November 6, 2024 • 19 mins
On this episode of Our American Stories, in this "Rule of Law" Story, James King and his lawyer Patrick Jaicomo from the Institute for Justice tell the story of an extreme case of mistaken identity that led them down a long road to achieve justice.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:10):
This is our American stories. And up next, it's time
for our Rule of Law series, where we tell stories
about what happens when the rule of law is present
or absent in our lives. And we tell these stories
because what we have here in this country, my goodness,
the rights we have, the interests that are protected from
our property rights which are very important, write down to
(00:31):
our most basic civil rights, from free speech and right
through the criminal procedure rights, the right to an attorney
and the right to a speedy trial. These are not
normal things in other places around the world. And our founders, well,
it's their work that enshrine these rights and the separation
of powers that created this great country. And that's why
(00:51):
we tell these rule of law stories. And up next
our own Monte Montgomery with a Rule of Lost story
you won't believe.
Speaker 2 (01:00):
James King was born and raised in Michigan, and that's
where a story begins. In the state's second largest city,
Grand Rapids.
Speaker 3 (01:10):
Summer of twenty fourteen, I was think twenty one years
old at the time, going to school at Grand Valley
State University. I had an internship at a place called
the Geek Group. I also had a summer job as
a low voltage technician. I got out of that job
a little bit early that day. I stopped at my
house for made some lunch, and then I walked to
my internship. It was only about six blocks away, but
(01:33):
I didn't make it there. I didn't make it all
six blocks, so I made it about four blocks and
then I was stopped by two plane clothes men who
had asked me who I was. Well, and they asked
me who I was. I perhaps being a little bit naive,
but I've always been a little bit pro social, so
I told them how I was. I said, Hey, I'm James,
what's going on? What's up? Their immediate response to me
(01:55):
telling them who I was was is that your real name?
And I said yes, that's my real name, and then
they asked if I had my wallet on me. I
kind of got a weird vibe from these guys almost immediately,
so I said no, which was not the truth. I
did have my wallet on me, but I didn't really
want to tell strangers that, so I said no. And
(02:15):
then one of the guys boxed me out, where one
guy had me step towards him and the other guy
went aroundside me. And then I was between the two
of them, and one man said, oh, that's true, then
what's in your back pocket? And I'm like, okay, I'm
pretty uncomfortable right now. And I was just like, well,
it's really none of your business. But the one guy
(02:35):
reached into my pants and took my wallet out of
out of my pocket. That was the point where I
thought that I was being mugged. The men that did
this didn't introduce themselves. I didn't know who they were
or what they were after, so I thought I was
being mugged, and I actually yelled out, are you guys
mugging me? And I and I tried to run, which
(02:56):
is where this all goes sideways in a hurry, pretty
much made about four steps and it was tackled to
the ground. At that point in time, I started screaming
and yelling for anybody that was nearby to help call
the police. I was yelling, yelling for the police over
and over again. A fight ensued for quite a while.
I was not fighting them, but I was fighting to
get away, and I was eventually just beaten, unconscious and
(03:21):
putting chokehold and blacked out. And when the when uniformed
police officer showed up, I thought that I was saved.
I thought, you know, I thought, thank god, they're here.
I'm gonna get out of this. I'm I'm gonna I
thought I was gonna die. So, you know, I was
relieved and then very surprised when they arrested me and
(03:45):
didn't arrest the people that were assaulting.
Speaker 2 (03:47):
Me, because the men who assaulted James weren't muggers.
Speaker 3 (03:52):
So this was an undercover fugitive task force, a joint
task force between a federal agent and a grand rapidity
the police detective who.
Speaker 2 (04:01):
Had caught the wrong guy.
Speaker 3 (04:10):
Having seen the person they were looking for a much
later on. I look absolutely nothing like him. They were
working off of a license photo and a like an
eight year old Facebook photo, so their information was exceedingly
bad for the job that they were trying to do.
I should probably back up and mention that instead of
saying sorry, we were wrong, we got the wrong guy,
(04:31):
we shouldn't have done that. They charged me with three felonies,
a felonious assault, fleeing and eluding, and assaulting a federal officer.
