The Supreme Court on Tuesday continued its indefensible defense of the “qualified immunity” doctrine that helps keep police officers from facing civil liability.
The doctrine, invented by the court in the 1960s, has developed to rely on extreme legal technicalities that block people from successfully suing individual police officers for rights violations.
The court’s latest refusal to revisit the immunity doctrine came in an especially absurd case — of a guy who was arrested after he made a parody Facebook account of Ohio’s Parma Police Department. Among his posts was a job announcement “strongly encouraging minorities to not apply” and one about a “Pedophile Reform event” featuring a station “filled with puzzles and quizzes,” promising that anyone who made it through would be “removed from the sex offender registry and accepted as an honorary police officer.”
As NBC News’ Lawrence Hurley reported, Anthony Novak “was charged under a state law that criminalizes disruption of police operations but acquitted at trial.” Yet, due to the immunity doctrine, Novak couldn’t successfully bring a civil suit.
In addition to pressing the justices to reconsider the doctrine outright, the question that Novak’s lawyers asked the court to review is an indictment of the doctrine and the court itself. His petition asked the court to address “Whether an officer is entitled to qualified immunity for arresting an individual based solely on speech parodying the government, so long as no case has previously held the particular speech is protected.” The satirical website The Onion filed a brief in the case, urging the court to review the matter, writing that: “Ohio Police Officers Arrest, Prosecute Man Who Made Fun of Them on Facebook” might sound like a headline ripped from the front pages of The Onion—albeit one that’s considerably less amusing because its subjects are real.
Indeed, the court’s refusal to address the issue is far from amusing, and its latest decision to let qualified immunity stand, without a single justice registering dissent or explanation, suggests it doesn’t care.
Jordan Rubin is the Deadline: Legal Blog writer. He was a prosecutor for the New York County District Attorney’s Office in Manhattan and is the author of “Bizarro," a book about the secret war on synthetic drugs. Before he joined MS NOW, he was a legal reporter for Bloomberg Law.
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