Yeah being proven wrong will do that to you, won’t it?
Lmao fucking seethe, dipshit.
I’m not wrong. The entire case is being done incorrectly. As soon as they dismissed the curfew issue they lost credibility for taking this case seriously and following laws. Just skipping over every law Kyle broke
“I am completely unaware that courts drop minor charges all the time.” Also, five bucks says Leany doesn’t think the rioters who were also breaking curfew should be punished.
(8) The term “short-barreled rifle” means a rifle having one or more barrels less than sixteen inches in length and any weapon made from a rifle (whether by alteration, modification, or otherwise) if such weapon, as modified, has an overall length of less than twenty-six inches.
The rifle in question was a Smith and Wesson M&P15, at least as reported. That model has a 16″ barrel and has an overall length of 36.625“. It fills neither part of the definition of SBR.
Judge is right; you are wrong.
“… dismissed the curfew issue….”
After all this you want him slapped on the wrist for being a naughty boy and staying out late?
This is a pretty silly post from a number of different perspectives.
First, people are quoting federal law. Federal law doesn’t matter here. Wisconsin law does. Therefore, if you’re going to be quoting law that actually applies to the case (and that the judge was actually considering), you would need to quote Wis. Stat. § 948.60. That’s what is actually relevant in the judge’s determination. In a federalist system, state trial court judges tend to not really care what federal law says. It’s at most persuasive precedent. In this case, it’s irrelevant.
Second, just because a judge says something doesn’t mean that it’s right. Sure, it might have the backing of a particular interpretation of the law, but there are other interpretations of the law that can exist. Also, appeals exist for that exact reason.
Now, there is a way to read this statute such that this forbids prosecution against Rittenhouse for the gun charge. I think that’s obvious. But it’s also obvious that this particular reading essentially invalidates the main thrust of § 948.60. Rather than a statute forbidding minors from possessing firearms, it becomes subsidiary to the general statute forbidding possession of short-barreled rifles. Furthermore, this means that minors, despite the clear wording of the general part of § 948.60, are in fact allowed to possess dangerous weapons in the form of rifles so long as they are not already proscribed short-barreled rifles or shotguns. That seems absurd to me, but the drafting here is really bad. Per evidence from the legislative history of § 948.60, the exception was meant to provide some security for minors who needed to hunt without supervision, but it’s very clear that whomever drafted the statute did a poor job. Essentially, the way the judge interpreted the statute was “It’s illegal for minors to use guns that are already illegal. Sure, we already knew that, but it’s especially illegal for minors.” Again, the way the judge has interpreted the statute, Rittenhouse could have been 10 and he still would have been exempt from prosecution. That’s silly. But that does appear to be what was drafted—though almost self-evidently not what was intended.
But anyone who doesn’t think that interpretation is ridiculous just isn’t reading the case or the law. And I’m pretty sure that’s a lot of people in this thread.
Progressives: We don’t hate America! Being proud of your country doesn’t mean you ignore the problems!“
Also Progressives: America was always bad, actually.
…I guess I fail to understand the issue here. I get the whole “liberals/left-wing people aren’t patriotic and like to shit on the 4th of July” or not celebrate it thing, but other than the first tweet (and I guess some of the stuff in the video/ some of the stuff from the 1619 project) I really don’t see that with NPR?
I thought that we were all…kind of in agreement that the Declaration of Independence was inherently flawed when it was written in that it didn’t include the right to “Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness” to slaves, Native Americans, etc. I thought we had all accepted that the ideas in the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution were good, but there were some problems with the execution. That’s why speeches like Frederick Douglas’s “What to the Slave is the Fourth of July” is so powerful. So the NPR article, at least to me, just kind of reads an an acknowledgement of the point and a recognition that these issues shape the understanding of the Declaration of Independence–as well they should.
Furthermore, the discussion of the slur within the Declaration is important. Do you think that you might be affected by the fact that a founding document, a document that is known worldwide to espouse freedom and liberty and that has become the bedrock of one of the most powerful nations on the planet, has a slur in it relating to your race or ethnicity? Personally, I don’t think it would bother me very much. And it doesn’t bother some Native Americans either. That’s kind of the point of acknowledging the different opinions. But it does bother some, and I don’t see that as inherently illegitimate or irrelevant when discussing the Declaration. Like it or not, that slur is in the document.
