THE SUPREME COURT IS NOTHING BUT A CRIMINAL ENTERPRISE
TO PROTECT RICH CRIMINALS,
MOST OF WHOM LIVE ON WALL STREET
Supreme Court doubles down to shield abusive police officers from misconduct lawsuits
The great Billie Holiday, in “God Bless the Child,” sings, “Rich relations give/Crust of bread and such/You can help yourself/But don’t take too much,” lyrics which pretty much sum up current Supreme Court doctrine on qualified immunity and its devastating impact on federal civil rights lawsuits against law enforcement and detention facility abuses.
In 1871, the Reconstruction Congress enacted, and President Ulysses S. Grant signed into law, Title 42 of the United States Code, Section 1983, known as the Ku Klux Klan Act, to enforce the due-process and equal-protection guarantees embodied in the recently ratified Fourteenth Amendment, which for the first time extended federally guaranteed rights to all people within the jurisdiction of a state.
On Monday, October 18, the Supreme Court issued unsigned unanimous orders summarily dismissing two Section 1983 police brutality suits that had been deemed worthy of trial in the Court of Appeals. These rulings demonstrate that all of the justices on the current Supreme Court support the judge-made doctrine of “qualified immunity” that shields local law enforcement officers from facing trials on all but the most egregious excessive force and other misconduct claims.
Section 1983 of the Federal Civil Rights Act, in two unambiguous sentences, provides that any person acting pursuant to local governmental authority who deprives another person of a constitutional right can be sued in federal court for money damages.
Police officers who use excessive force violate the Fourth Amendment’s prohibition against unreasonable seizures, thus triggering Section 1983 liability. The Seventh Amendment, a provision of the 1791 Bill of Rights, guarantees the “the right of trial by jury shall be preserved” for civil lawsuits in federal court.
In short, reading Section 1983 and the Seventh Amendment together dictates that any person who alleges a constitutional injury such as excessive force caused by a public officer is entitled by the Bill of Rights to present that case to a jury made up of members from the community.
However, in a series of decisions over the last sixty years the Supreme Court has manufactured a doctrine labeled “qualified immunity,” fashioning a Catch-22 that allows reactionary pro-government judges from the trial court level to the Supreme Court itself to arbitrarily toss cases before they can be presented to a jury.
There is nothing in the text of Section 1983 or the Bill of Rights that supports qualified immunity. To the contrary, blocking access to juries violates the Seventh Amendment.
Qualified immunity requires civil rights plaintiffs in Section 1983 cases against public officials to establish during the pretrial phase of the litigation, when the facts are disputed and the credibility of witnesses untested, that the exact contours of the constitutional right at stake have been so precisely defined by pre-existing law that the officers being sued would have known under the specific facts presented that their conduct was unconstitutional.
In the first of the two cases decided Monday, Rivas-Villegas v. Cortesluna, police officers called to a domestic disturbance ordered the boyfriend outside. He complied with hands raised in surrender. What happened next was captured by a surveillance camera .
An officer shot the man twice in the gut with a “less-lethal” shotgun round, a cloth sock packed with lead pellets euphemistically referred to as a “beanbag,” accomplishing nothing other than inflicting pain. The man then got down on the concrete as ordered. Two other officers stepped and then kneeled on him, handcuffed him behind his back, lifted him by the handcuffs, hurting his shoulders, and then dragged him several feet. No resistance is visible on the video recording.
In the second case, City of Tahlequah v. Bond, a woman called police to remove her ex-husband, who was rummaging through tools in the garage of the home they once shared. Officers backed him into a corner. He said, “I have done nothing wrong here, man. I’m in my house. I’m doing nothing wrong.” When he picked up a hammer and raised it over his head with one hand while holding the other hand out, signaling to keep away, the officers stepped back and shot him dead.
Reversing lower court rulings that would have allowed a jury to determine whether or not the force in each case was excessive, the Supreme Court repeated its mantra that “qualified immunity shields officers from civil liability so long as their conduct does not violate clearly established statutory or constitutional rights of which a reasonable person would have known,” and protects “all but the plainly incompetent or those who knowingly violate the law.”
Of course, officers are trained that the Fourth Amendment prohibits excessive force, so one might think that such conduct would violate a “clearly established” right. Not so.
Following a rule first stated by the crude and reactionary Antonin Scalia, the Supreme Court reiterated, “We have repeatedly told courts not to define clearly established law at too high a level of generality,” that the “rule’s contours must be so well defined that it is clear to a reasonable officer that his conduct was unlawful in the situation he confronted,” adding that “specificity is especially important in the Fourth Amendment context, where it is sometimes difficult for an officer to determine how the relevant legal doctrine, here excessive force, will apply to the factual situation the officer confronts.”
Outside of an occasional “obvious case,” to overcome qualified immunity every Section 1983 plaintiff “must identify a case that put” the police officer “on notice that his specific conduct was unlawful.” The term “case” here means a published decision of the Supreme Court or of the Circuit Court of Appeals for the area in which the lawsuit has been filed.
