From [HERE] The U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Mississippi issued a compelling decision Monday denying qualified immunity to a detective who falsely accused Desmond Green of capital murder based on a “lying, drug-impaired jailhouse informant” whom she steered to select Mr. Green’s face from a photo lineup. 

The “horrifying wrong” of being wrongly accused and arrested was compounded by Mr. Green’s imprisonment for nearly two years in the Hinds County Detention Center, which was full of violence, rodents and snakes, and moldy food, where he endured “constant yelling, fighting, and threats,” often had to sleep on the bare floor, and “constantly feared for his life.”

After the informant recanted and prosecutors dropped the charges, Mr. Green filed a federal civil rights lawsuit against the Jackson police detective (as well as the city itself and Hinds County, which runs the jail) seeking justice for his wrongful prosecution and conditions of confinement. 

The detective responded that Mr. Green’s suit should be dismissed under the doctrine of qualified immunity, a legal doctrine that, according to the court, “means people wronged by government agents cannot sue those agents unless the Supreme Court previously found substantially the same acts to be unconstitutional.”

In his 62-page order, District Judge Carlton W. Reeves concludes after a detailed legal analysis that the detective is not entitled to qualified immunity because her actions violated clearly-established law.

The court goes on, however, to address Mr. Green’s argument that qualified immunity is itself unlawful, setting out the historical context for the doctrine’s invention and tracing its evolution into what Justice Sonia Sotomayor has called “an absolute shield” against accountability for police officers accused of using excessive force. 

Qualified immunity “has no basis in law,” the court concludes. “It is an extra-constitutional affront to other cherished values of our democracy.”

“Waves of Terrorism”

The federal statute under which Mr. Green sued the police detective is usually called “section 1983,” but the court insists on using the law’s formal name—the Ku Klux Klan Act of 1871—to underscore why Congress passed it in the first place. The decision sets the historical stage this way (citations omitted):

After the Civil War, white supremacists unleashed waves of terrorism across the South. Lawlessness was the order of the day. Groups like the Ku Klux Klan carried out “thousands of beatings, lynchings, and incidents of torture and mutilation.” “These atrocities were inflicted with impunity because judges, politicians, and law enforcement officers were fellow Klansmen and loyal sympathizers.” White supremacy empowered them to kill Black men, women, and children without fear of consequences.

EJI has documented nearly 2,000 confirmed racial terror lynchings of Black people by white mobs during Reconstruction, the 12-year period following the Civil War. Thousands more were attacked, sexually assaulted, and terrorized by white mobs and individuals who were shielded from arrest and prosecution. [MORE]