Recognizing that a document is flawed does not make that document any more or less important. Historically contextualizing a document does not mean that one is providing a “trigger warning.” There is no trigger warning in the NPR article. Readers are not asked to look away from the Declaration in shame and disgust. Instead, they are asked to look at the Declaration as something more than an absolute good–to critically examine a founding document that has become perhaps more important over the years and a foundational principle of the United States. To, as the article states, examine a document that contains “flaws and deeply ingrained hypocrisies” but also “laid the foundation for our collective aspirations, our hopes for what America could be.”
The Declaration is all of those things. The good and the bad. And nothing about that sentence implies or otherwise states any kind of rejection of the 4th of July.
Where corporations legally justify child slavery because of Zyklon B.
it’s not that simple. it’s because the actions occurred somewhere else, as in “not in this country”, not in the courts’ jurisdiction. that is the crux of the matter. the united states is not the world police. if people go get gay married in other countries then come back to the usa, that does not mean they should be prosecuted. this was actually tried. if we ignore jurisdiction, then people who cross state lines to get abortions could be prosecuted for doing so in their home state. people who go to amsterdam or elsewhere and do legal drugs in those places can then be criminally prosecuted here.
what could still happen is that nestle is held accountable for using child slavery in its supply lines, if there are laws banning such. this particular lawsuit is about international law. this is not the first such lawsuit, and previous suits have reduced the tort this was brought under to basically nothing. the argument being used by the corporations is ridiculous.
this is a clickbait headline and not honest. there isn’t even a link to the actual article where this is explained. i don’t know if the tweet was falsely edited up in the screenshot or if the article was edited, because the article that links to says absolutely nothing about nuremberg, nazis, or zyklon b.
Firstly, It’s not selectively edited.
You didn’t search for Zyklon B in that link, though. It’s right here.
Secondly, The argument was explicitly “the international community didn’t hold the companies responsible for Zyklon B, so you can’t hold us responsible for child slavery.”
As for the argument in the article/ tweet, I have no idea how the author can literally link the brief and then get the restatement of the brief’s argument misleadingly wrong. The statement that the brief discussed how the international community has not traditionally held that liability extended to corporations (rather than to individuals) is entirely correct; however, the context of Zyklon B manufacturing makes substantially more sense in context. The brief discusses how the Nuremberg trials extended the traditional liability for sovereigns to individuals, but not to corporations. Therefore, while the owner and two employees of the firm that manufactured Zyklon B were indicted, the actual firm itself was not. It’s not that someone cannot be held accountable for child slavery, it’s that the companies themselves are not held responsible for these sorts of actions under international law. Additionally, Zyklon B is explicity used as an extreme example which is to say “even in this case the company was not held liable–the individuals were.”
The brief goes on to mention the ICTR and ICTY tribunals (dealing with genocide and crimes against humanity in Rwanda and Yugoslavia respectively) as followers of the Nuremberg tradition of not extending individual liability to corporations. The brief further makes the claim that there is no real rulebook on how to create this liability for corporations, and that if such liability is to be created it must be done by Congress as opposed to the judiciary. This is disputed by other amicus briefs, as well as by other cases, but that’s kind of outside the purpose of this post which is more to clarify the argument in the brief itself.
For what it’s worth, this is a fairly extremeargument, and one that I personally do not agree with. However, it rests on a little sounder footing than merely “we didn’t charge the firm that made Zyklon B, therefore we can’t charge Nestle and Cargill for child slavery.” Likewise, this argument was rejected by the Court who instead applied the first section of the brief based on Kiobel rather than the more extreme argument predicted on an application of Jesner and the above-discussed international norms.
I have no idea how this got a little twisted in the Slate article, but I do think that the article’s reporting is at least somewhat misleading for those who either don’t know the type of law in question or don’t read the brief. And that’s unfortunate. I think that the author’s biases, which are front and center throughout this piece, impede on the reporting a little. I can’t fault anyone who read the Slate article from coming away with a bit of a skewed perspective on the brief. Instead, I fault that article’s author who really should know better.
Prison labor is a problem we need to address soon.
Convicts in prison should have to work like the rest of us.
You mean like slavery?
No, we’re giving them 3 meals and a bed, at our expense, while they just sit around and watch TV. They should have to work!
Right. Like slavery.
It’s not like slavery!
Can they leave?
No.
Can they refuse work?
No.
So how exactly isn’t this slavery?
We DO pay them!
Do we pay in accordance with labor laws?
No. We pay them between 33 cents and $1.41/hour with a maximum daily wage below $5, then take up to half of that as room&board fees and victim compensation.
