Supreme Court can right their wrong
Four decades on, qualified immunity routinely shields both the incompetent and those who knowingly violate the law. In the past year alone — along with the two cases above — courts have granted qualified immunity to:
►Officers who stole $225,000.
►A cop who shot a 10-year-old while trying to shoot a nonthreatening family dog.
►Prison officials who locked an inmate in a sewage-flooded cell for days.
►SWAT team members who fired gas grenades into an innocent woman’s empty home.
►Medical board officials who rifled through a doctor’s client files without a warrant.
►County officials who held a 14-year-old in pretrial solitary confinement for over a month.
►A cop who body-slammed a 5-foot-tall woman for walking away from him.
►Police who picked up a mentally infirmed man, drove him to the county line and dropped him off at dusk along the highway, where he was later struck and killed by a motorist.