Speaker 2 (04:41):
Beaten and battered, James was taken to the hospital, still
confused about what exactly was happening.
Speaker 3 (04:52):
I went right from being beaten to being cuffed and
put in the back of an ambulance. So I don't
really I don't think I p sit together and tell
a much later when I was put in jail after
the hospital and then it was very confused for more
than a few days. I take a moment to sort
of talk of this hospital scenario because it's something that
(05:13):
I've sort of ruminated about quite a bit in the
last six and a half years. But I remember being
I was in the hospital bed and I was handcuffed
to the bed, and there was a uniformed officer there
that was in charge of just watching me, and we
had struck up a conversation and we gotten annoying to
it a little bit. He had a daughter that was
(05:34):
going to Grand Valley, same school that I went to,
and he I don't think it took him very long
to realize that the situation I was in was not
right and I didn't belong there and what happened to
me was not okay. I remember he loosened the coffs
on me and was just overall very nice to me
up until one of the Grand Best City police detective
(05:54):
his partner came into my hospital room and sort of
made cinderrogaate comments toward me and then took my notepad
that I had at the time because I knew I
knew I was in trouble. I didn't know what kind
of trouble, but so I started taking notes as best
I could to recollect everything that happened. And he took
that notebook from me, never to get that back. But
it was weird. I could feel the tension in the
(06:16):
room as that uniform police officer who was sort of,
you know, understanding that what was happening to me wasn't right.
When the other person was in the room. He wouldn't
look at me, and he wouldn't wouldn't really speak up
or speak his mind as if you know, it's sort
of like I don't know how to say it, like
almost like you're in afternity, you know, and you can't
(06:37):
speak out against one of your own. When he laughed,
that uniform officer that was in charge of watching me,
I saw him like want to look towards me and say,
I'm so sorry that this happened, and I wish you
the best. But because there was other police officers there,
he didn't, and I saw that moment of hesitation, and
I thought about it so much because in a weird way,
(06:59):
I feel bad for him for having to see his
the people he works with, to do that to people
and get away with it and be okay with it.
I can barely begin to describe the amount of stress
that I was under between the time I was charged,
put in jail, arraigned, bailed out, and then I couldn't
(07:20):
leave the state and had to wait I think six
months before the criminal trial, so that whole time, and
I was trying to go to school, was trying to
be a student, while the whole time thinking I may
go to prison for crimes I didn't commit. So that
was certainly some of the most stressful times in my
entire life. And in hindsight too, it's one of those
things where I couldn't really tell anybody about it because
it was such a bizarre thing that nobody really understood.
(07:44):
You know. I had some people that would when heard
about it, they would be like, Oh, I bet that's
not the whole story. You know, what did you really do?
That kind of thing doesn't really happen, you know, And
in some sense that's understandable because it sounds it's such
a crazy story and to have it happen to me,
and I've never met anybody else that has that happened
to him, So there's no you know, I don't have
(08:06):
any a sounding board for this, and I haven't for
six and a half years.
Speaker 2 (08:13):
Then came the criminal trial against James.
Speaker 3 (08:20):
The first day of the trial, the prosecution goes first,
so I had to sit there and listen without any
avenue of having people understand that what they're saying was
not true at all, basically referring to me as a
growling animal, like a vicious criminal, and that I spun
(08:40):
around on them and assaulted them and all these just
ludicrous statements. That it is insane to me that you
can work for the public as a police officer and
be willing to get on stand and take an oath
and lie through your teeth because you don't want to
admit that you made a mistake.
Speaker 2 (09:01):
So at the end of.
Speaker 3 (09:02):
The second day of the trial, the jury went into
deliberation and my attorney told me that he didn't know
how long it would take. It could take anywhere from
a few minutes to a few days to a few weeks.
So I went home, and I don't think I was
home for more than twenty minutes, and my attorney called
me and say, hey, get back to the courthouse right now.
