“Police violated the constitutional rights of an Alabama man when they repeatedly shot at his car, first as he inched forward in it nonthreateningly and then as he drove away, hitting him either five or six times and requiring that he receive emergency surgery, a federal court ruled last week.
The same panel found that the officers are entitled to qualified immunity and thus cannot be sued in connection with the incident. The legal doctrine allows state actors to violate your rights without fear of civil liability if the exact manner in which they misbehaved has not been declared unconstitutional in a preexisting court precedent. (A practical example: Two cops in Fresno, California, allegedly pocketed $225,000 while executing a search warrant, but the victims were not permitted to sue because no ruling on the books said that stealing under those precise circumstances is a violation of someone’s rights.)”
“Body camera footage released along with the lawsuit shows Grashorn stepping out of his police cruiser. Love and Hamm’s other dog, Bubba, is sleeping on the ground but gets up and begins running toward the officer. Grashorn draws his gun on the dog, but the couple yells at the animal to come back. It pauses and turns toward its owners, but Herkimer jumps out of the truck and lopes toward Grashorn with its tail wagging. Grashorn shoots the dog. (The audio is not captured by the body camera, which retains 30 seconds of footage before it is turned on, but not sound.)”
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“After the shooting, Grashorn refused to allow the distraught couple near Herkimer, ordering them to go back to their truck. When Hamm demanded to know why Grashorn had shot the dog, Grashorn yelled that he had “no way of knowing” whether Herkimer was friendly and that he “wasn’t in the business to get bit.”
The lawsuit says that Loveland police refused to let the couple retrieve their dog and take it to a veterinarian until a Loveland police supervisor arrived on the scene. Hamm was ticketed for having a “dangerous dog.” The ticket was later dismissed by the district attorney.
Herkimer died four days after being shot. An internal review by the Loveland Police Department found the shooting was justified.”
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“Reason has been covering sad incidents of “puppycide” like Herkimer’s for decades now. In 2019, a Faulkner County, Arkansas, sheriff’s deputy was fired and charged with animal cruelty after he casually shot a small dog because the owner refused to walk outside to talk to him. The shootings lead not only to devastated families and viral news stories, but expensive lawsuit settlements for cities. In 2019, St. Louis paid $775,000 to a woman whose dog was shot during a no-knock SWAT raid over an unpaid gas bill. The Detroit Police Department has settled a string of lawsuits for shooting dogs during drug raids.”
“In November of 2018, Lucil Basco of Bexar County, Texas, awoke to a thunderous boom, followed by a parade of eight cops barging through her front door. She was handcuffed, and, with her screaming child, removed from the premises. The officers soon realized they made a mistake: They had the wrong house, based on incorrect information from a confidential informant. Yet they continued the operation anyway.”
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“Deputies arrived and broke into Basco’s home that evening, despite there being no reason to believe such force was required. Though it appears they did not do the requisite research to confirm she was involved in the drug trade, they did conduct plenty of surveillance: “Officers conducted a traffic stop of Mrs. Basco shortly before the raid during which they searched her vehicle and learned that she is a nurse,” writes Pulliam. “And officers were surveilling the home both when Mrs. Basco left to collect her child and when she returned with him.””
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“It is not uncommon for police departments to leverage confidential sources to carry out violent, no-knock raids. The Chicago Police Department, for example, is well-known for its so-called John Doe warrants, based solely on anonymous tips.
In 2019, a cadre of male cops knocked down the door to a Chicago apartment, handcuffing a naked woman while they ransacked her home. The officers elicited nearly 100 misconduct allegations during that one raid because they had the wrong address and had not bothered to do rudimentary verification beforehand. The city has a pile of similar suits.”
“For years, St. Paul police officer Heather Weyker was swamped. She gathered evidence, cultivated witnesses, filled out the police reports, testified under oath—all in connection with an interstate sex trafficking ring run by Somali refugees. But perhaps most impressive is that she did all that while fabricating the same ring she was investigating, which resulted in 30 indictments, 9 trials, and 0 convictions.
Hamdi Mohamud, then a 16-year-old refugee from Somalia, found herself caught up in that scheme in 2011, when one of Weyker’s witnesses, Muna Abdulkadir, tried to attack her and her friends at knifepoint. Mohamud called the police, and Weyker intervened—on behalf of Abdulkadir. She arrested Mohamud and her friends for allegedly tampering with a federal witness, and Mohamud subsequently spent two years in jail before the trumped-up charges were dismissed.
While Mohamud lost those two years of her life, Weyker has not paid any price—not in spite of her position, but because of it. Since the officer conducted her investigation as part of a federal task force, she is entitled to absolute immunity and cannot be sued, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 8th Circuit ruled last year.”
“”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.”
“The family of Porter Feller says that a lie told by a Seattle police officer led to Feller’s suicide, according to a lawsuit they have filed against the city. Feller was involved in what the lawsuit describes as a “minor” car accident. No one reported injuries, and Feller left the scene. Later that day, Officer Matthew Kerby went to Feller’s house to get his ID and insurance information. Kerby told a fellow officer he “planned on using a ruse.” He was caught on video and audio saying, “It’s a lie, but it’s fun.” Feller wasn’t at the house when Kerby arrived, so Kerby told one of Feller’s friends that he had been involved in a hit-and-run accident and critically injured a woman who “might not survive,” the lawsuit said. According to the lawsuit, when informed of Kerby’s remark, Feller became increasingly distraught. He committed suicide four days later. The Seattle Office of Police Accountability found that Kerby’s lie was “abuse of his discretion.” It said Kerby’s lie “shocked fundamental fairness” and that he acted “without any apparent consideration of the possible consequences.” The department suspended him without pay for six days.”
“DeSantis pushed the ‘anti-riot” bill in the aftermath of last year’s racial justice protests that spread across the nation — and even cited protesters blocking roads as a justification for the measure that includes extra penalties for people accused of participating in riots and violent protests.
But Democrats and other critics of the law — which is being challenged in federal court — accused DeSantis and other Republicans of supporting selective enforcement of the measure. They said the measure was designed to target Black protesters upset with police shootings. But now DeSantis and other GOP leaders are in a difficult position since they support the aims of many of the demonstrators backing Cuba in Miami and elsewhere.
This week, demonstrators blocked major roadways for hours in Miami-Dade County without any reports of arrests or citations. But the Tampa Bay Times reported on Wednesday that two demonstrators in Tampa were held in jail overnight without bail because of a provision in the new law.
On Tuesday, DeSantis sidestepped a question about whether authorities should arrest people blocking roads as part of protests in solidarity with Cuba. Those demonstrations popped up in several cities as Cuban Americans voice their support to Cuban protesters who are demanding an end to the authoritarian regime that has controlled the island nation for the past six decades.
On Thursday, the governor reversed course and said that authorities could not “tolerate” people blocking roads.
“It’s dangerous for you to be shutting down a thoroughfare,” DeSantis said during a press conference with Florida GOP Reps. María Salazar and Carlos Giménez calling on the Biden administration to help restore Internet access to Cuba. “You’re also putting other people in jeopardy. You don’t know if an emergency vehicle needs to get somewhere and then obviously it’s just disrespectful to make people stand in traffic.”
DeSantis repeated his assertion that his ‘anti-riot’ bill was meant to crackdown on violent protesters.”
“The Court’s ruling is a crash course in the lopsided logic behind qualified immunity, which requires that the facts of any given case be reflected almost identically in a previous case should a victim of government abuse want the privilege of bringing their suit before a jury.”