Below URL image reads “fun bonus fact: enough of our labor market currently relies on labor at these depressed rates, that it has a substantial downward pressure on both wages and job availability in low-skilled sectors. Immigrants aren’t taking your jobs. Slavery is.
End description.
I’d also like to add it’s not just private prisons. It’s also private detention centers where ICE keeps the immigrants.
-fae
The constitution even acknowledges that it’s still slavery
a hefty chunk of items with that ‘made in america’ sticker are in fact made by prison labor
at the very least anything that is a product of prison labor should be required to have a similar sticker to inform consumers they are taking part of this system, which is difficult to track because prison made manufactured goods include almost the entire uniform of a US soldier, road construction in most southern states, and agricultural goods sold in most stores
this…. looks familliar
So, far be it for me to discourage people promoting prison/carceral reform, but there’s potentially some misinformation here based on… one of the sites previously linked.
Here is an article/opinion from the same place as the prison labor statistics called “Confronting Prison Slave Labor Camps and other Myths” in which the second “myth” confronted is the idea that carceral labor is modern slavery. It’s not. OLDER carceral labor, where people were not paid at all was slavery. The 13th Amendment is now used to get around things like minimum wage laws which would otherwise apply. But even if one wants to argue that it’s like slavery, it’s definitely not slavery (even if it could be).
Furthermore, in arguing that prison labor is slavery, be sure to take into account the opinions of the prisoners themselves which are quite varied. While some prisoners hate the conditions and their pay and become disillusioned with the system, others enjoy the work and find it fulfilling. Furthermore, as that piece points out, there are other considerations than the obvious “prisoners do not need to be paid minimum wage” that factor-in to whether or not major companies want to use prison labor and are driving prison expansion as a result of said desire for prison labor.
Finally, I have my personal experiences working with people incarcerated long-term. I work with the Innocence Project. My home state does not have widespread prison labor programs. I’ve talked with many inmates–most of whom were serving at least 20 years in prison. The number one thing they are is bored and lonely. When we called, they were so happy to be able to tell their stories, their theories, their ideas and hear that someone wanted to believe them. The only other time where they got anything resembling that is when they took classes or were allowed something other than just recreation/yard time. Prison labor, for as terrible as it might sound to people not incarcerated, could very well be a haven for people who areincarcerated. Labor is more than just a way to earn money (or at the very least, it should be more than just a way to earn money). So, it might be worth keeping that perspective in mind when we’re talking about prison labor as akin to slavery.
All-in-all I’m all in favor of prison and criminal justice reform. But I don’t think that the above analogy is the way even if it’s popular. In fact, overzealous non-thoughtful action might end up hurting the very people we are ostensibly trying to help.
What a funny way to say “cops blew up neighborhood”
It’s been really hilarious to watch the LAPD try to dodge any responsibility for this while the media tries desperately to help them by publishing the most confusing fucking headlines but what really happened is that the cops found and confiscated thousands of pounds of “illegal” fireworks in LA and then decided to take 10 pounds of that, call the press, and make a show of using their new expensive toy, the “total containment” truck that is supposed to be able to take explosions of up to 15 pounds.
So they took the 10 pounds of explosives and their toy truck to a poor Black neighborhood, got reporters there, stuck the explosives inside, and set them off intentionally instead of just defusing them like they did with the other 4,990 pounds of fireworks.
For some reason, likely because something went wrong with their truck which I bet cost the city a shit ton of money, the containment completely failed and the explosion destroyed cars, homes, and injured 17-19 people (I’ve seen different reports with different numbers), a couple of whom were in critical condition but it sounds like everyone survived.
The LAPD then had the audacity to tweet that they didn’t know what caused the explosion when it was them who caused the explosion, intentionally, and we know because they called the media so that everybody could see them do it.
In summary, the LAPD wanted to show off/justify their ridiculous budget but their expensive toy was a dud and so they ended up bombing a poor Black neighborhood (because they would never risk this in a white neighborhood) and don’t want to admit it.
In my experience with people eager to show off their new toys, particularly ones explosion or fire related, my money says the truck itself didn’t fail, they just completely fucked up the operation of it, which just adds to the incompetence on display here.
I’m skeptical of this accounting of events. Not because it’s not possible that the LAPD just wanted to show-off a new toy and royally messed up, and that they didn’t care about collateral damage, but I don’t think it’s all that likely.
