This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Tuesday, October 12, 2021.

I'm Caleb Brown.

Qualified immunity demands some mental gymnastics by lower court judges.

The Supreme Court could take up any number of questions governing the court invented doctrine that regularly allows police acting with malice to avoid any civil accountability.

Patrick Giacomo, an attorney at the Institute for Justice, details some cases of police

misconduct, and why courts at least so far are allowing those cops to get away with it. We hear a lot about qualified immunity.

You and I spoke recently with James King,

who is a client of yours who was severely beaten by two cops, one of which was a deputized federal officer and the

other one was a federal officer and it's you know hearing his story it's terrible to think that for

federal officials these violations of constitutional rights that police, even federal police,

engage in, however rare or infrequent they might be,

there's no accountability.

So what makes it so hard,

as a special case distinct from qualified immunity, what makes it so hard to hold

federal officials accountable when they violate Americans rights.

Right, so qualified immunity is a protection that applies to both state and federal officers.

But federal officers also have this de facto absolute immunity in most situations.

And that comes through something called the Bivens doctrine and it's growing

restriction by the federal courts. So when you see a federal official there's no

statute that allows that lawsuit. When you see a state official there's a statute called Section 1983 and in the

1970s the Supreme Court implied a constitutional cause of action in a case called Bivens and

in that case members of the Federal Bureau of Narcotics

...