“”Middle-management circuit judges must salute smartly and follow precedent,” Judge Don Willett regretfully explained in his concurring opinion. “And today’s result is precedentially inescapable: Private citizens who are brutalized—even killed—by rogue federal officers can find little solace” in U.S. Supreme Court case law. The unfortunate reality, Willett observed, is that “if you wear a federal badge, you can inflict excessive force on someone with little fear of liability.”
Vindicating your rights in court is a cornerstone of the rule of law. As the famous British jurist William Blackstone observed, “in vain would rights be declared, in vain directed to be observed, if there were no method of recovering and asserting those rights, when wrongfully withheld or invaded.”
Blackstone’s dire scenario resembles what is happening in the United States today in cases like Byrd v. Lamb. File suit for damages against a lawless federal officer, and the federal courts likely will toss the suit in the name of following precedent. As Willett noted in his judicial protest, “redress for a federal officer’s unconstitutional acts is either extremely limited or wholly nonexistent, allowing federal officials to operate in something resembling a Constitution-free zone.””
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“If a Bivens claim arises in a “new context,” meaning “the case is different in a meaningful way from previous Bivens cases decided by this Court,” Justice Anthony Kennedy wrote, the presiding judge must scour the record for any “special factors counselling hesitation.” For example, Kennedy said, “the risk of personal damages liability is more likely to cause an officer to second-guess difficult but necessary decisions concerning national security policy.” If any such “special factor” is found (or simply invented by the judge), the lawsuit against the federal officer must be dismissed.”
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“The lower courts got the message. In Oliva v. Nivar (2020), the 5th Circuit dismissed a Bivens claim by 70-year-old José Oliva, a Vietnam veteran who was beaten and permanently injured by federal police at a Department of Veterans Affairs hospital in El Paso, Texas. According to Oliva, the officers took a disliking to him because he did not immediately show his ID, which was momentarily out of his reach in a metal detector bin. He also spoke up against their verbal bullying. “I got a problem with this man,” one of the officers reportedly said about Oliva’s lack of deference. “He’s got an attitude.” The same officer placed Oliva in a chokehold and slammed him to the ground, severely injuring his shoulder.
The 5th Circuit characterized Oliva’s civil rights lawsuit as a “new context,” which is basically the kiss of death for Bivens claims. Yes, the court admitted, both Oliva and Bivens centered on allegations of Fourth Amendment violations by federal officers. But “this case differs from Bivens in several meaningful ways.” For one, “the case arose in a government hospital, not a private home.” For another, “the VA officers were manning a metal detector, not making a warrantless search for narcotics.” From there it was all too easy for the 5th Circuit to find “special factors counselling hesitation,” such as the fact that Congress specifically “did not make individual officers liable for excessive-force claims.”
In sum, thanks to SCOTUS-sanctioned legal hairsplitting, a victim of abusive federal policing did not even get a chance to make his case for damages.”
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“Bivens became “a ‘disfavored’ judicial activity” because a majority of the Supreme Court has come to see it as an example of judicial activism, a modern ruling that empowered federal judges to do something they should not do. The late Justice Antonin Scalia called Bivens “a relic of the heady days in which this Court assumed common-law powers to create causes of action.” Justice Clarence Thomas has argued that “the analysis underlying Bivens cannot be defended.”
But was Bivens really such a radical departure? Not when considered in the full light of American legal history. Indeed, the idea that federal judges have the authority to impose damages against lawless federal officers is as old as the republic—older, in fact, since it comes from venerable British common law judgments that directly influenced the founding generation.”
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“America’s founding generation was deeply committed to seeing the judiciary hold wayward federal officers civilly liable for their misdeeds. That commitment is readily apparent when you examine the debates over the ratification of the Constitution, in which both sides subscribed to this particular view of the judicial role.
In 1788, for instance, the Anti-Federalist writer known as Maryland Farmer argued that “whenever an officer had deviated from the rigid letter of the law,” that officer should be forced to pay “ruinous damages.” But under the proposed Constitution, Maryland Farmer feared, federal judges might refuse to award damages to “spare the public purse, if not favour a brother officer.”
George Mason, another Anti-Federalist, raised the same concern at the Virginia ratifying convention. Speaking on June 19, 1788, Mason worried that the new federal judiciary could not be trusted “to bring officers to justice.” Suppose “any of the federal officers should be guilty of the greatest oppressions, or behave with the most insolent and wanton brutality to a man’s wife or daughter,” Mason demanded, “where is this man to get relief?”
Federalist John Marshall, the future chief justice of the United States, responded to Mason the next day. Mason “says that the officers of the government will be screened from merited punishment by the federal judiciary,” Marshall said. “The federal sheriff, [Mason] says, will go into a poor man’s house and beat him, or abuse his family, and the federal court will protect him.”
Nonsense, Marshall declared. “Will such great insults on the people of this country be allowable?” he asked. “Were a law made to authorize them, it would be void. The injured man would trust to a [judicial] tribunal in his neighborhood. To such a tribunal he would apply for redress, and get it.”
Marshall proved as good as his word while serving as chief justice. In Little v. Barreme (1804), he led the Supreme Court in finding a U.S. naval officer liable for trespass after he seized a ship based on an illegitimate presidential order. “The law must take its course,” Marshall wrote, “and he must pay such damages as are legally awarded against him.” Likewise, in Wise v. Withers (1806), Marshall found a District of Columbia justice of the peace liable for trespass after the officer entered a man’s home without legal authority.
Such rulings against rogue federal officers continued to appear in subsequent decades. “At the Founding, and for much of American history, there was no question as to whether federal courts had the power to provide judge-made damages remedies against individual federal officers,” observed University of Texas law professor Stephen Vladeck in the Cato Supreme Court Review: 2019–2020. “Not only did federal courts routinely provide such relief, but the Supreme Court repeatedly blessed the practice.” The Bivens case—in which federal drug cops were held civilly liable for unconstitutional search and seizure—is consistent with this noble legal tradition.”
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“Whatever the solution, it is long past time for the many victims of rights-violating federal officers to start getting some redress in court.”