And so had I actually beat my parents and my
family back to the courthouse. And then the jury's four
(09:25):
persons stood up and said, on all three counts, we
find the defendant not guilty. After all that, when I
was going to walk out of the courthouse, one of
the jurors came up to me and an older woman,
and she said, she gave me a hug and said,
I'm so sorry for what those officers put you through.
(09:45):
She said, I knew the whole time that you had
not done anything wrong.
Speaker 1 (09:50):
When we come back, more of this remarkable story here
on our American Stories, and we continue with our American
(10:10):
Stories and with James King's story. Here's James lawyer Patrick
Jacamo for the Institute for Justice with why they decided
to open up a civil case against the officers who
beat James and the astounding legal hurdles they faced.
Speaker 4 (10:27):
Pretty much from top to bottom. What these officers did
was unconstitutional. They didn't have a reasonable basis to mistake
James for the fugitive, which means that they had no
reasonable basis to stop him at all, let alone arrest
him or beat him up. Basically, the constitution requires that
officers have probable cause to arrest you for a crime,
(10:47):
and if they don't have probable cause, they're taking you
into custody is unconstitutional. And similarly, if they use excessive
force against you, even if they do have probable cause,
that's unconstitutional. Here, the police had no reasonable suspicion to
stop James in the first place, no probable cause to
arrest him, and then they exceeded whatever restrictions on forced
there might have been, even if he had been the
(11:09):
fugitive that they were looking for, when they tackled him,
choked him unconscious, and beat him severely in the head
and face.
Speaker 3 (11:15):
However, there's this wonderful and terrifying doctrine of qualified immunity
that the police get to hide behind.
Speaker 4 (11:24):
So qualified immunity is a relatively recent invention. Basically, from
the founding up until the middle of the twentieth century,
government officials were strictly liable when they violated your constitutional rights,
which means they didn't have any excuse. The point that
the courts drove home was we're here to decide the law,
and the question of law is whether this person violated
(11:47):
your constitutional rights, and if they did, we're going to
assign damages for your injury. And then if they acted
in good faith, they can ask Congress or their employer
to indemnify them by paying them back that damages owed.
But in the middle of the twentieth century, the Supreme
Court carved out its first exception, which it called qualified immunity,
and that's very different from the qualified immunity we have today.
(12:07):
But in that case, the Court basically said, if someone
acts reasonably and in good faith, which means reasonably is
any person would know that what we did was okay,
and good faith was I actually believed what was happening
was okay, then an officer is entitled a qualified immunity,
meaning you can't get any damages from them even though
(12:29):
they violated your constitutional rights. But in the nineteen eighties
the Supreme Court basically inverted that in a case called
Harlow versus Fitzgerald, and they said, you know, it's really
a lot of trouble to adjudicate these cases because we're
looking into whether someone had good faith and so instead,
what we're going to do is we're going to get
rid of the subjective requirement. Any government official, whether it's
(12:51):
state or federal, police or non police, it doesn't really matter.
If you allege that they violated your constitutional rights, they
can assert qualified immunity, and then the burden is on
you to provide a specific case where a court has
said basically exactly what those officials did is in fact
a constitutional violation. And so the way that it comes
in here is we file the civil rights lawsuit against
(13:13):
these officers and we said when they did what they
did to James, they violated his Fourth Amendment right to
be free from unreasonable searches and seizures. And the officers
just said, we get qualified immunity. And you can't find
another case that's specific enough that shows that at every
step of the way along our interaction with James, we
were violating as constitutional rights.
Speaker 2 (13:33):
Which is crazy because to prevent the police officers from
simply getting qualified immunity and your constitutional rights hearing their
day in court, you have to cite a pass case
that's almost perfectly identical to your own. And if there's
tiny inconsequential differences, such as if you were laying down
and the person in the past case was standing up
(13:54):
when you were detained. That's different enough that you can't
cite it as president the police office US get qualified immunity,
and your case in your rights get thrown out.
Speaker 4 (14:05):
The theoretical basis behind all of this was that they
didn't want government officials to be apprehensive about doing their
job because they might get sued, and they didn't want
people to act reasonably and end up being held liable
for it just because they happened to technically violate the Constitution.
