LADI Packet – Nov-Dec
Topicality
Limit MayReduce
Limit is to reduce in scope
Merriam-Webster n/d [“Limit”] LADI
: to prevent (something) from being larger, longer, more, etc. : to place a limit on the size or extent of (something)
Limit Must Be Abolish
Curtail means a partial restriction – the aff is a cancelation of a program, not curtailment
San Fellipo, 92 (John, “OREGON'S TELEPHONE INFORMATION DELIVERY SERVICE LAW: A CONSUMER PROTECTION STEP TOO FAR” 28 Willamette L. Rev. 455 1991-1992, Hein Online)
131. The author understands "limit" as used in OR. ADMIN. R. 860-21-505(8) (1991) to mean cancel, as opposed to the word "curtail" used in section (7), meaning only a partial restriction.
Aff
Sample plans
-Eliminate qualified immunity in wrongful-death cases where police officers violated department policy
Jason Lee Steorts 12 [(Jason Lee Steorts, ) When Should Police Officers Be Able to Use Deadly Force?, Atlantic 7-1-2012] LADI
But there will be limits to what legal reforms can accomplish. In criminal law, proof beyond reasonable doubt establishes a suitably high bar for prosecutors to clear. And in civil law, the doctrine of qualified immunity shields officers from liability for violating people’s constitutional or statutory rights—and usually entitles them to summary judgment in their favor—if it can be shown that the legal standard was not clearly defined. In the murky, context-dependent area of Fourth Amendment case law, it often isn’t. This makes it very hard to impose on police officers any form of accountability between criminal guilt and full exoneration. Courts and investigative bodies sort through the consequences as well as they can, but what they cannot do is bring back the dead. Legislatures could partially address that problem by establishing that officers will not be granted qualified immunity in wrongful-death suits when their actions violate departmental training or policy. And independent bodies whose members include community representatives could be empowered to fire officers even if they have not been found criminally culpable or civilly liable.
-Remove the “clearly established” standard, which holds that police officers are entitled to qualified immunity as long as the law they broke was not clearly established
Sam Wright 15 [(Sam Wright, public interest lawyer who has spent his career exclusively in nonprofits and government) Want to Fight Police Misconduct? Reform Qualified Immunity, Above the Law 11-3-2015] LADI
Despite the fact that it doesn’t appear to be supported by evidence, FBI Director James Comey gave some credence to the notion of a “Ferguson effect” in a speech last week at the University of Chicago Law School. He described “a chill wind that has blown through American law enforcement over the last year” and suggested this “chill wind” was “some part of the explanation” for a putative rise in violent crimes. The White House disagreed with Comey. And Ta-Nahesi Coates had some things to say about Comey’s remarks, too, saying they reflected an attitude of non-evidence-based policing — a sort of “creationism, crime-fighting on a hunch.” He linked this attitude to longstanding racist police practices, and he ended with these words: “A theory of government which tells citizens to invest agents of the state with the power to mete out lethal violence, but discourages them from holding those officers accountable is not democracy. It is fascism.” Coates hits the proverbial nail squarely on its head: again it comes down to accountability. So now let’s take a look at what Campaign Zero is asking for on police accountability. This part of the Campaign Zero platform breaks down into four umbrella requests: Community Oversight — Campaign Zero proposes to increase community oversight of the police by establishing more effective structures for civilian oversight and removing barriers to reporting police misconduct. Independent Investigation and Prosecution — Campaign Zero wants to make police oversight more independent by lowering the standard of proof for federal civil rights investigations of police, using federal funds to increase investigations of killings by police officers, establishing a permanent Special Prosecutor position in each state, and requiring independent investigations of all deaths and serious injuries caused by police. Body Cameras and Filming the Police — Campaign Zero supports reforms to make it easier for civilians to obtain video evidence of encounters with police both by requiring police body cameras and by ensuring civilians can record police encounters. Fair Union and Police Contracts — Campaign Zero wants to remove special procedural protections for police officers accused of misconduct, to make police disciplinary records public, and to bar police officers who have killed or severely injured civilians from going on paid leave. I think Megan McArdle is probably right that these proposals (and the others in Campaign Zero’s broader platform) range from “worthy of consideration” to “immediate moral imperative.” But I also think the list is missing something. As usual, I’ve not buried the lede: that something is qualified immunity reform. In order to truly hold