by Eric Zuesse, Strategic Culture:

A black U.S. District Court Judge in Mississippi — one of America’s most bigoted-against-Blacks states — issued on August 4th a 72-page decision, Jamison v. McClendon, containing a plea for the U.S. Supreme Court to discontinue its imposition of police legal immunity when police are being accused of — while on the job — having violated Constitutionally guaranteed rights of American citizens (such as by shooting innocent persons — such as George Floyd). Legally immune police is what defines a police state; and, so, this was a black judge’s request for the U.S. Supreme Court to end the existing police state it imposes in America — to end a police state that this judge attributed to (and which he documented to have been produced by) choices that the U.S. Supreme Court itself had made, and that only they therefore can possibly reverse.

His basic point was that nothing which allows a public official to violate the U.S. Constitution is Constitutional, and that therefore these U.S. Supreme Court decisions themselves violate the U.S. Constitution, and should therefore be reversed by the U.S. Supreme Court, which created this situation of legal immunity for police misconduct.

The decision by this judge, Carlton W. Reeves, asserted: “The Constitution says everyone is entitled to equal protection of the law — even at the hands of law enforcement. Over the decades, however, judges [at the U.S. Supreme Court] have invented a legal doctrine to protect law enforcement officers from having to face any consequences for wrongdoing. The doctrine is called ‘qualified immunity.’ In real life it operates like absolute immunity.” Because of U.S. Supreme Court rulings, he had to — in the particular case at hand that he was ruling on — grant a police officer’s “qualified immunity” from prosecution, regardless of what is Constitutional, or even justice in any meaningful sense. Implicitly, he is saying, in this ruling, that because of the existing legal tradition of stare decisis or adhering to existing juridical tradition — and especially of doing so when the prior rulings come from a higher court, most especially from the U.S. Supreme Court — he is required, in the present case, to issue a ruling that violates the U.S. Constitution itself. And so, he did that, he admits. This is an exceptionally bold ruling, far beyond what is normal. Basically, he says that in order for him not to be reversed on appeal, he had to rule against the U.S. Constitution, in the particular case that he was ruling on. He was pleading with the U.S. Supreme Court to end this, so that judges in the lower courts will be able to enforce — instead of compelled to violate — the Constitution.

This ruling by judge Reeves was extremely tactful, such as by its saying, “A review of our qualified immunity precedent makes clear that the Court [he pointedly didn’t say “the Supreme Court,” but that’s what he was actually referring to] has dispensed with any pretense of balancing competing values [meaning that only police are protected, their victims are not — the public is being jeopardized — by these decisions from the U.S. Supreme Court].” Then, Reeves went on to say, “Our courts [he was referring here to today’s U.S. Supreme Court] have shielded a police officer who shot a child while the officer was attempting to shoot the family dog.117.” That was a case which had been only recently decided by the U.S. Supreme Court, on June 15th, and which decision by this Supreme Court was ignored by the nation’s press, since that decision exposes how totalitarian this country has actually become. That Supreme Court decision, which (especially because of the recent headlines about the George Floyd murder case) should have been front-page news throughout the country, was instead hidden from the public by the ‘news’-media, though that decision — and the others which were similarly dismissed that day on the very same ground of “qualified immunity” of police officers — probably constituted the most important decision of the current Supreme Court term, and directly relate to the George Floyd case. That June 15th decision (now virtually a precedent protecting the murderer of George Floyd) ruled in a slew of cases that had been brought against police officers by their victims. This Supreme Court dismissed all of them, on the basis of this absurd court-precedent, which had been established in 1967, and which was further defined in 1982. It’s “qualified immunity”, and asserts that police are allowed to do anything to anyone unless Congress has passed a specific law against what they did, and in that law, has described and identified exactly the same circumstances that the claimant against the police is claiming had existed — each and every detail of it — in his/her specific case. It’s a Supreme-Court precedent, for a police state (unaccountable government-officials) to be ‘Constitutional’ in America, and this black judge in Mississippi was here essentially begging the U.S. Supreme Court to reverse the precedent that the 1967 Supreme Court had established (and which had been reaffirmed and worsened yet further, by the Supreme Court in 1982). It is horrific judge-made ‘law’ that is no real law but instead nothing but an extremely evil precedent, which today’s Supreme Court continues to impose; and judge Reeves expressed that he reluctantly is bound to follow it and therefore he pleads requesting the U.S. Supreme Court to reverse itself on this matter.

