We just won our first appeal.
We just got a decision in Senn v. Smith, the case we argued last week. We won. Linda Senn sued Deputy Smith because he gratuitously pepper-sprayed her at a protest. Today, the Ninth Circuit ruled that he doesn’t get qualified immunity for that. You can read the decision here.
What does this decision mean for the bigger picture? It’s a small but important crack in the firmament of qualified immunity. Smith argued strenuously that he had qualified immunity because no single previous case involved all the same factual circumstances as this one. That’s a dangerous way to read the doctrine: History never repeats itself exactly, so there will always be some way to distinguish the facts of an earlier case. (For example, one of our key cases involved a very similar use of force against a very similar victim—but it wasn’t at a protest, so Smith said it was irrelevant.) If the court had agreed with Smith, cops would almost always be able to use qualified immunity to escape accountability.
We told the court he was wrong: What we needed was a “body of relevant case law.” As long as previous cases put together told Smith his use of force violated the Constitution, we could overcome qualified immunity. The Ninth Circuit agreed, and it held that we easily met that bar. It said that under its earlier cases,
every reasonable officer had notice at the time of the incident that, if reasonable alternatives are available, even in somewhat chaotic circumstances, he or she cannot pepper-spray a person who has committed no serious crime and who is not a threat to anyone’s safety.
So no qualified immunity for Deputy Smith.
We’re incredibly proud of this result. And we couldn’t have achieved it without your support. We don’t charge our clients fees—we run on contributions from people like you. So if you’re able, please donate to help us fight for your civil rights.