TL;DR: A lot of the above arguments (and similar arguments I have seen elsewhere) seemed based in misreading sources, bad faith, or misinformation. It’s certainly possible that the LAPD made a mistake here, but it’s equally possible that there was some unknown or unforeseeable mechanical error, or just an error in policy. Any person who is seeking to ascribe malicious intent to the LAPD, or any kind of utter recklessness to the LAPD is doing so prematurely.
First, there are a ton of articles about how LAPD doesn’t know the cause of the “explosion” that happened and people are reading this as the LAPD denying that they set-off the fireworks that caused the explosion. However, I think this is reading those statements in the worst faith possible given the scenario. In this case, there are essentially two explosions: The controlled detonation of the fireworks, and the explosion of the bomb disposal semi-truck. If you just read the LAPD as talking about the actual explosion of the truck itself, the statements make sense–to the best of my knowledge (and the media reporting) the LAPD do not in fact know why the bomb disposal vehicle exploded.
Now, you can claim that they are lying and that they messed-up. But they’re not currently saying that and have called in ATF investigators from across the country to determine why exactly the breach of containment occurred. So, that says to me that either (1) the LAPD wants to waste literally everyone’s time or (2) they legitimately don’t know why the explosion happened and want to figure it out to make sure that it doesn’t happen again. If it was police incompetence, which it very well might have been, it doesn’t seem like it was willful incompetence.
Second, the above account implies that the LAPD moved the explosives to a poor black neighborhood to detonate them. This is wrong. Instead, the explosives were not really moved. Most of the fireworks (between 4,990 and 4,985 of 5,000 pounds depending on your source) were transported to a remote disposal site where they were defused, detonated, etc. The 10-15 pounds of explosives in the truck were deemed unsafe to transport by the bomb disposal squad, and therefore remained in place. The reason why the detonation occurred around a poor black neighborhood is because that’s where the fireworks/explosives were being stored. There’s not any kind of malicious or willful moving, or malicious or willful disregard of the setting here. Or, at least I can’t find anything other than speculation from people who don’t seem to have any more information than I do.
Oh, and what was detonated likely weren’t fireworks. Multiple experts have said that based on the size of the containment breach and resulting explosion that the ordinance the police detonated were not fireworks for a local celebration. They were high-powered explosives. So, I also don’t think any claim that the detonation didn’t need to happen is particularly convincing.
Third, the official number appears to be 17 people, with 9-10 of them being officers/ bomb disposal squad members. So, the majority of those injured were part of the LAPD. Again, if there was any knowledge about responsibility, I seriously think that they would probably just cop to it at this point and fire the officers who were responsible (or allow their prosecution). There would be no real reason to defend their actions–especially since other officers were harmed.
Fourth, experts say that there’s a human error possibility (such as not sealing the chamber properly) or a mechanical failure, or both. However, these sorts of detonations occur nationwide and are not particularly uncommon. Containment units cost tens of thousands of dollars, but I’m not sure how reliable the claim is that this was a new unit or that the police wanted to “show it off.”
All-in-all, I think any intentionality here is in the eyes of people who don’t have all the information and are reading it into the sources that are available to prove their narrative as opposed to determining what happened. I don’t fault people who were originally responding to the incident for being suspicious, but it seems that in the following days those suspicions were not borne out.
If you are going to say that maybe The Left needs to ease up and increase police funding then for those of us who don’t have the brain of a goldfish you should include some measures to ensure that the police are under civilian control.
We’re way up on murders. Even the Vox article celebrating a reduction in the number of police kills admits that there were way more murders than the police kills were reduced by.
If I make no change to the police rules and simply get rid of the Progressive DAs who let so many violent guys roam the streets that they had to invent #StopAsianHate to cover it up and conflate 55 incidents of Trump being rude with violent assault, then I’ll come out ahead on the total number of deaths.
And we could change the police rules, but the problem is that it won’t change the underlying difference in the crime rates. And since it won’t change the underlying difference in crime rates, and it’s impossible to get perfect police performance, we’ll still have left-wing claims that police are “racist” and pressure regardless.
“But burglary is down!“
Yes, because burglary in 2019 is called home invasion in 2021.
This is, quite explicitly, “Omelas is the best we can get.”
Complaints about the circumstances of the death of, say, Breonna Taylor are fundamentally incomprehensible; her death, and the vague lack of accountability that surround it, are the necessary price we pay to lower the murder rate.
A concrete reaction to an individual injustice is fundamentally insane. “What could have been done to prevent the death of Breonna Taylor? What can be done to prevent such things in the future?” are irrational questions.
