Supreme Court sides with police officers seeking ‘qualified immunity’

The Supreme Court in two cases Monday ruled police officers were entitled to protection from being sued over their use of force against suspects.

The unsigned opinions, posted in the court’s periodic list of orders, both overturned lower appellate decisions.

One case involved an officer accused of excessive force when he put his knee on a man’s back during an arrest, while trying to remove a knife from the man’s pocket. In the other case, two officers were sued by the estate of a man whom they shot and killed after he appeared to threaten them with a hammer.

The high court said officers in both cases were entitled to qualified immunity. That doctrine protects officers from lawsuits unless it can be shown that they violated “clearly established” rights that a reasonable person would know about.

Police reform advocates have called for an end to qualified immunity, arguing it insulates officers from accountability for wrongdoing. House progressives pushed to include a provision ending the doctrine as part of bipartisan police reform negotiations. Those efforts dissolved last month.

The Supreme Court on Monday first ruled on a case in which police in Union City, California, in 2016 responded to a 911 call alleging Ramon Cortesluna was going to hurt his girlfriend and her two children, who were trapped in another room of her home.

As police directed Cortesluna to leave the house and approach them with his hands up, an officer shouted, “he has a knife in his left pocket.” Cortesluna lowered his hands and was shot with nonlethal beanbag rounds in the stomach and hip. He got down on the ground, at which point officer Daniel Rivas-Villegas “straddled” him and “placed his left knee on the left side of Cortesluna’s back,” the court wrote in its opinion.

“Rivas-Villegas was in this position for no more than eight seconds before standing up while continuing to hold Cortesluna’s arms,” at which point another officer removed the knife and handcuffed Cortesluna, the court said.

Cortesluna sued, arguing Rivas-Villegas used excessive force in violation of the Fourth Amendment. A federal district court sided with the officer, but the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit reversed that decision, ruling that “existing precedent put [Rivas-Villegas] on notice that his conduct constituted excessive force.”

The Supreme Court ruled that “to show a violation of clearly established law, Cortesluna must identify a case that put Rivas-Villegas on notice that his specific conduct was unlawful.”

He “has not done so,” the court’s opinion said, and neither he nor the appeals court “identified any Supreme Court case that addresses facts like the ones at issue here.”

The other case involved a 2016 police incident in which the ex-wife of Dominic Rollice told 911 that her former husband was drunk in her garage and refusing to leave.

Three officers from the Tahlequah, Oklahoma, Police Department showed up: Josh Girdner, Chase Reed and Brandon Vick. They asked to pat Rollice down for…