Qualified Immunity

Short description: Police officer immunity from civil liability

Importance: When constitutional rights are violated, the majority of civil lawsuits in federal court result in favor of the government officials and not of the citizen that was harmed. The way qualified immunity is written and practiced prevents accountability of police for their actions.

The Issue: Qualified Immunity is a doctrine that has emerged over time. Congress passed the Civil Rights Act in 1871 to allow someone whose constitutional rights were violated by a government official to sue for damages in civil court. 

In 1967, the Supreme Court established qualified immunity to protect government officials who were acting “in good faith” when they violated someone’s civil rights, therefore, government officials cannot be sued in civil court. 

In 1982, the Supreme Court widened the protections to include acts committed maliciously as long as the right that was violated had not been “clearly established” as a violation of the law.

In practice currently, the courts consider what a “reasonable” officer would know is unlawful, not whether the officer knows what they did was wrong. The situation has to be in the same “specific context” by the same “particular conduct”. The courts’ decisions have stretched the meaning of “reasonable” and it is difficult to point to other legal cases where the same context and conduct was found unconstitutional.