No other area of law imposes such esoteric burdens on injured parties seeking relief. Human experience unfolds in myriad forms. As a result, courts must use broad standards to define unlawful conduct that are applied by juries to the specific facts of individual cases.
The Supreme Court knows the consequences of its qualified-immunity jurisprudence: gutting Section 1983 as a tool to expose police and detention facility misconduct. There are a limited number of reported “cases” in the various courts of appeals and very few in the Supreme Court with specific facts that would provide “notice” to police officers, who do not closely follow those legal developments regardless.
Even where a Section 1983 plaintiff identifies prior cases, they invariably arose under circumstances that can be “distinguished” by judges when needed to justify a dismissal. Like snowflakes, there are patterns, but no two police shootings or jail beatings are exactly alike.
More insidious, by limiting police-misconduct victims to claims that have previously been ruled unconstitutional, qualified immunity blocks novel claims that might expand constitutional protections while at the same time institutionalizing police conduct that may be unconstitutional but does not, at least in the view of whatever judge happens to be ruling, violate the specific rule of some prior court decision.
New technologies for inflicting pain and injuries cannot be challenged because no case law exists declaring their unconstitutionality.
There is a direct link behind the perpetuation and expansion of qualified immunity in the Supreme Court and the persistence of brazen police misconduct that has been documented time and again on video recordings.
Many commentators noted that none of the three so-called liberal Supreme Court justices, Stephen Breyer, Elena Kagan and Sonia Sotomayor, dissented from the two recent rulings. That, along with the inability of Congress, despite the Democrats control of both chambers, to repeal qualified immunity in the wake of last year’s George Floyd protests, demonstrates there is no longer any constituency within what remains of bourgeois democracy to rein in the “special bodies of armed men” whose role is to defend the existing form of exploitation, as Engels and Lenin described police and jailors.
Somali Cop in Minneapolis Gets Less Than Five Years for Killing an Unarmed Woman
Welcome to migrant privilege.
We hear a great deal about “privilege” in America these days, but the truth is that those who are supposed to have it do not, and those who claim to be marginalized are actually the elites. Anyone who doubts this should study the case of Mohamed Noor, the Somali Muslim migrant cop in Minneapolis who shot an unarmed woman, Justine Damond, to death. His murder conviction was recently overturned, and now he has been sentenced to less than five years in prison for manslaughter. Despite the appalling leniency of this, some people are enraged that he got that long a sentence. Of course. The privileged expect their privileges to be unstinting.
The Associated Press reported Wednesday that Noor’s sentence was “the most the judge could impose but less than half the 12½ years he was sentenced to for his murder conviction that was overturned last month.” Noor “was initially convicted of third-degree murder and manslaughter in the 2017 fatal shooting of Justine Ruszczyk Damond, a 40-year-old dual U.S.-Australian citizen and yoga teacher who was engaged to be married. But the Minnesota Supreme Court tossed out Noor’s murder conviction and sentence last month, saying the third-degree murder statute didn’t fit the case because it can only apply when a defendant shows a ‘generalized indifference to human life,’ not when the conduct is directed at a particular person, as it was with Damond.”
Oh. Yeah, sure. In other words, “We wanted to make sure this guy didn’t serve hard time, and we found a way.” This was because Noor is a member of a privileged victim class: “Noor, who is Somali American, was believed to be the first Minnesota officer convicted of murder for an on-duty shooting. Activists who had long called for officers to be held accountable for the deadly use of force applauded the murder conviction but lamented that it came in a case in which the officer is Black and his victim was white. Some questioned whether the case was treated the same as police shootings involving Black victims.”
Noor’s father, Mohamed Abass, was enraged. He “denounced Quaintance on his way out of the courthouse as ‘the worst judge in Minnesota’ and ‘very hateful.’ Speaking to reporters, he said, ‘This judge hates (the) Somali community’ and said he believed racism was a factor in her decision to impose the toughest sentence she could.”
Of course! Racism is everywhere, right? Why not here?
Back on planet earth, Mohamed Noor’s father is furious that this sentence is so long, but it is actually a very light sentence for killing a human being, and reflects Mohamed Noor’s privilege as a Somali Muslim migrant in Minneapolis. He was the first Somali Muslim on the Minneapolis police force. In 2016, Minneapolis Mayor Betsy Hodges expressed her excitement about that fact: “I want to take a moment to recognize Officer Mohamed Noor, the newest Somali officer in the Minneapolis Police Department. Officer Noor has been assigned to the 5th Precinct, where his arrival has been highly celebrated, particularly by the Somali community in and around Karmel Mall.”
Hodges wasn’t excited because Mohamed Noor had the skills necessary to become a fine police officer. She was only excited because he represented a religious and ethnic group that she was anxious to court. And it became increasingly clear — as we learned about Mohamed Noor’s nervousness and jumpiness and lack of respect for women, and from his own account of events that he relayed to friends (that he was “startled” and reacted by opening fire) — that Mohamed Noor was not cut out to be a policeman. He did not have the temperament for it, and if he hadn’t killed Justine Ruszczyk Damond, he would likely have done something similar at some point.
