Sick with pneumonia, agitated and confused, Johnny Leija refused to return to his hospital room.
Staff at the local hospital in tiny Madill, Oklahoma, had called the police in the early evening of March 24, 2011, for help giving Leija an injection to calm him. Security cameras captured much of the ensuing encounter.
Erma Aldaba, however, blamed the officers for her son’s death. “My son wasn’t a criminal, my son was sick,” she said in an interview. The appeals panel based its decision on a two-question test courts use to weigh police requests for immunity. The first is whether the evidence shows or could convince a jury that the officers used excessive force in violation of the Fourth Amendment. The second question is whether the officers should have known they were breaking “clearly established” law – a Supreme Court coinage for a court precedent that had already found similar police actions to have been illegal.
Reuters found among the cases it analyzed more than three dozen in which qualified immunity protected officers whose actions had been deemed unlawful. Outside of Dallas, Texas, five officers fired 17 shots at a bicyclist who was 100 yards away, killing him, in a case of mistaken identity. In Heber City, Utah, an officer threw to the ground an unarmed man he had pulled over for a cracked windshield, leaving the man with brain damage.
In a dissent to a 2018 ruling, Sotomayor, joined by fellow liberal Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, wrote that the majority’s decision favoring the cops tells police that “they can shoot first and think later, and it tells the public that palpably unreasonable conduct will go unpunished.” The Reuters analysis supports Sotomayor’s assertion that the Supreme Court has built qualified immunity into an often insurmountable police defense by intervening in cases mostly to favor the police. Over the past 15 years, the high court took up 12 appeals of qualified immunity decisions from police, but only three from plaintiffs, even though plaintiffs asked the court to review nearly as many cases as police did.
“We have repeatedly told courts not to define clearly established law at a high level of generality,” the court wrote in a November 2015 opinion, repeating its language from an earlier ruling. In that 2015 opinion, the justices reversed a lower court decision and granted immunity to Texas State Trooper Chadrin Mullenix, who had stopped a high-speed chase by shooting at a vehicle from an overpass, killing the driver.
In February, the federal appeals court in Cincinnati, Ohio, granted immunity to an officer who shot and wounded a 14-year-old boy in the shoulder after the boy dropped a BB gun and raised his hands. The court rejected as a precedent a 2011 case in which an officer shot and killed a man as he began lowering a shotgun. The difference between the incidents was too great, the court determined, because the boy had first drawn the BB gun from his waistband before dropping it.
In the encounter, the deputies shocked Illidge six times with a stun gun before he fell to the ground. As he lay face-down, one deputy shocked him 13 more times as two others struggled to handcuff his wrists, according to their testimony. They then shackled his ankles with leg irons and fastened them to his handcuffs – an extreme form of restraint, known as a hogtie, that many police departments across the country have banned.
By allowing judges to consider only the question of clearly established law in excessive force cases, the Supreme Court created a closed loop in which “the case law gets frozen,” said lawyer Matt Farmer, who represented Lewis’s family. Even so, as the Reuters analysis found, appellate courts have ruled in favor of plaintiffs, denying cops immunity, in 43 percent of cases in recent years. As opponents of qualified immunity point out, denial of immunity doesn’t automatically mean cops will be held liable for alleged excessive force. When such cases go to trial, juries may side with police after weighing the facts of a case.
The United States first allowed citizens to sue government officials for civil rights violations in a law passed in 1871. These so-called Section 1983 lawsuits were intended to give citizens a path to justice when state and local authorities in the post-Civil War era turned a blind eye to – or even participated in – acts of racist violence by groups like the Ku Klux Klan.
The American Association for Justice, the plaintiff bar’s main lobbying group and a backer of efforts to curb qualified immunity, knows that its “members would like to pursue cases where people are treated unjustly,” said Jeffrey White, the group’s senior associate general counsel. But, he added, lawyers must think carefully when “the chances of obtaining justice are tilted heavily towards defendants.
When first examined, Leija was agreeable and alert, but his blood oxygen levels were dangerously low. He was put on oxygen and given antibiotics through an intravenous line. He soon seemed on the mend and was admitted to a room down the hall. They had little information when they arrived. Beebe thought Leija, dressed in a white T-shirt and pajama bottoms, was a visitor, not a patient.
Pickens and Atnip were holding Leija face down and Beebe was trying to handcuff him when he grunted and stopped moving. Clear fluid poured from his mouth and pooled on the floor around his head. Judge Frank Seay disagreed. He noted that officers’ accounts differed from each other about the extent of the threat Leija posed and what the officers knew about his medical condition. For instance, the two sheriff deputies said Leija was “slinging blood” and had challenged them to fight, but officer Pickens did not make those claims. And while all three officers said Leija was bleeding heavily, two nurses present testified that he wasn’t.
In the encounter with Leija, however, he and the other officers “did the right thing” to protect themselves and the people in the hospital, he said. “I think we need to be held accountable,” Beebe said. “But when we go out, sometimes we have to use force…. We shouldn’t have to worry about being sued every time.”
The officers then petitioned the Supreme Court to review the case. Their appeal arrived just as the justices were weighing the case of Texas State Trooper Mullenix, the cop who shot and killed a fleeing driver from an overpass.
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