(14:26):
And the main problem with that is that that is
a policy judgment that's supposed to be made by Congress,
and in fact, when Congress passed the Civil Rights Statute
in the late nineteenth century after the Civil War, it
didn't create any defense like we see today with qualified immunity.
It's very frustrating because you're kind of starting from a
weird position, right where the premise of anything like qualified
(14:49):
immunity is that the Constitution shouldn't apply unless But the
entire purpose of the Constitution is to place limits on
the government and the things that it can do, and
so it makes very little sense to say, yes, the Constitution,
which is the law that governs the people who govern us.
The Constitution says, these people can't do these things, and
(15:10):
they did these things, but we shouldn't hold them accountable
because they didn't know they shouldn't do those things. And
you just have to take a step back and realize, well,
that's not how the law works. I mean, if I
violate the law and I didn't know I was committing
a crime, that's no defense to me.
Speaker 3 (15:28):
They know that they aren't accountable. And when you're not accountable,
you are above the law. That the law is there
to hold people to account. And the way it's written
right now, the doctrines have qualified immunity. These are extra
judicial and they're immoral. So the rule of law is
completely out the window on these cases.
Speaker 2 (15:55):
But nevertheless, with the help of the Institute for Justice,
James case pushed forward.
Speaker 4 (16:04):
The way that played out in the district court, which
is the lower court here the federal trial court. The
court agreed with them and it said there's no constitutional
violations here, and the officers are entitled the qualified immunity,
So I'm gonna throw James's case out now. We appealed
that decision to the Sixth Circuit, which is the intermediate
court between the trial court and the US Supreme Court,
(16:24):
and we showed them all the cases that we'd found
and they actually reversed, which is a fairly miraculous outcome
in the issue of qualified immunity, because courts tend to
favor granting qualified immunities. The thing about qualified immunity is
it prevents the court from ever reaching the constitutional question.
They can look at the constitutional question if they want to,
(16:44):
but they don't have to. And so the frustrating thing
is that in a lot of cases involving qualified immunity,
a court will throw the case out without ever saying
whether officers violated someone's constitutional rights or not.
Speaker 2 (17:08):
Today James case sits before the Supreme Court to be
decided along six years after he was beaten on the
streets of Grand Rapids. But despite the waight, James thinks
he's lucky.
Speaker 3 (17:20):
My family was as supportive of me as they as
they possibly could have in every way I didn't come
from means most people would not be able to afford this.
And if I didn't have the Institute of Justice representing me,
and before that, Miller Johnson pro bono, I would have
not been able to fiscally pursue this litigation at all.
(17:41):
But you know, my aunt Land bought me a suit
for the trial. My parents, you know, spent My dad
took out his four toh one cake cash that was
four oh one cake for me to get me out
of jail. So yeah, they were certainly there for me,
and it was pretty tumultuous time for.
Speaker 4 (17:58):
All of us.
Speaker 3 (17:58):
Emotionally. It's it's crazy to say that I'm lucky, but
I am because I have good representation, I'm not in
jail and I wasn't killed, and those those are not
always the case for people that this has happened to.
Speaker 1 (18:14):
And what a story, and thanks so much to James
for telling it. For his lawyer, Patrick Jacamo, my goodness,
the work the folks at the Institute for Justice do,
and they help defend people's civil rights, and not just
on the criminal rights front, but on the civil rights front,
particularly in the civil courts and then the property rights front.
And my goodness, most cops are good. Most do a
(18:37):
really good and hard job. When I was in law school,
the arguments we had over qualified immunity was some of
the most difficult because when a cop goes out, we're
putting him in harm's way. We're literally throwing him into
a place where he's got to make a lot of
judgment calls. So there are good arguments for qualified immunity
and there are bad ones, but ultimately we're always trying
to make good cops better, and so many of the
(18:57):
rules of our constitution just do that because there are
rules for cops and limits, and in a lot of
other places and a lot of other times, there weren't
in a lot of other country the cops are the enemy.