police accountable for bad acts, civilians must be able to bring, and win, civil rights suits themselves — not rely on the Department of Justice, or special prosecutors, or civilian review boards to hold officers accountable. And in order to both bring and win civil rights suits, civilians need a level playing field in court. Right now, they don’t have one. Instead, police officers have recourse to the broad protections of the judicially established doctrine of qualified immunity. Under this doctrine, state actors are protected from suit even if they’ve violated the law by, say, using excessive force, or performing an unwarranted body cavity search — as long as their violation was not one of “clearly established law of which a reasonable officer would be aware.” In other words, if there’s not already a case where a court has held that an officer’s identical or near-identical conduct rose to the level of a constitutional violation, there’s a good chance that even an obviously malfeasant officer will avoid liability — will avoid accountability. To bring about true accountability and change police behavior, this needs to change. And change should begin with an act of Congress rolling back qualified immunity. Removing the “clearly established” element of qualified immunity would be a good start — after all, shouldn’t it be enough to deviate from a basic standard of care, to engage in conduct that a reasonable officer would know is illegal, without having to show that that conduct’s illegality has already been clearly established in the courts?
-Supreme Court overturns the decision in Mullenix v. Luna, which expanded the scope of qualified immunity.
ZoshaMillman 15 [(ZoshaMillman, ) Supreme Court's decision on police force misses the scope, LXBN 11-10-2015] LADI
But in her strongly worded dissenting opinion, Justice Sonia Sotomayor claimed the court’s opinion was essentially authorizing rogue conduct. As her opinion states: When Mullenix confronted his superior officer after the shooting, his first words were, “How’s that for proactive?” (Mullenix was apparently referencing an earlier counseling session in which Byrd suggested that he was not enterprising enough.) The glib comment does not impact our legal analysis; an officer’s actual intentions are irrelevant to the Fourth Amendment’s “objectively reasonable” inquiry. But the comment seems to me revealing of the culture this court’s decision supports when it calls it reasonable—or even reasonably reasonable—to use deadly force for no discernible gain and over a supervisor’s express order to “stand by.” By sanctioning a “shoot first, think later” approach to policing, the court renders the protections of the Fourth Amendment hollow. And in many ways Sotomayor is right; though the court may have been focusing themselves on the actions of this one state trooper, the problem—and thus the opinion—has a much wider scope. Ruling that officers are immune from lawsuits save for when it is “beyond debate” that a shooting was unjustifiable and clearly unreasonable, the Supreme Court could make it very difficult for families of those shot and killed or injured by the police to prove that there was a wrongdoing on the part of the officer. As more and more attention is being paid to the Black Lives Matter movement and the frequency of police-related deaths, there’s a long list of deaths at the hands of police that are often (against the odds) not indicted or ruled to be not an excessive use of force. Investigations into the the deaths of 12-year-olds who were unarmed and made no threats take months to resolve. Legal cases are already an uphill battle for many families who struggle to pay the legal bills and funeral costs, but adding the burden of proof that an officer’s split-second reaction to reach for a gun was “beyond debate” seems hard to reconcile. Especially when, as Juan C. Antúnez wrote on the Florida Probate & Litigation Blog, the implicit bias that informs gut reasoning appears across the population, from general public all the way up to judges: First, understand the problem. We’re not talking about intentional bias here. What we’re talking about are the factors affecting decision making that most judges are simply not aware of. The linked-to article does a good job of identifying the typical unconscious biases we’ll encounter in a courtroom. Yes, “who” your judge is matters (i.e., race and background), but “how” his or her brain works is just as important. Our brains use a number of mental shortcuts, or “cognitive heuristics,” that help us make decisions more quickly and efficiently by operating in a matter of milliseconds, without our realizing that it is happening. Understanding how these mental shortcuts work, and what you need to do to make sure they’re working in a way that helps your judge do the best job possible, is crucial. It’s hard to argue against the danger felt during a car chase. But it’s important that the law understand the line between truth in the moment and the truth illuminated by hindsight. And placing those decisions beyond debate won’t likely inspire confidence in policing without excessive force. It’s more like throwing away our shot.
