Appeals Court Judge: Qualified Immunity Is A Rigged Game The Government Almost Always Wins
from the well-deserved-(and-well-placed)-shots dept
We've long cast a skeptical eye on the judicial theory of qualified immunity. Conjured out of thin air by the Supreme Court, qualified immunity cannot be found among the thousands of laws and statutes our legislature has created over the past couple of centuries.
Qualified immunity raises an almost-insurmountable bar for plaintiffs to hurdle when alleging Constitutional violations. It's not enough to provide evidence of violated rights. Previous court decisions on point must exist, and the court must have previously established [insert rights violation here] as a Constitutional violation for the plaintiff's lawsuit to advance. This summation of the QI standard from Scott Greenfield may seem outlandish, but it's actually not that far from the truth.
The presumption is that if a court hasn’t told you that putting a gun in a person’s mouth and threatening to blow his head off unless he admits guilt [violates someone's rights], how could a cop possibly know this is unconstitutional?
Greenfield's post discusses a recent decision [PDF] by the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals. The ruling deals with an unconstitutional search of medical records performed by the DEA. The Appeals Court agrees with the plaintiff rights were violated.
Relying on Supreme Court precedent, we held that it was clear at the time that “prior to compliance, Cotropia was entitled to an opportunity to obtain review of the administrative subpoena before a neutral decision maker.” Id. at 358 (citing See v. City of Seattle, 387 U.S. 541, 545 (1967); Donovan v. Lone Steer, Inc., 464 U.S. 408, 415 (1984)). Similarly, the demand to turn over Dr. Zadeh’s medical records immediately did not provide an opportunity for precompliance review. We agree, then, that a requirement of precompliance review in many, if not most, administrative searches had been clearly established by Supreme Court precedent prior to the search here.
The government argued that the medical industry is "closely regulated" (like pawn shops or porn), thus eliminating the need to present subpoenas for review and/or engage in warrantless searches. The court disagrees with the government's assessment, pointing out the ridiculousness of claiming there's no expectation of privacy in medical records.
Acknowledging that the medical profession is subject to close oversight, the district court emphasized the absence of a history of warrantless inspections to conclude that the medical profession was not a closely regulated industry. Important to its conclusion was the confidential nature of the doctor-patient relationship: “It strains credibility to suggest that doctors and their patients have no reasonable expectation of privacy.” On appeal, the defendants all but concede that there is not a lengthy history of warrantless searches.
At the end of the day, all this discussion doesn't matter. The "unlawfulness" was "not clearly established" at the time it happened. Why? Because no case directly on point with this one had arisen where the Appeals Court had declared this particular rights violation -- containing these particular circumstances -- unconstitutional.
That's where the decision gets interesting. Recently-appointed appeals court Judge Don Willett concurs with the majority's opinion, but only to raise questions about qualified immunity and its effect on the justice system.
The court is right about Dr. Zadeh’s rights: They were violated.
But owing to a legal deus ex machina—the “clearly established law” prong of qualified-immunity analysis—the violation eludes vindication. I write separately to register my disquiet over the kudzu-like creep of the modern immunity regime. Doctrinal reform is arduous, often-Sisyphean work. And the entrenched, judge-made doctrine of qualified immunity seems Kevlar-coated, making even tweak-level tinkering doubtful. But immunity ought not be immune from thoughtful reappraisal.
Willett's next sentence is nearly as trenchant as Greenfield's take on QI:
To some observers, qualified immunity smacks of unqualified impunity, letting public officials duck consequences for bad behavior—no matter how palpably unreasonable—as long as they were the first to behave badly. [emphasis in the original]
And that's the problem: a novel way of violating rights -- even a way the court agrees is unconstitutional -- gets a free pass because no one has been sued over this exact rights violation occurring under these exact circumstances. This Supreme Court-erected standard of review -- cases on point -- has resulted in many federal judges refusing to declare acts unconstitutional… because no one before them has bothered to find violations clearly established. The justice system provides no justice. Instead, it erects shelters for government misconduct.
Section 1983 meets Catch-22. Plaintiffs must produce precedent even as fewer courts are producing precedent. Important constitutional questions go unanswered precisely because those questions are yet unanswered. Courts then rely on that judicial silence to conclude there’s no equivalent case on the books. No precedent = no clearly established law = no liability. An Escherian Stairwell. Heads defendants win, tails plaintiffs lose.
This is where we're at as a country. Rights can be violated so long as the government employee finds a new way of doing it or happens to reside in a jurisdiction where that particular rights violation hasn't been "clearly established" as unconstitutional. Even if it has been, the government may still get away with it as long as the violation occurred before it was determined unconstitutional. What was supposed to balance citizens' ability to seek redress with the government's supposed need to move fast and break things is merely another way for government employees to avoid being held accountable for their actions.
