Is It Time to End Qualified Immunity for Cops?

Open to Debate

Education, News, Society & Culture

4.6 • 2.2K Ratings

🗓️ 28 October 2022

⏱️ 52 minutes

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Summary

How does one balance two important, though at times competing, public interests? In this case, it’s the need to hold public officials accountable versus the need to shield those officials from harassment and legal liability. In 1967, the US Supreme Court lay the foundations of an answer during a case involving two police officers, sued over civil rights violations carried out at a segregated bus stop in Jackson, Mississippi. The court effectively ruled that if unconstitutional arrests were made in good faith and with probable cause, officers then enjoyed a degree of legal immunity. That case then served as bedrock for a legal doctrine that later came to be known as “qualified immunity;” a concept that effectively provides government officials with immunity from civil suits in certain circumstances. In 1982, the court went further, codifying qualified immunity for officials and rendering subjective intent of the official immaterial. In other words, whether or not a defendant was acting in good faith was effectively considered irrelevant. Under the revised doctrine, cases could proceed to trial only when there was a clear violation of “established statutory or constitutional rights of which a reasonable person would have known.” Since then, critics have argued that this doctrine stands as a central barrier to substantive police reform, allowing officers to more easily to kill or injure with impunity. But advocates say it’s a necessary protection, shielding police officers – who are tasked with making split-second life-and-death decisions – from bankruptcy and vindictive personal lawsuits. In this context, we debate this question: Is It Time to End Qualified Immunity for Cops? Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Transcript

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0:00.0	I think that the holidays feel like frozen noses. I love walking with the dog for long periods of time.
0:10.0	Hopefully it's snowing and you've got to wrap up warm. So I think a frozen nose is a sweaty armpit
0:15.0	because your wrapped up so warm but then you're climbing hamps and heath and you get to the top
0:20.0	and you're like, and then you can see the breath but then your nose is still freezing to touch.
0:25.0	Join in every sip with red cops now back at Starbucks.
0:30.0	Hi everybody and welcome to Intelligent Squared. I'm John Don Van.
0:35.0	In the United States people who want to sue a police officer for violating their civil rights
0:41.0	often run into a legal roadblock that is called Qualified Immunity,
0:46.0	which is a legal shield designed to protect cops in certain situations
0:49.0	and quite a few other government officials when a citizen wants to bring them to court.
0:54.0	Now language like Qualified Immunity makes it sound like this concept in the right or in the wrong
0:59.0	of it are going to be kind of hard to understand like you're going to need a law degree to get it.
1:03.0	I am here to tell you it is not that complicated and we are going to explain it first
1:08.0	ahead of the debate that we have lined up, which is set up to address this question,
1:12.0	is it time to end Qualified Immunity for cops? That's our debate.
1:17.0	But first to get it explained, we have the help of New York Times's superb Supreme Court reporter Adam Liptack
1:23.0	who has dropped by with the need to know stuff about Qualified Immunity.
1:28.0	What it is and how it came into existence. And right after that, the debate,
1:32.0	which will have John Malcolm versus Anya Bidwell,
1:35.0	John is at the Heritage Foundation, Anya is with the Institute for Justice.
1:39.0	They will be here shortly, but first Adam Liptack.
1:43.0	Adam Liptack, thanks so much for joining us to help our audience kind of understand the legal context
	...

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