Accountability Advantage
Qualified immunity is part of a jurisprudence of violence that makes killing a permissible option for police
Greene 15 [(Linda Sheryl, Evjue-Bascom Professor, University of Wisconsin Law School) “Before and After Michael Brown—Toward an End to Structural and Actual Violence” Washington University Journal of Law & Policy Volume 49 Ferguson and Beyond 2015] LADI
The fact that the officers did not follow their training was also irrelevant. Even if they do so, they still retain qualified immunity if “a reasonable officer could have believed that his conduct was justified.”203 On summary judgment, “a jury does not automatically get to second-guess these life-and-death decisions, even though a plaintiff has an expert and a plausible claim that the situation could better have been handled differently.”204 They would have voted to dismiss both legal issues as certiorari improvidently granted, on the ground that the petitioner city engaged in bait and switch tactics by asking the court to grant cert on “whether title II [of the ADA] applies to the arrest of violent and mentally ill individuals” while briefing only the question how it applied under the circumstances of this case, where the plaintiff threatened officers with a weapon.205 Police killings of mentally ill persons are not deterred by this permissive decision.This tactic deprived the court of the “opportunity to consider, and settle, a controverted question of law that has divided the Circuits.”206 The Court’s approach is understandable on one level; as it has said multiple times, it does not want the judiciary second-guessing the street judgments of police officers.207 Yet others have observed that the Court has rejected substantive objections to police officer’s decisions on due process grounds, while constructing a Fourth Amendment analysis that defers entirely to police judgment in the absence of positive statements of law. In this gap—between clearly established violations of the Fourth Amendment and new fact situations involving dead or severely injured people—lies the broken content of a mandate that the State not take life without compelling justification. Thoughtfully, some lower courts have pushed back on postGarner permissiveness with respect to police killings of incapacitated suspects. In Brockington v. Boykins, a Fourth Circuit panel found no justification for a second series of shots fired by a police officer against a suspect who was obviously disabled by the first volley.208 The panel discussed the rules of qualified immunity209 including the rule that conduct that qualifies for qualified immunity “does not violate clearly established statutory or constitutional rights of which a reasonable person would have known.”210 Boykins argued that “there needs to be a clear bright-line separating allowable actions from forbidden ones” and that conduct not specifically and previously found to violate the Fourth Amendment ought to qualify for qualified immunity.211 The Fourth Circuit responded that the fact that the exact conduct has not been found previously unconstitutional does not immunize the officer’s conduct from civil liability.212 The Court observed that Tennessee v. Garner made the point “that deadly force was not generally justified against a suspect who did not pose an immediate threat.”213 The court plainly stated that “it is just common sense that continuing to shoot someone who is already incapacitated is not justified under these circumstances.”214 The regime for the possible redress of excessive force makes the loss or preservation of life in police encounters dependent on the judgment of an individual officer in a framework in which killing is permissible unless it has been strictly forbidden by prior precedent or limited by individual local police authority. This is sanctioned arbitrariness in the imposition of deaththat has affected Black communities around the nation. Our jurisprudence of violenceincludes approval, even celebration, of actual violence. It is the combination of immunity, weak criminal penalties, cultures of secrecy, and unfettered power through technology and militarization that renders the meaningful discussion of restraint on police violence impossible in the current legal framework. Our challenge is to find a meta-framework that aids our understanding and contributes to a transformation. There are several possibilities, including rethinking the regime of deference to police judgment, a moral and ethical framework for policing, and the elimination of the circumstances of economic discrimination, spatial discrimination, and hyper-criminalization in order to eliminate material and stigmatic disparities that that weaken communities and make them vulnerable to despair and crimes of survival.