Here there are our neighbors and friends. And again there
are some bad ones out there, and that's why we
have rule of law, because they have to be punished
as well. Another of our great rule of Awe stories
(19:18):
James King's story here on our American Stories
This is our American stories. And up next, it's time
for our Rule of Law series, where we tell stories
about what happens when the rule of law is present
or absent in our lives. And we tell these stories
because what we have here in this country, my goodness,
the rights we have, the interests that are protected from
our property rights which are very important, write down to
(00:31):
our most basic civil rights, from free speech and right
through the criminal procedure rights, the right to an attorney
and the right to a speedy trial. These are not
normal things in other places around the world. And our founders, well,
it's their work that enshrine these rights and the separation
of powers that created this great country. And that's why
(00:51):
we tell these rule of law stories. And up next
our own Monte Montgomery with a Rule of Lost story
you won't believe.
Speaker 2 (01:00):
James King was born and raised in Michigan, and that's
where a story begins. In the state's second largest city,
Grand Rapids.
Speaker 3 (01:10):
Summer of twenty fourteen, I was think twenty one years
old at the time, going to school at Grand Valley
State University. I had an internship at a place called
the Geek Group. I also had a summer job as
a low voltage technician. I got out of that job
a little bit early that day. I stopped at my
house for made some lunch, and then I walked to
my internship. It was only about six blocks away, but
(01:33):
I didn't make it there. I didn't make it all
six blocks, so I made it about four blocks and
then I was stopped by two plane clothes men who
had asked me who I was. Well, and they asked
me who I was. I perhaps being a little bit naive,
but I've always been a little bit pro social, so
I told them how I was. I said, Hey, I'm James,
what's going on? What's up? Their immediate response to me
(01:55):
telling them who I was was is that your real name?
And I said yes, that's my real name, and then
they asked if I had my wallet on me. I
kind of got a weird vibe from these guys almost immediately,
so I said no, which was not the truth. I
did have my wallet on me, but I didn't really
want to tell strangers that, so I said no. And
(02:15):
then one of the guys boxed me out, where one
guy had me step towards him and the other guy
went aroundside me. And then I was between the two
of them, and one man said, oh, that's true, then
what's in your back pocket? And I'm like, okay, I'm
pretty uncomfortable right now. And I was just like, well,
it's really none of your business. But the one guy
(02:35):
reached into my pants and took my wallet out of
out of my pocket. That was the point where I
thought that I was being mugged. The men that did
this didn't introduce themselves. I didn't know who they were
or what they were after, so I thought I was
being mugged, and I actually yelled out, are you guys
mugging me? And I and I tried to run, which
(02:56):
is where this all goes sideways in a hurry, pretty
much made about four steps and it was tackled to
the ground. At that point in time, I started screaming
and yelling for anybody that was nearby to help call
the police. I was yelling, yelling for the police over
and over again. A fight ensued for quite a while.
I was not fighting them, but I was fighting to
get away, and I was eventually just beaten, unconscious and
(03:21):
putting chokehold and blacked out. And when the when uniformed
police officer showed up, I thought that I was saved.
I thought, you know, I thought, thank god, they're here.
I'm gonna get out of this. I'm I'm gonna I
thought I was gonna die. So, you know, I was
relieved and then very surprised when they arrested me and
(03:45):
didn't arrest the people that were assaulting.
Speaker 2 (03:47):
Me, because the men who assaulted James weren't muggers.
Speaker 3 (03:52):
So this was an undercover fugitive task force, a joint
task force between a federal agent and a grand rapidity
the police detective who.
Speaker 2 (04:01):
Had caught the wrong guy.
Speaker 3 (04:10):
Having seen the person they were looking for a much
later on. I look absolutely nothing like him. They were
working off of a license photo and a like an
eight year old Facebook photo, so their information was exceedingly
bad for the job that they were trying to do.
I should probably back up and mention that instead of
saying sorry, we were wrong, we got the wrong guy,
(04:31):
we shouldn't have done that. They charged me with three felonies,
a felonious assault, fleeing and eluding, and assaulting a federal officer.