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Filed Under: don willett, fifth circuit, qualified immunity, rights
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The only Remedy, revolution
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Re: The only Remedy
Can't be done. Corruption is a fundamental attribute of all government. Our 1776 experiment in honest government has failed spectacularly -- Americans today sense that things have gone terribly wrong, but can't pinpoint the cause due to the fog of government misinformation permeating every aspect of life. However, a small fringe ideological minority has well understood the true situation for over a century.
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Re: Re: The only Remedy
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Re: Re: The only Remedy
But was, at the time, a great improvement on the status quo. We could say it succeeded spectacularly, for a while.
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Re: Re: Re: The only Remedy
Once we start implementing that step, things will go much better for us.
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Re: Re: Re: Re: The only Remedy
The what with the step?
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Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: The only Remedy
"god forbid we should ever be 20 years without such a rebellion." - Thomas Jefferson
https://www.loc.gov/exhibits/jefferson/105.html
I'm not really clear on what rebellion he was talking about. I don't think it was the revolution.
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Re: Re: Re: The only Remedy
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Re: The only Remedy, revolution
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Isn't a good portion of those laws and regulations that make it a "closely regulated" industry exactly about keeping the data private? I was pretty confident that stuff like HIPAA Privacy Rule meant there was, you know, an expectation of privacy.
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Lies and more damn lies
Several says ago I posted a rebuttal to an article about lies and damn lies being spread by political hacks that are really in favor of destroying western civilization.
Today I will simply post a link to an article about a Jewish 93 year old in The Guardian and what he has to say about the big lie.
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2018/sep/05/survived-warsaw-ghetto-wartime-lessons-ext remism-europe
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Re: Lies and more damn lies
Back to the plot. This is along the same lines as saying law enforcement can arrest you for whatever they want, and then search the books for an applicable law.
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Re: Re: Lies and more damn lies
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Re: Re: Re: Lies and more damn lies
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Re: Re: Re: Re: Lies and more damn lies
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Re: Lies and more damn lies
https://www.techdirt.com/submitstory.php
If your story doesn't get selected by the people who write here, well, start your own blog. You can't dictate what any site you don't run opts to write about, and no source can cover everything.
"Several says ago I posted a rebuttal to an article about lies and damn lies"
So? Did you? Was it relevant to the article? How do we even know it was you since you refuse to allow yourself to be differentiated from other posters? Hell, since you refused to even link to the previous comment, how do we know it even exists?
"Today I will simply post a link to an article"
...but refuse to comment on what relevance it has to the discussion, or even why you think it's worth looking at, thus making both the link and your comment utterly worthless. But, thanks for at least driving traffic toward a source that tends toward some factual information rather than the right-wing fiction factories that are usually so popular with the whiners here.
Try providing context and reasoning, it might pan out better for you.
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Re: Lies and more damn lies
things of immense interest to me
ftfy
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It's much worse than that
You wish. Enter plea deals. "There is no legal precedent, so qualified immunity lets us keep our illegally obtained evidence. In light of that, you'd be a fool not to accept the following plea deal:"
And poof, still no legal precedent. A plea deal does not create precedent, and the vast majority of cases end in plea deals. And the desire to retain a prosecutorial toy is a strong incentive to offer a plea deal, and since the first-time declaration of some executive action being illegal does not help the defendant, there is excellent extortion material for getting them to accept a deal rather than desiring a proper verdict.
Who is most likely to accept a bad plea deal? People not having the money for a defense. Consequently the executive will feel a lot more entitled fucking with the rights of people from the lower classes since they are more likely to accept a foul deal, keeping precedent from getting established.
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An easy example is taking pictures and video is well established to not be a crime, but they charge you with 2 person consent wire tapping laws for your video. Its still a constitutional issue, the cop already knows hes in the wrong and making up a case, but under qualified immunity today, unless you have a wire tapping case (and not a video or picture related case) the court will say, "to bad so sad".
This is the kind of crack that is needed in qualified immunity, and today its not there at all. Your wire tapping case is as far from a recording case as I am from the grand canyon.
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I mean this with all due respect, but there are those of who still feel like the government doesn't have the right to take whatever it wants, that we still have or should have 4th amendment rights. I am not sure if we are naive, you are jaundiced, or the reality is somewhere in the middle. I do respect your POV though now more than ever.
For the record though, the windmill has been damaged. The two DEA agents involved in this raid have been disciplined. The Texas Medical Board (TMB) has stopped doing these types of raids. The executive director (ED), Mari Robinson, whose signature is on this subpoena (even though she denied signing it) is not longer ED. Precompliance review is now part of Texas law. The TMB, whose charter has to be renewed every 12 years, was given only two years of life in the last legislative session, and the Texas legislature has given indications that changes to the TMB are coming.