The only rational questions are “What can be done to lower the overall death rate of a given race of people?” and “Are police systemically racist?”
When you say, “What happened to Taylor was an injustice that never should have happened” you obviously mean“American policing is systemically racist” and obviously I can counter that by simply explaining to you that on net police cause fewer black deaths than the complete absence of any kind of institutional support.
“As long as the police department causes a netreduction in deaths in the black community when compared to the mass resignation of the entire force, they are beneficial to your race and you should recognize that.”
The whole thing is deeply rotten and relies on bad faith and really really poor and manipulative utilitarian reasoning.
Like, I absolutely don’t accept the underlying moral reasoning here but it also bothers me a lot how much of a non sequitur response this is to collapsed squid.
“Any given instance of institutional corruption or lack of accountability needs to be understood as a necessary evil given how utterly important the institution is”
That’s how you get insanely corrupt and inept organizations.
Didn’t Breonna Taylor die right after her boyfriend shot a cop?
That’s not a rhetorical question. That’s the version of the story I heard. If you heard differently, please tell me.
If the version I heard is accurate, I’m having trouble imagining what policy could have saved her. Whatever the law says, I think the cops would probably shoot back anyway. Human nature. You can arrest the cop afterwards, but she’d still be dead.
Seriously, what could have been done to save Breonna Taylor? Sleeping with a guy whose response to having his door knocked down with a battering ram is to open fire without asking questions is like having an alligator for a pet - you’re in a a dangerous situation and the government can’t realistically protect you if it goes south.
You could make the cops personally liable if they shoot a bystander
Yeah they’ll still shoot back if they get shot at
But they’ll be more careful not to get into that situation in the first place, by e.g. making sure they’re not raiding the wrong address.
I both agree and disagree with this take. The issue here is that what are we requiring of police in this situation?
If we put police in a situation in which people are obviously going to be shooting at them (such as a no-knock raid) and then say “you’re fine if you shoot back, unless you’re going to the wrong place in which case you’re going to be liable for whatever happens.” Then we’re essentially discouraging police not to shoot back. That’s dangerous.
Let’s take a hypothetical. The address on the arrest warrant authorizing a no-knock raid is wrong through no fault of the officers involved in the raid. In fact, it’s wrong in the police computer system altogether, the magistrate has it wrong in his records, it was recorded wrong by the initial officer making the observations (who is not involved in the raid), etc. Police burst in without knocking at 3 AM. The occupants are terrified and open fire. Police return fire, killing one of the occupants. They realize that they are in the wrong house.
Who should be held liable in that situation? Probably not the officers participating the raid right? Then the person who made the mistake? But, in the Breonna Taylor situation, assuming that the grant of the warrant was legitimate, there really wasn’t a mistake minus the fact that a bystander was killed. That’s why the death of Breonna Taylor is such an indictment against no-knock raids (just like the death of Philando Castile was an indictment against the use of force criteria police use).
Far better to just stop the practice of no-knock raids then to start changing liability in these kinds of situations. Though, we absolutely do need to address qualified immunity in general.
Who should be held liable in that situation? Probably not the officers participating the raid right?
Definitely the officers. The rest of the incentives flow from there.
Punishing the individuals who happen to be adjacent to an error, that is not the result of willful negligence, when it happens is, as far as I know, largely discredited in medicine and industrial safety. (Certainly it has been opposed to the philosophy of the US Naval Nuclear Program since the beginning, concurrent with its emphasis on individual integrity.) Why would it work differently for cops?
My reaction to your proposal, were it to be implemented, is that it’s an effort to throw inevitable unlucky individuals under the bus to avoid more difficult institutional improvements.
Yes.
No.
The morally correct party to hold liable would be the governing entity
But since sovereign immunity is (a) a thing, and (b) impossible to get rid of, the actual best place to put the liability is on the individual officer - who can then insist on passing that cost on to the governing entity by requiring them to insure their officers against this as part of the compensation package, neatly side-stepping sovereign immunity problems.
In addition to the clever idea of government-paid insurance functionally shifting some responsibility back off the officer, I would add that I’m not convinced this fully describes the situation under discussion:
the individuals who happen to be adjacent to an error, that is not the result of willful negligence
That might describe shooting the right person, missing (or overpenetrating), and hitting a bystander. Shooting the wrong person in the first place strikes me as a bit more willful than merely error-adjacent. I figure it depends a little on how much leeway the cops on the ground have to make the call, too.
A few things to say here. But here’s a very quick summary.
