
…in a series of decisions from 1967 to 1982, the Supreme Court gutted the Ku Klux Klan Act by creating out of whole cloth the legal defense of qualified immunity…Instead of considering whether a person’s civil rights have been violated, courts shut their eyes to whether a crime has been committed and look only to see if there has been a past conviction of a police officer for doing the exact same thing. Otherwise, it gets thrown out of court.
https://www.counterpunch.org/2021/04/20/chauvinist-cops-and-the-just-is-system-that-enables-them/
citing
• A police officer kills a twelve-year-old boy. It’s caught on video. The officer gets off.
• A police officer strangles a man selling cigarettes. It’s caught on video. The officer gets off.
• A police officer shoots a man in his car. It’s live-streamed. The officer gets off.
It happens over and over again. The culprit here, alongside the cops, is Qualified Immunity (QI), a legal principle which Reuters describes as “a nearly failsafe tool to let police brutality go unpunished and deny victims their constitutional rights.”
Originally intended to protect cops from being sued over good faith mistakes, courts have interpreted QI so broadly that police are shielded from accountability in all but the rarest of circumstances. Only when the exact same abusive behavior was already deemed unconstitutional by a court in the exact same jurisdiction can victims succeed in a prosecution.
Above the Law recounts 12 cases in which justice was denied because of QI. The stories are accompanied by infographics, timelines, and contextualizing background to create a concise and compelling indictment of an outrageously unjust legal principle that must be changed.
150 pages • Paperback ISBN 978-1-68219-310-5 • E-book ISBN 978-1-68219-255-9
The court sided with the police, granting them qualified immunity. They concluded that there “is no doubt that innocent citizens have a clearly established right not to be shot by police officers,” but that David could not sue because “reasonable officers could differ on the lawfulness of” the officer’s decision to shoot.
Going on little more than the officers’ statements about what they felt, the judges denied David justice and ruled that the cops decision to shoot him was “objectively reasonable.”
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