How is that an example? Whatever you do now doesn't work retroactively.
Changing the system means removing the potential for abuse of power, not punishing abuse of power after the fact.
Changing the system means removing the potential for abuse of power, not punishing abuse of power after the fact.
The point of such a thing is to deter similar conduct in the future.
The fact that this isn't a crime, and that qualified immunity typically means they can't even be held responsible civily, is part of what encourages police to commit misconduct like this.
The only folks punished here were the local taxpayers footing the bill.
The core problem here is that the system allowed an innocent person to stay in jail. That needs to be fixed on a system level, not by trying to punish people after the fact for bad outcomes.
No; the system got the innocent person out of jail and a hefty settlement for their trouble. The system is now, unfortunately, allowing the guilty parties to stay employed as cops after performing a kidnapping.
> That needs to be fixed on a system level, not by trying to punish people after the fact for bad outcomes.
An accidental positive on a drug test is a bad outcome.
Locking someone up for more than a month because they posted a photo of the President and a quote he actually said is a crime.
I also think every party involved in that failure should be fired and rendered unemployable in the field.
Instead somehow bail was set at $2 million and the hearing to reduce bail was delayed.
Those are flaws in the system that should be fixed, and will continue harming people even without bad faith from sheriffs.
At a certain point, punishing abuse of power after the fact is the only way to discourage the potential abuse of power. Like there is nothing that actually stops you or me from going and kidnapping someone. And that same dynamic applies to someone who happens to also be a sheriff who controls a jail due to his employment. There is no magic wand for the system to wave that makes it so that the individuals employed by that system can't simply break the law.
Personal civil liability and firing can also help.
I do agree with you in general that we should aim to split system functions between multiple people. But this merely raises the bar, it doesn't make corrupt actions impossible. Which means we should be focusing on both avenues of reform, rather than emphasizing one to downplay another. Especially as when you do this, the entrenched system seems to takes advantage of the downplaying while resisting the solution being emphasized.
You could make the system more adversarial at that point, although I think enforcing bail hearings where a public defender can argue would help in this and many other cases.
But even then, abuse of that classification is something that could routinely happen and would need to be punished post-facto. Imagine the same sheriff looking to perform the same retaliation, so he checks all the boxes for a no-notice no-knock warrant that still results in an arrest with a weekend in jail. Which is why my main point is that we shouldn't argue against one avenue of reform with the goal of emphasizing a different one.
And once again there isn't much that can be done about corrupt public officials unjustly prosecuting/persecuting former officials as it comes down to that same human problem rather than a system problem - regardless of whether there is or isn't criminal liability for actions adjacent to official acts, they are still subject to the rest of the law! For example James was persecuted under the guise of having defrauded an unrelated agency in a personal capacity, independent of her actions as an official being what drew the aggro. Those persecutions of Comey and James basically rely on a post-truth electorate that doesn't care, and who chose to reelect a destructive tyrant who repudiates our American values merely to stick a fork in the eye of "the elites".
And while we can also talk about ways of reforming the system to prevent that (eg Constitutional amendment that explicitly divides power amongst independent agencies), I don't think it has much bearing on how we should be drawing legal lines in the sand to constrain public officials.