A Federal Judge Just Called Out the Supreme Court

To highlight its absurdity, he pointed to a number of surprising instances in other courts where misconduct wasn’t “clearly established.” The Ninth Circuit once ruled, for example, that officers who stole a $225,000 rare coin collection “did not have clear notice that it violated the Fourth Amendment,” essentially ruling that committing the crime of theft did not violate the victim’s rights. The Fifth Circuit held that it was OK to keep a prisoner “in a frigid cell” where he was “covered in other persons’ feces and forced to sleep naked in sewage” for six days because the “clearly established” precedent only barred it for “months.” In another case, a court held that it was not “clearly established” that prison guards who watched a mentally unstable inmate hang himself should have called for paramedics.

I could list more examples, and so could Reeves, but you probably get the point by now. “[Qualified immunity] discourages victims of misconduct from bringing lawsuits, and those who do file suit sometimes recover nothing because of it,” he wrote. “Qualified immunity accomplishes this by preventing victims of government misconduct from using the discovery tools available to other litigants.” He also noted the obvious effects it had on racial inequality, since Black defendants are statistically more likely to face interactions with law enforcement than other Americans.

Reeves, as a federal district court judge, is not free to simply ignore Supreme Court precedent. But he denied qualified immunity to Thomas all the same. He sided with Green on every portion of his claim, rejecting even some plausible defenses that Thomas had raised. When courts consider a defendant’s motion to dismiss, they typically assume that the plaintiff’s allegations are true and interpret any factual disputes in the plaintiff’s favor. The reasoning for this is simple: If a case can’t survive under even the friendliest circumstances, then it shouldn’t.