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Comment by dgrin91 | Hacker News Reader

To be a bit pedantic, its not sovereign immunity, its qualified immunity. It is defeatable, and there are examples of it, but its rather rare. It is an abused and obviously problematic legal doctrine

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Quoting the article:

>In court filings, attorneys representing the state and Bradley have argued Holland's lawsuit should be dismissed as the trooper has "sovereign immunity" as a member of law enforcement, and that it was a "lawful" traffic stop.

It’s just a sloppy article.

The concept is right but sovereign immunity is about states and between states.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sovereign_immunity_in_the_Unit...

I know it's less likely, but I think the party who made the error may have actually been the attorneys representing the state and Bradley

Huh, interesting. I am very dubious of that quote. IANAL, but I'm pretty sure if they actually filed that in court they would be laughed out of the room. My guess is either the reporters got it wrong or its some AI hallucination. Unfortunately they don't source this claim.

Sovereign immunity is the more general problem. The media focuses on qualified immunity because it's the specific justification that is often used for applying sovereign immunity to the actions of individual people. But really we need to significantly neuter that entire base concept of sovereign immunity. First, it's the background that causes individual officers to think "they are the law" and go down paths of wanton criminality illustrated here. But in general it's also what allows police forces, even congruent with all their rules and procedures, to still harm innocent citizens and then never make them whole for that harm. "You can beat the rap but you can't beat the ride" shouldn't be thought of as some witty insight, rather it's a grave subversion of justice.

According to the Wikipedia article on sovereign immunity, there are two types: "absolute immunity" and "qualified immunity". If that's right (I have no idea) then they're not incompatible.

When it's ICE it's both :-(

ICE itself as a federal agency has sovereign immunity but the individuals who make up ICE only have qualified immunity for constitutional rights violations. However they do have sovereign immunity for general torts (or more technically for general torts the USG is substituted as the defendant and the USG has sovereign immunity.

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