The June 15th U.S. Supreme Court ruling had been dissented from by only a single member of today’s U.S. Supreme Court, and that person happens also to be its only black member: Clarence Thomas. All of the white members reaffirmed this police-state precedent. Ironically, Justice Thomas, who along with judge Alito is the farthest-rightwing member of the U.S. Supreme Court, dissented against the police on that occasion. And, of course, all of the Democratic-Party appointees to this Court (the Court’s liberals) voted for the police, against the public, in that June 15th ruling. Today’s Democratic Party is liberal Jim Crow. (The Republicans are conservative Jim Crow, which is closer to the 19th Century variety.) The Democratic Party’s nominee for the Presidency, Joe Biden, was one of the U.S. Senate’s leading segregationists, and he was condemned for it by Senator Ted Kennedy, the NAACP and others (though the U.S. ‘news’-media hid — and continue to hide — that fact, too).

I had headlined on June 20th about this June 15th ruling, “U.S. Supreme Court Reaffirms U.S. Police State”. The Court in that decision had reaffirmed that America’s law-enforcement officers have this “qualified immunity” from prosecution, and so the Constitutional rights of Americans are effectively meaningless if the police abuse them. (As originally established in 1967, police have “qualified immunity” if they have acted “in good faith,” but since 1982 they posses this immunity even if they clearly did not.)

As the libertarian lawyer Jay Schweikert put this matter on June 15th: “the Supreme Court let stand an Eleventh Circuit decision granting immunity to a police officer who shot a ten-year-old child in the back of the knee, while repeatedly attempting to shoot a pet dog that wasn’t threatening anyone.” The officer who had been accused in that particular case, Corbitt v. Vickers, was Deputy Sheriff Michael Vickers, of Coffee County, Georgia. He had been chasing a suspect, who happened to cross into the yard of Amy Corbitt, who at that time happened to be chatting with another adult, Damion Stewart. One of her children was referred to in the case as “SDC.” Here is how the lower court ruling stated the incident:

At some point after Vickers and the other officers entered Corbitt’s yard, the officers “demanded all persons in the area, including the children, to get down on the ground.” An officer handcuffed Stewart and placed a gun at his back. …  Then, “while the children were lying on the ground obeying [Vickers’s] orders … without necessity or any immediate threat or cause, [Vickers] discharged his firearm at the family pet named ‘Bruce’ twice.” The first shot missed, and Bruce (a dog) temporarily retreated under Corbitt’s home. No other efforts were made to restrain or subdue the dog, and no one appeared threatened by him. Eight or ten seconds after Vickers fired the first shot, the dog reappeared and was “approaching his owners,” when Vickers fired a second shot at the dog. This shot also missed the dog, but the bullet struck SDC in the back of his right knee.

The U.S. Supreme Court ruled for Deputy Sheriff Michael Vickers. The case against Vickers was one in a batch of eight throughout the country challenging the existing court-precedent of “qualified immunity,” and the U.S. Supreme Court’s ruling dismissed all of them (“certeriori denied”) for the same reason: “qualified immunity” stands as-is — is valid as-is. (“Certeriori denied” means that at least five of the nine ‘Justices’ were satisfied with the existing legal precedents on the matter and with the appeals court’s application of those precedents to the given case — so: nothing gets changed. In this batch of 8 cases, 8 ‘Justices’ voted against accepting any of these 8 cases.) In each one of these cases, the appeals court had ruled in favor of the police officer, on the basis of his “qualified immunity.” And, so, 8 members of this Supreme Court approved of that. In other words: no matter how bad a police officer is, he has this legal immunity, and the only recourse that might be even possible is to reassign or maybe even fire him, if the Police Department decides to do so. Police officers are above the law, but they can be fired in some circumstances.

Here is how the Rutherford Institute, which backed all of these cases against the officers, phrased the officers’ argument in one of these cases:

Qualified immunity shielded the defendants’ actions from liability because Petitioner could not point to any factually identical case clearly establishing that law enforcement officials exceeded the scope of Petitioner’s consent to enter her home when they essentially destroyed her home. That reasoning sets an impossible standard. Because courts are free to advance to the ‘clearly established’ prong of the qualified immunity inquiry without first deciding threshold constitutional questions, it is unlikely that a body of case law with closely analogous factual circumstances will ever develop.

In other words: the U.S. Supreme Court ruled 8 to 1 that unless Congress will pass a new law which will specifically apply the 4th and the 14th Amendments so as to enable prosecution of law-enforcement officers who do the specific listed sorts of things that unequivocally are identified in such new statutes as being prohibited under those Amendments, America’s law-enforcement officers are free to continue doing these sorts of things and to avoid any sort of legal liability for having done them.

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