Clearly Established #4
Welcome to the fourth issue of Clearly Established, a somewhat weekly, slightly irreverent roundup of some of the week’s interesting accountability decisions. This week is a little light on decisions, so we’ll also highlight some other accountability-related developments.
First, the decisions:
Allegation: Coccidioidomycosis, also known as “valley fever,” which can cause everything from chronic pneumonia to meningitis, is running rampant through state mental health hospital where civil detainees are held. Ninth Circuit (2019): No previous case has clearly established a right for prisoners to be free of exposure to valley fever, and we’re not going to clearly establish it in this case. Ninth Circuit (2021): Which means there’s no clearly established right for civil detainees, either, even though civil detainees are entitled to better conditions than prisoners. And, again, we’re not going to clearly establish any such right in this case.
Exoneree sues prosecutor, alleging that prosecutor knowingly fed medical examiner false info to get a suicide reclassified as a homicide—and on the strength of that reclassification, put exoneree behind bars. Tenth Circuit: If true, this shocks the conscience—which means it’s a violation of due process. And we needn’t go on a “scavenger hunt for prior cases with precisely the same facts.” This is an “obvious” violation, so QI denied. (Our ED had a longer Twitter thread about this case here.)
Other news:
The decision itself is about a month old, but Reason has excellent reporting this week on a particularly egregious qualified-immunity grant in Georgia. Twenty-four cops raided an elderly man’s home with flash-bang grenades and a battering ram. Turns out they had the wrong house, which didn’t even look like the house described in the search warrant. Qualified immunity for all twenty-four.
In Arkansas, a cop used a PIT maneuver to flip a car because it didn’t pull over within 20 seconds of his turning on his siren. The dashcam video is pretty horrifying—all the more so because the driver was pregnant. (Baby and driver both survived.) The woman, who followed police instructions perfectly, is suing—but, as our ED points out, the Eighth Circuit’s caselaw means the officer will almost certainly get qualified immunity.
Five Reuters reporters have won the Pulitzer Prize in Explanatory Reporting for a series of exceptionally well-researched articles on qualified immunity. Read the articles here:
That’s it for this week. Please feel free to send this newsletter to any friends or family who might find it interesting. If you got this from a friend, you can sign up to receive future issues here.
When we’re not writing this newsletter, we litigate cases in the federal courts of appeals. If you want to support that important work, you can do so here.
Thanks for reading.
