Court: No, You May Not Force Your Way into a Home and Strip Search Six Children
techdirt.com
techdirt.com
Right here is the key sentence of the article. Normally, in cases involving qualified immunity, the circumstances have to match up more or less exactly with some precedent in order for qualified immunity to be denied. So, if officers break into someone's place and steal/seize money and rare coins, without justification, as happened recently, when faced with a precedent about officers seizing money alone, the Court might conclude that qualified immunity applies.
Once qualified immunity applies, that effectively kills the case. The worst part about this is that means the case can't become the specific precedent that the Court is looking for. This is why qualified immunity is terribly constructed: there is no way for the Court to say "You did the wrong thing, but you didn't know, so you had qualified immunity. But, next time someone does that, they should know better."
As we develop various technical solutions, and keep discussing merits of this or that javascript framework, let's keep in mind that the technology we develop may end up in the hands of the people described in the article. Or this might have happened already.
What she could do legally matters little when two government officials, one armed, told her that exercising her legal rights would result in them returning with a court order to take her children.
Is there some context that doesn't justify, but maybe explains the situation?
Is it just as simple as a bully arbitrarily abusing a position of power?