TL;DR:
(1) Sovereign immunity does not apply to municipal/ local governments (like the City of Louisville) in all situations, so you can sue them for torts in some circumstances.
(2) The point of the hypothetical I gave was that everyone is acting in good faith and people still get hurt. The Supreme Court has frequently, in like situations of good faith by police officers, excused misconduct up to and including the violation of constitutional rights.
(3) Police indemnification already creates an insurance-like system that clearly is not working.
There’s substantially more analysis and discussion under the cut, so I recommend you read if you have the time or inclination.
1. The United States does still have some form of sovereign immunity, but sovereign immunity applies to the Federal and State governments only and applies with numerous exceptions carved out by things like the Federal Tort Claims Act and the like. Local/municipal governments are not entitled to full sovereign immunity under Monell v. Department of Soc. Svcs, 436 U.S. 658 (1978) (Overruling Monroe v. Pape’s grant of total sovereign immunity from § 1983 claims and holding that there was limited municipal liability under § 1983 and other similar torts). Under Monell, a local or municipal government may be sued under § 1983 (which is a general statute that allows for suit when someone’s constitutional rights are violated) or other individual torts where “the action that is alleged to be unconstitutional implements or executes a policy statement, ordinance, regulation, or decision officially adopted or promulgated by those whose edicts or acts may fairly be said to represent official policy.” Monell, 436 U.S. at 659. Likewise, suit is also possible if the deprival of constitutional rights was due to government “custom” even if such custom has not received formal approval.
So, it is in fact entirely possible to sue the local government in charge of the police. In fact, that’s exactly what Breonna Taylor’s family did and won a 12 million dollar settlement from the City of Louisville. The only issues are showing that the action that caused deprivation was the result of a local policy, which in this case, is not particularly difficult. It might eve be covered by showing that, for example, the early-morning timing of the raid was due to government custom or unofficial government policy as well and that it had an unconstitutional element itself. So, you could be double-covered, or at the very least would have a legally cognizable argument to make.
So, I would posit that the best place to put liability is in fact on the municipality in situations in which the individual officer was not the one ultimately responsible for making the decision that cost an innocent person their life–if there is to be liability at all of course as opposed to just eliminating the practice and creating a per se liability for ignoring such a prohibition.
2. I think that error-adjacent is more due to the fact that if one presumes that the officers conducting the raid acted in good faith and following their due diligence, they likely still would have made the same decisions. The error comes not from the actual raid team, but from record-keeping that is incorrect with the address being wrong in both the computer system the police are using and the actual warrant that they are executing. In such a scenario, even if the raid team sought to double-check with the information either on the warrant to be executed, with the judge, or in the police systems they still would have received information that led them to the wrong place.
The idea was to present a situation where assigning legal liability to the officers was highly debatable if not inherently unfair unless one assumes that the police, by nature of their profession, should be held to a much higher standard of liability than a civilian.
Insofar as we are talking about the hypothetical I gave, I would classify the error as in the record-keeping and everything else that occurs as a response to said error. This leads to a situation where the officers conducting the raid are responsible for the deprivation of constitutional rights, but not intentionally, and not in a way that they could have fixed through due diligence. The idea is everyone is acting normally in a manner in which they should be based on the information that they have and yet people still get hurt and harm is still suffered.
We’ve actually seen Supreme Court precedent that suggests that the officers would not be found liable in such a situation. See e.g. Herring v. United States, 555 U.S. 135 (2009), United States v. Leon, 468 U.S. 897 (1984). The Court seems rather willing to bestow things like “good faith” exemptions on officer conduct that was based on misinformation that the officers could not have known at the time of their conduct up to and including the violation of people’s constitutional rights.
This is why I support things like a blanket ban on no-knock warrants and a reassessment of police powers and the role of police more than things like shifting liability to officers–to do so is potentially both over and under inclusive.
3. There have been a number of very interesting studies on police and insurance, some of which have results that indicate that such a system would have results contrary to what people want. Additionally, per research on qualified immunity from most legal experts (which I sadly cannot provide as it’s from subscriptions to WestLaw and LexisNexis) indemnification, or the process in which a municipal government pays for the losses assessed to an individual police officer or department, occurs at a conservative estimate in upwards of 75%+ of all cases where the officer is found liable. So, we essentially do have some form of an insurance system dealing with police accountability at the moment and it… doesn’t seem to be working.
Perhaps a more defined and “official” system of police insurance will change things, but I’m rather skeptical that’s the case.
