Why do politicians have immunity

So the crooks were off the hook. This, unfortunately, is par for the course. Reuters examined cases of alleged excessive force by police between and In more than three dozen of them, qualified immunity shielded officers from prosecution for behaviors deemed unlawful.

Qualified immunity could have bleak implications in the case of George Floyd, who was handcuffed and helpless when Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin kneeled on his neck for 8 minutes and 46 seconds, per USA Today. If there is no legal precedent, statute, or constitutional protection barring the use of excessive or deadly force under those highly specific circumstances, there might not be much that could be done to hold Chauvin accountable. A jarring article by law professor and Cato Institute vice president for criminal justice Clark Neily explains the situation this way: "Thus, if Mr.

Floyd's family wants to sue the officer who took his life, they will need to find an existing case from the Eighth U. Circuit Court of Appeals holding that a police officer may not kneel on a unresisting suspect's neck, ignoring his pleas for help, until he passes out. Schwartz found that qualified immunity is only rarely raised at the motion to dismiss stage It is raised much more often at summary judgment But she postulates that the real problem with qualified immunity is that it is a fact-driven analysis which prevents most cases from being resolved at summary judgment or earlier.

Little can be done about the fact that our legal system is set up to deal with factual disputes at the end of the process at a trial in front of a jury and that disputes with government officials, police officers in particular, are very fact driven. This suggestion of course only adds additional factual inquiries. The future for qualified immunity It is unsurprising that academics are taking a stab at qualified immunity. After all, no one likes someone who always wins!

But Supreme Court justices are more than used to academics telling them they got it wrong and should do it another way. Completely changing course on any major legal doctrine, especially one like qualified immunity, which the liberal and conservative justices mostly agree on, is unlikely.

Changes at the margins are more likely. For example, in the next few terms maybe the Supreme Court will rule that a lower court improperly granted a state or local government official qualified immunity.

For example, one study found that individuals created antibodies that could stop six variants of concern all at once, including the delta variant. These individuals could also stop other coronaviruses.

Paul Bieniasz , a virologist at Rockefeller University who helped lead the research for several of these studies, told NPR that these individuals will have good luck in the future with more variants. So the individuals had protection from the virus and then experienced a strong response to the vaccine. Indeed, previous research backs up this theory. For example, recent real-world U. Of course, the researchers still suggested people get the COVID vaccine to stay safe from the coronavirus.

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