The 5th Circuit ruled that the DEA could only look at partially redacted patient charts when using their subpoenas.
The whole story is the DEA looked at patient charts illegally by using a TMB subpoena. The DEA then issued its own subpoena trying to do a legal search after doing an illegal one. Dr. Zadeh had his staff and his attorneys sign sworn affidavits that the DEA had already illegally looked at patient charts, and the DEA's attorney didn't deny this allegation, but the 5th Circuit, likely assuming Dr. Zadeh was guilty of a crime, didn't buy it. They said there was not enough evidence that the DEA looked at charts.
In Dr. Zadeh's lawsuit against TMB personnel, it became crystal clear that the DEA did do an illegal search. The DEA filed a complaint about Dr. Zadeh to the TMB and in that complaint asked to look at patient charts, and TMB personnel went along with the DEA's scheme.
If you listen to the audio of these two cases, you can hear the tone of voice of the judges change. In the first case, the judges sound as if they were being asked to let a guilty doctor free. In the second, they saw what really happened: the DEA and TMB were breaking the law in an attempt to set up an innocent doctor. The judges, particularly Judge E Grady Jolly, were infuriated with the TMB and DEA.
As of now, the case is at the en banc stage and it has not been dismissed. A legal professor told Dr. Zadeh's team that Judge Willett's target audience with his opinion was not the legal community but the Supreme Court itself. He wants THIS case to go to the Supreme Court and have the court's decision on QI re calibrated.
Who knows? Maybe if you get the right angle, the right speed, and the right personnel, you can charge the windmill and it will topple over.
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BUT you love legalisms when favor you pirates / drug sellers.
Let's see. What broad points have I been hitting for years that apply?
1) Common law, meaning simple fairness -- and requiring gov't and other people to be FAIR -- is the highest law in America.
2) Kill all lawyers. Not hyperbole. Start with taking away de jure aspects to end their de facto monopoly on the "practice" of law. Abraham Lincoln did not need a "license" to practice law.
3) Legalisms cut both ways. If Techdirt is going to claim that persons not contesting to have downloaded child pornography should escape justice due to a mere Court Rule, not actual law, then YOU, Techdirt, have no authority for complaining of this legalism.
Oh, and:
4) No censorship even by "private" entities because prevents The Public learning the Truth in "law". That covers publishing regulations and court cases, besides tiny little Techdirt preventing my text from being seen.
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Re: BUT you love legalisms when favor you pirates / drug sellers.
1) That is NOT the definition of "common law," except in your head. Common law, according to the whole world except for you, is another word for jurisprudence. That means "{a thing} is/isn't a law because of legal precedent."
2) Abraham Lincoln DID need a license to practice law, and got it, Illinois, 1836. Up until that point, he had been what would be called a "legal assistant," writing documents for actual lawyers.
3) Like common law, I don't think "legalism" means what you think it means. If you are referring to a child pornographer escaping justice due to investigators violating the Constitution (illegal search/seizure), that's on the cops.
4) Censorship by private entities is an expression of their First Amendment rights to free speech and association. The same First Amendment that lets you spew your nonsense everywhere. Well, not everywhere. You are free to stage a protest on the public sidewalk in front of Techdirt's office. They are free, in turn, to point and laugh, and refuse you entry to their building.
You know, you sure do try to claim a lot of rights about other people's property.
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Re: Re: BUT you love legalisms when favor you pirates / drug sellers.
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Re: BUT you love legalisms when favor you pirates / drug sellers.
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Re: BUT you love legalisms when favor you pirates / drug sellers.
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Already enough of that
Just treat them as someone throwing a world-record setting tantrum against a site they're obsessed with hating, and as such funny rather than annoying, it's much less stressful.
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Where is the qualified in qualified immunity?
Let's start with 1b. When the Supreme Court pulled qualified immunity out of their collective asses, did they bother to mention the specific requirements to earn immunity eligibility? If they didn't, isn't it up to the lower courts to establish those requirements, at least until the Supreme's say otherwise?
This isn't to say that the whole concept isn't seriously bogus.
As for definition 2, the Appellate Courts weaseling about there being no precedent isn't the type of limitation that should be intended, as the article points out. I believe that one of the purposes of Appellate Courts is to ESTABLISH precedent. They take the district courts rulings upon appeal and make decisions as to whether the law was followed, establishing precedent.
Could it be that since the whole concept was made up and that there is no law spelling out what qualified immunity is or isn't is causing those courts such consternation that they cannot logically work their way out of the conundrum? Or are they just not brave enough to go ahead and establish a precedent that might be overturned.
