Broad police immunity for bad actions

St. Paul. MN, police officer Officer Heather Weyker 

The New York Times reports on a conservative federal court trend to further expand police immunity to their illegal and harmful actions. In my opinion, this is more evidence of the inherently fascist, or at least authoritarian, intent of the Republican Party and its hostility to civil liberties and the rule of law. The NYT writes in an article entitled, If the Police Lie, Should They Be Held Liable? Often the Answer Is No.:

In 2010, Officer Heather Weyker of the St. Paul Police Department in Minnesota had the biggest case of her career: a child sex-trafficking ring said to have spanned four states and involved girls as young as 12. Thirty people, almost all of them Somali refugees, were charged and sent to jail, many of them for years.

Then the case fell apart. It turned out, the trial judge found, that Officer Weyker had fabricated or misstated facts, lied to a grand jury and lied during a detention hearing. When three young women unwittingly got in the way of her investigation, according to their court filings, she had them locked up on false charges.

“She took my life away,” said one of the women, Hamdi Mohamud, who was a senior in high school at the time.

But there is little Ms. Mohamud can do. For decades, the Supreme Court and Congress have declined to close the many legal loopholes, like qualified immunity, that protect the police from accountability. Now legal advocates say that an increasingly conservative Supreme Court has emboldened lower courts to close off the few avenues that plaintiffs once had to seek redress.

“If a federal law enforcement officer lies, manipulates witnesses, and falsifies evidence, should the officer be liable for damages?” the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Eighth Circuit wrote of Officer Weyker, whose investigation ultimately resulted in no convictions. The answer was no. 

More than 20 civil lawsuits have been filed against Officer Weyker, a former vice officer who is still the subject of an internal department investigation. Some of the suits failed because she was granted qualified immunity, a doctrine created by the courts that shields officers from lawsuits unless they violate a “clearly established” right.  

Locked up for over a year, Ms. Mohamud said she was kept in a cell 23 hours a day. “I would cry all night, sleep all day,” she said.  

“I don’t know whose life I’m living right now,” she said, “but this is not my life.”

What on Earth is a “clearly established” right? Isn’t it clearly established that we have a right to not be locked up and our lives ruined based on false evidence and false charges? 

The NYT article goes on to point out that although she did violate people’s rights, another form of immunity that extends to federal law enforcement officers shielded Officer Weyker in other lawsuits. Those courts gave her the broader federal officer immunity even though she was not a federal law enforcement officer.

In Weyker’s case, she got federal law enforcement immunity because she was part of a joint task force with some federal agents. According to that legal reasoning, if that is what one can call it, the federal immunity just sort of slops over onto non-federal law officers on joint task forces. In theory, federal law allows state and local officers, but not federal agents, to be sued for rights violations, even when their actions are the same. 

Based on that, a federal judge told the Black Lives Matter organization that it could sue the local — but not the federal — police officers who violently cleared protesters from Lafayette Square in Washington in June 2020.

Whether the federal immunity law applies to state or local law enforcement officers is arbitrary. The NYT makes the government’s irrational, rule of law mocking caprice crystal clear: “In a case argued before the U.S. Supreme Court last year, James King, a college student walking to work in Grand Rapids, Mich., was mistaken for a suspect by two plainclothes members of a fugitive task force — one federal, one local — who beat him so savagely that bystanders called 911. The government contends that he should not be able to sue either officer.”

Questions: Would Officer Weyker have been given federal immunity if she was a non-White person, and the people she lied about were White? Are calls to reform police departments to get rid of this kind of law enforcement warranted or not? Is this evidence of fascism in the form of hostility to civil liberties, or is this just a case of one bad apple in the cracker barrel? Or, was the apple not a bad one at all? Is it reasonable to suspect that this kind of policing reflects the ideology and mindset of Christian nationalism?