Speaker 2 (04:41):
Beaten and battered, James was taken to the hospital, still
confused about what exactly was happening.
Speaker 3 (04:52):
I went right from being beaten to being cuffed and
put in the back of an ambulance. So I don't
really I don't think I p sit together and tell
a much later when I was put in jail after
the hospital and then it was very confused for more
than a few days. I take a moment to sort
of talk of this hospital scenario because it's something that
(05:13):
I've sort of ruminated about quite a bit in the
last six and a half years. But I remember being
I was in the hospital bed and I was handcuffed
to the bed, and there was a uniformed officer there
that was in charge of just watching me, and we
had struck up a conversation and we gotten annoying to
it a little bit. He had a daughter that was
(05:34):
going to Grand Valley, same school that I went to,
and he I don't think it took him very long
to realize that the situation I was in was not
right and I didn't belong there and what happened to
me was not okay. I remember he loosened the coffs
on me and was just overall very nice to me
up until one of the Grand Best City police detective
(05:54):
his partner came into my hospital room and sort of
made cinderrogaate comments toward me and then took my notepad
that I had at the time because I knew I
knew I was in trouble. I didn't know what kind
of trouble, but so I started taking notes as best
I could to recollect everything that happened. And he took
that notebook from me, never to get that back. But
it was weird. I could feel the tension in the
(06:16):
room as that uniform police officer who was sort of,
you know, understanding that what was happening to me wasn't right.
When the other person was in the room. He wouldn't
look at me, and he wouldn't wouldn't really speak up
or speak his mind as if you know, it's sort
of like I don't know how to say it, like
almost like you're in afternity, you know, and you can't
(06:37):
speak out against one of your own. When he laughed,
that uniform officer that was in charge of watching me,
I saw him like want to look towards me and say,
I'm so sorry that this happened, and I wish you
the best. But because there was other police officers there,
he didn't, and I saw that moment of hesitation, and
I thought about it so much because in a weird way,
(06:59):
I feel bad for him for having to see his
the people he works with, to do that to people
and get away with it and be okay with it.
I can barely begin to describe the amount of stress
that I was under between the time I was charged,
put in jail, arraigned, bailed out, and then I couldn't
(07:20):
leave the state and had to wait I think six
months before the criminal trial, so that whole time, and
I was trying to go to school, was trying to
be a student, while the whole time thinking I may
go to prison for crimes I didn't commit. So that
was certainly some of the most stressful times in my
entire life. And in hindsight too, it's one of those
things where I couldn't really tell anybody about it because
it was such a bizarre thing that nobody really understood.
(07:44):
You know. I had some people that would when heard
about it, they would be like, Oh, I bet that's
not the whole story. You know, what did you really do?
That kind of thing doesn't really happen, you know, And
in some sense that's understandable because it sounds it's such
a crazy story and to have it happen to me,
and I've never met anybody else that has that happened
to him, So there's no you know, I don't have
(08:06):
any a sounding board for this, and I haven't for
six and a half years.
Speaker 2 (08:13):
Then came the criminal trial against James.
Speaker 3 (08:20):
The first day of the trial, the prosecution goes first,
so I had to sit there and listen without any
avenue of having people understand that what they're saying was
not true at all, basically referring to me as a
growling animal, like a vicious criminal, and that I spun
(08:40):
around on them and assaulted them and all these just
ludicrous statements. That it is insane to me that you
can work for the public as a police officer and
be willing to get on stand and take an oath
and lie through your teeth because you don't want to
admit that you made a mistake.
Speaker 2 (09:01):
So at the end of.
Speaker 3 (09:02):
The second day of the trial, the jury went into
deliberation and my attorney told me that he didn't know
how long it would take. It could take anywhere from
a few minutes to a few days to a few weeks.
So I went home, and I don't think I was
home for more than twenty minutes, and my attorney called
me and say, hey, get back to the courthouse right now.