The Supreme Court is now hearing about half the cases they used to, but even before the supreme slowdown, the chance of getting a Appellate decision reviewed by them was/is seemingly small. What are they afraid of?
I know someone is going to go off the boards and claim it is all graft, but I don't think Appellate Judges are as susceptible to graft as lower court judges might be. There might be political leanings, due to the appointment process, but where is the politics in qualified immunity? Or are all politicians looking for ways to 'uniquely' for the first time screw someone over?
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Re: Where is the qualified in qualified immunity?
Qualified immunity is also applied in ways completely opposite to every other use of the term "qualified." Currently, everything is qualified, until that qualification is revoked.
In any other usage, "qualified" would mean that few or no things were "qualified" until they were firmly established.
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Re: Where is the qualified in qualified immunity?
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On one hand you have the law 'n order zero tolerance mantra and on the other you have qualified immunity. So, the law says everyone is subject to blah blah except for those who are not. Brilliant! Then you hear all the babble about how we are a nation of laws - LOL. Excuse me while I go puke.
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This is where a smilie or an "</s>" tag or some other written form of a laugh track should have been but I ran clean out.
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Except rather than the court telling them to stop mouthing off and doing shit they know is wrong, they weakly say "well gee, you're right. Please don't do it again." Repeat ad nauseam for every possible permutation of violation.
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"I work in arresting. I also do evidence gathering and creation."
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There is no such thing as "qualified immunity"...
If that means prison time, then by all means, throw the bastard(s) in prison.
If it means death sentence, then by all means, execute the bastard(s).
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Re: There is no such thing as "qualified immunity"...
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So...
The US Constitution is opt-in by state agents.
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"The enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people."
I'm not a lawyer, but it seems to suggest that people have more rights than those stated in the Constitution. In other words, there exist rights that haven't been clearly established.
Whereas the people may do whatever they want if it's not specifically deemed to be illegal, the government can not do things unless they are specifically deemed to be legal.
Am I misunderstanding this?
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If the rules say you always lose, why not try different rules?
Every single thing that previous generations considered so beyond the pale that no one could ever justify doing it is now fair game for a rights violation by police because no court has ever needed to rule on such a violation before because everyone knew it was a violation. And with no previous case law, courts defer to the doctrine of Qualified Immunity and dismiss the case.
This is why, for years now, I've been suggesting that instead of going through the civil courts, people should take the criminal court route. Every rights violation that you could win a Title 42, Section 1983 lawsuit against a police officer for (assuming you get past the doctrine of qualified immunity) is also a criminal act under Title 18, Section 242! And almost invariably a felony to boot, given the circumstances of a typical rights violation by police!
In 49 out of 50 states, it is completely legal for non-police to arrest a criminal for committing a felony in their presence, even if that criminal is a cop. In almost all of those, it's just as illegal to flee from or resist a citizen's arrest as it is to do so for one by police. Escaping from custody is a crime in all 50 states.
Sure, you might be putting yourself in danger doing it, but you're already in danger just by being in close proximity to police. If they decide to attack you unlawfully, odds are you are the one who will go to prison for it. If they decide to kill you, even if they are prosecuted and convicted you will remain dead -- and the odds heavily favor them getting away with murdering you too.
There's an old story about two government workers in China who were late to work. The penalty for anyone holding a government job being late was death. So was the penalty for armed rebellion. When people have nothing to lose, and success means escaping to safety, why not go for it?
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Re: If the rules say you always lose, why not try different rules?
This means that catching the cop planting evidence on your car (hidden video?). Or simply claiming to have found drugs in your possession is never enough to fly. For crying out loud they gave a guy xrays and enemas and got off on qualified immunity.
Your best bet is to ignore dealing directly with the cop and go after his city. Enough settlements and court cases in a city draw the ire of the feds and if your armed with settlements and cases in the future that the city knows this is not right, you can finally go after qualified immunity.
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Re: If the rules say you always lose, why not try different rules?
The only way I know of to avoid the proprietorial misconduct, which is really hard to prove, is through the civil courts.
Or is there a way to force a prosecutor to do their jobs competently?
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"All animals are equal under the law. Some animals however..."
And of course were a defendant without a badge to try the same trick, 'The law didn't say I couldn't do that specific thing, even if anyone with a working brain could have seen that it fell into a category that was clearly illegal' you can be damn sure that no judge would accept that as a legal defense.
You'd be hard pressed to find a more blatant example of hypocrisy and double-standards, and what makes it all the worse is that the ones benefiting from the ability to break the law with immunity are the ones who are supposedly tasked with upholding the laws.
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Abdicate responsibility + exterminate all rational thought
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