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Comment by thyrsus | Hacker News Reader

Explain to me how qualified immunity is better than any ill it is supposed to address? And how is it that if you sue the government and win, then the judgement doesn't automatically award reasonable legal fees?

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The ill that it's supposed to address is people hassling government officials who are just doing their jobs. Their jobs require them to do things that people don't want them to do, like making you pay taxes or go to jail for committing crimes. They are prominent targets and can easily spend their entire career fighting off complaints.

Of course that promptly shifts the potential for abuse in the other direction. Supposedly, democracy is the control over that. If they are abusing their office, you vote them out. (Or you vote out the elected official supervising them, such as a mayor or sheriff.)

It actually does work out most of the time. The cases of abuse are really few and far between. But in a country of 300 million, "few and far between" is somebody every single day, and a decent chance that it's you at some point.

That said, it should be zero, and there's good reason to think that for every offender you see there are dozens or hundreds of people complicit in allowing it. The theory I outlined above can only handle so many decades of concerted abuses before they become entrenched as part of the system. At which point it may be impossible to restore it without resetting everything to zero and starting over.

Working in the criminal justice system for awhile in some capacity will really give you perspective on what people have to deal with.

> The ill that it's supposed to address is people hassling government officials who are just doing their jobs.

How? If they're doing their jobs, then they are in the right and would be defended by their agency. If they are doing something illegal, they'd be in trouble. But that's the point!

They might be defended by their agency (though being "in the right" doesn't appear to be a pre-requisite for that anyway). But they would/could still be subject to lawsuit after lawsuit, which hardly suits the intended goal of government, does it?

Make the losing side pay attorney fees. (This is a general fix for a lot of issues in the legal system.)

That's a good way to stop poor people from trying to sue anyone with better access to lawyers.

Poor people already cannot afford most legal services, and (other than a very small percentage of cases brought on a volunteer or nearly-volunteer basis at the goodwill of law firms) very rarely file suit without legal fees sought in restitution. Of those that don’t, it’s understood that recouping legal fees from lower income clients is far from guaranteed due to bankruptcy risk.

That doesn't cover SLAPP, where the purpose is not restitution, but, as the acronym puts it, a lawsuit "against public participation".

Still. I understand the officers having "qualified immunity". But not the agency.

If an agency has shitty officers doing dodgy stuff, it's on the agency. The agents may be declared immune to direct litigation, but any claims and reparations should be automatically shifted to the agency.

I do not understand officers having qualified immunity. They are armed for of the government and they have much lower expectations placed on them the normal citizens.

The fact that cops can break laws, actually harm people and then make prosecution basically impossible is bonkers.

It’s a sticky issue. Without QI, it seems very plausible that many law enforcement departments would be seriously hamstrung by continual waves of legal action and thus cost taxpayers a lot more to operate effectively. Not only would many people use a court of law as a fallback from the court of public opinion, but the legal industry would support this given the lucrative monetary and reputational advantages of suing the government.

And I’m saying that as someone extremely pro-curtailment of police/TSA/CBP scope and resources, and extremely critical and aware of the law enforcement abuse and overreach epidemic. This one just doesn’t have an easy solve—not without a massive overhaul of the entire US justice system down to the roots.

Surely other countries manage it without having a QI doctrine.

Indeed, it's those normal citizens who hold those expectations. Quite a lot of people voted explicitly for this, and are getting what they voted for.

This is indeed bonkers, because history is rife with examples of this ending badly. And that bonkers goes far deeper than just this issue.

If the agency has become corrupt, tweaking immunity isn't going to fix it. Only voters can solve that by saying clearly "no, this is not the agency we want."

If that is what the voters want, then the victim minority can only reconsider their role in the social contract.

Especially when the implication in the article is the police tried to delete a video from evidence -- and still ended up getting to hide behind qualified immunity.

Ugh.

Two separate things. Qualified immunity is just immunity from individual liability afforded to government agents when conducting government business, as long as they are conducting it properly.

Except the whole "as long as they are conducting it properly" part isn't actually true.

It might be true, it might not. Probably more useful to say "as long as they are conducting it properly" seems to have little impact on any of cases in which such immunity has been an issue.

> as long as they are conducting it properly.

I think ICE has clearly demonstrated that this is not true

Have you ever looked at legal proceedings involving criminals? It’s 95% noise and 5% signal. Criminals are, in general, bad people with a lot of time on their hands, and without qualified immunity you’d totally swamp the legal system with frivolous lawsuits.

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