Qualified immunity sanctions indiscriminate police violence – police are allowed to kill with impunity
Tom Carter 15 [(Tom Carter, World Socialist Website) US Supreme Court expands immunity for killer cops, International Committee of the Fourth International International Committee of the Fourth International 11-12-2015] LADI
With the death toll from police brutality continuing to mount, the US Supreme Court on Monday issued a decision expanding the authoritarian doctrine of “qualified immunity,” which shields police officers from legal accountability. When a civil rights case issummarily dismissed by a judge on the grounds of “qualified immunity,” the case is legally terminated. It never goes to trial before a jury and is never decided on its constitutional merits. In March of 2010, Texas Department of Public Safety Trooper ChadrinMullenix climbed onto an overpass with a rifle and, disobeying a direct order from his supervisor, fired six shots at a vehicle that the police were pursuing. Mullenix was not in any danger, and his supervisor had told him to wait until other officers tried to stop the car using spike strips. Four shots struck Israel Leija, Jr., killing him and causing the car, which was going 85 miles per hour, to crash. After the shooting, Mullenix boasted to his supervisor, “How’s that for proactive?” The Luna v. Mullenix case was filed by Leija’s family members, who claimed that Mullenix used excessive force in violation of the Fourth Amendment, part of the Bill of Rights. The district court that originally heard the case, together with the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals, denied immunity to Mullenix on the grounds that his conduct violated clearly established law. The Supreme Court intervened to upholdMullenix’s entitlement to immunity—a decision that will set a precedent for the summary dismissal of civil rights lawsuits against police brutality around the country. This is the Supreme Court’s response to the ongoing wave of police mayhem and murder. The message is clear: The killings will continue. Do not question the police. If you disobey the police, you forfeit your life. So far this year, more than 1,000 people have been killed by the police in America. Almost every day, there are new videos posted online showing police shootings, intrusions into homes and cars, asphyxiations, beatings and taserings. Last week, two police officers in Louisiana opened fire on Jeremy Mardis, a six-year-old autistic boy, and his father Chris Few. The boy’s father had his hands up during the shooting and is currently hospitalized with serious injuries. His son succumbed to the police bullets while still buckled into the front seat of the car. The Supreme Court’s decision reflects the fact that in the face of rising popular anger over police killings, the entire political apparatus—including all of the branches of government—is closing ranks behind the police. This includes the establishment media, which has largely remained silent about Monday’s pro-police Supreme Court decision. The police operate with almost total impunity, confident that no matter what they do, they will have the backing of the state. Two weeks ago, a South Carolina grand jury refused to return an indictment against the officer who was caught on video killing 19-year-old Zachary Hammond. This follows the exoneration of the police who killed Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, Eric Garner in New York City and Tamir Rice in Cleveland. The Obama administration’s position regarding the surge of police violence was most clearly and simply articulated by FBI director James Comey in a speech on October 23. “May God protect our cops,” Comey declared. He went on to accuse those who film the police of promoting violent crime. Meanwhile, in virtually every police brutality case that has come before the federal courts, the Obama administration has taken the side of the police. On Monday, the Supreme Court went out of its way to cite approvingly an amicus curiae (friend of court) brief filed by the National Association of Police Organizations (NAPO), which defended Mullenix. With this citation, notwithstanding its ostensible role as a neutral arbiter and guarantor of the Constitution, the Supreme Court sent a clear signal as to which side it is on. During the imposition of de facto martial law in Ferguson last year, NAPO issued statements vociferously defending Michael Brown’s killer, labeling demonstrators as “violent outsiders,” and denouncing “the violent idiots on the street chanting ‘time to kill a cop!’”