Mohamed Noor was not competent to be a police officer. If he had not been a Somali and a Muslim, he never would have been on the force at all. Identity politics kills. If there was any lesson to be drawn from the killing of Justine Ruszczyk Damond, that was it. The city of Minneapolis was so eager to have a Somali Muslim police officer on the force that it hired a man who had been found incompetent to hold the job. Even worse, Minneapolis officials did not fire him even when he proved that he was indeed unfit to be a cop.
And now, less than five years for killing a woman. Amid all the hysteria and propaganda about “white supremacy,” Mohamed Noor’s story shows who has the real privilege in America today.
Robert Spencer is the director of Jihad Watch and a Shillman Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center. He is author of 23 books including many bestsellers, such as The Politically Incorrect Guide to Islam (and the Crusades), The Truth About Muhammad and The History of Jihad. His latest book is The Critical Qur’an. Follow him on Twitter here. Like him on Facebook here.
OMAR IS SIMOLI
Omar-Schakowsky Bill Would Create Special Envoy, Require State Dep’t to Report on ‘Islamophobia’
(CNSNews.com) – Three months after urging Secretary of State Antony Blinken in a letter to create the post of special envoy to monitor and combat “Islamophobia,” Reps. Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.) and Jan Schakowsky (D-Ill.) on Thursday introduced legislation to achieve that aim.
The Combating International Islamophobia Act would create an “Office to Monitor and Combat Islamophobia” at the State Department, headed by a special envoy.
In addition to those dealing with country-specific situations (Afghanistan, Yemen etc.) the department has special envoys covering issues ranging from “advancing the human rights of LGBTQI+ persons,” to climate change, to anti-Semitism.
The Omar-Schakowsky bill would also require the State Department to specifically include sections relations to Islamophobia in its annual human rights and international freedom reports.
Many abuses that would broadly fall under anti-Muslim conduct are already covered in depth in those reports – for example, atrocities against Muslim minorities in Xinjiang and Burma, or the defacing of mosques in Europe with derogatory graffiti – but the drafters want a more focused examination.
The bill calls for State Department annual reports to include “a description of the nature and extent of acts of Islamophobia and Islamophobic incitement that occur during the preceding year.”
They should detail “acts of physical violence against, or harassment of, Muslim people, acts of violence against, or vandalism of, Muslim community institutions, [and] instances of propaganda in government and nongovernment media that incite such acts.”
Furthermore, the reports should outline “the actions taken by the government of that country to respond to such violence and attacks or to eliminate such propaganda or incitement, to enact and enforce laws relating to the protection of the right to religious freedom of Muslims, and to promote anti-bias and tolerance education.”
The legislation is co-sponsored by more than two dozen Democrats, including Omar’s fellow “Squad” members Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.), Rashida Tlaib (D-Mich.), and Ayanna Pressley (D-Mass.).
“We are seeing a rise in Islamophobia in nearly every corner of the globe,” Omar said in a statement. “As part of our commitment to international religious freedom and human rights, we must recognize Islamophobia and do all we can to eradicate it.”
The Merriam-Webster dictionary defines Islamophobia as “irrational fear of, aversion to, or discrimination against Islam or people who practice Islam.”
Other suggested definitions are more expansive.
“Islamophobia is rooted in racism and is a type of racism that targets expressions of Muslimness or perceived Muslimness,” says the All Party Parliamentary Group on British Muslims.
A working definition proposed by two legal experts to the UN. Human Rights Council (HRC) last year said, in part, that Islamophobia was “motivated by institutional, ideological, political and religious hostility that transcends into structural and cultural racism which targets the symbols and markers of a being a Muslim.”
The Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), which describes itself as the nation’s biggest Muslim civil rights and advocacy group, says it has been calling for a special envoy on Islamophobia for 20 years.
“While global Islamophobia, anti-Muslim state policies and hate incidents have increased for the past two decades, the American Muslim community has consistently called for the creation of a special envoy position to monitor and combat this rising tide of hate,” CAIR national executive director Nihad Awad said on Thursday.
“CAIR is calling on congressional leadership and the Biden-Harris administration to support the Combating International Islamophobia Act and make this special envoy position a reality.”
CAIR said in a statement that “in a world where anti-Muslim rhetoric and bigotry spreads quickly on online platforms and repressive state policies, a global approach is necessary to combat it.”
At the HRC in Geneva, a U.N. human rights bureaucrat reported last March that “institutional suspicion of Muslims and those perceived to be Muslim has escalated to epidemic proportions.”
The 57-member bloc of Islamic states known as the Organization of Islamic Cooperation (OIC) has for years been campaigning at the HRC for a greater focus on Islamophobia, citing incidents ranging from cartoons lampooning Mohammed to security profiling at airports and prohibitions against Islamic dress in parts of Europe.
At the same time, the OIC has drawn sharp criticism for its response to arguably the most egregious “Islamophobic” activity in the world today – Chinese repression of Uyghur and other minority Muslims in Xinjiang.
Far from criticizing the Chinese repression, some of the OIC’s most influential members – including Pakistan, Iran, Egypt, and Saudi Arabia – have signed statements praising Beijing’s policies in Xinjiang and echoing its denials that abuses are taking place.
No comments:
Post a Comment