And so had I actually beat my parents and my
family back to the courthouse. And then the jury's four
(09:25):
persons stood up and said, on all three counts, we
find the defendant not guilty. After all that, when I
was going to walk out of the courthouse, one of
the jurors came up to me and an older woman,
and she said, she gave me a hug and said,
I'm so sorry for what those officers put you through.
(09:45):
She said, I knew the whole time that you had
not done anything wrong.
Speaker 1 (09:50):
When we come back, more of this remarkable story here
on our American Stories, and we continue with our American
(10:10):
Stories and with James King's story. Here's James lawyer Patrick
Jacamo for the Institute for Justice with why they decided
to open up a civil case against the officers who
beat James and the astounding legal hurdles they faced.
Speaker 4 (10:27):
Pretty much from top to bottom. What these officers did
was unconstitutional. They didn't have a reasonable basis to mistake
James for the fugitive, which means that they had no
reasonable basis to stop him at all, let alone arrest
him or beat him up. Basically, the constitution requires that
officers have probable cause to arrest you for a crime,
(10:47):
and if they don't have probable cause, they're taking you
into custody is unconstitutional. And similarly, if they use excessive
force against you, even if they do have probable cause,
that's unconstitutional. Here, the police had no reasonable suspicion to
stop James in the first place, no probable cause to
arrest him, and then they exceeded whatever restrictions on forced
there might have been, even if he had been the
(11:09):
fugitive that they were looking for, when they tackled him,
choked him unconscious, and beat him severely in the head
and face.
Speaker 3 (11:15):
However, there's this wonderful and terrifying doctrine of qualified immunity
that the police get to hide behind.
Speaker 4 (11:24):
So qualified immunity is a relatively recent invention. Basically, from
the founding up until the middle of the twentieth century,
government officials were strictly liable when they violated your constitutional rights,
which means they didn't have any excuse. The point that
the courts drove home was we're here to decide the law,
and the question of law is whether this person violated
(11:47):
your constitutional rights, and if they did, we're going to
assign damages for your injury. And then if they acted
in good faith, they can ask Congress or their employer
to indemnify them by paying them back that damages owed.
But in the middle of the twentieth century, the Supreme
Court carved out its first exception, which it called qualified immunity,
and that's very different from the qualified immunity we have today.
(12:07):
But in that case, the Court basically said, if someone
acts reasonably and in good faith, which means reasonably is
any person would know that what we did was okay,
and good faith was I actually believed what was happening
was okay, then an officer is entitled a qualified immunity,
meaning you can't get any damages from them even though
(12:29):
they violated your constitutional rights. But in the nineteen eighties
the Supreme Court basically inverted that in a case called
Harlow versus Fitzgerald, and they said, you know, it's really
a lot of trouble to adjudicate these cases because we're
looking into whether someone had good faith and so instead,
what we're going to do is we're going to get
rid of the subjective requirement. Any government official, whether it's
(12:51):
state or federal, police or non police, it doesn't really matter.
If you allege that they violated your constitutional rights, they
can assert qualified immunity, and then the burden is on
you to provide a specific case where a court has
said basically exactly what those officials did is in fact
a constitutional violation. And so the way that it comes
in here is we file the civil rights lawsuit against
(13:13):
these officers and we said when they did what they
did to James, they violated his Fourth Amendment right to
be free from unreasonable searches and seizures. And the officers
just said, we get qualified immunity. And you can't find
another case that's specific enough that shows that at every
step of the way along our interaction with James, we
were violating as constitutional rights.
Speaker 2 (13:33):
Which is crazy because to prevent the police officers from
simply getting qualified immunity and your constitutional rights hearing their
day in court, you have to cite a pass case
that's almost perfectly identical to your own. And if there's
tiny inconsequential differences, such as if you were laying down
and the person in the past case was standing up
(13:54):
when you were detained. That's different enough that you can't
cite it as president the police office US get qualified immunity,
and your case in your rights get thrown out.
Speaker 4 (14:05):
The theoretical basis behind all of this was that they
didn't want government officials to be apprehensive about doing their
job because they might get sued, and they didn't want
people to act reasonably and end up being held liable
for it just because they happened to technically violate the Constitution.
(14:26):
And the main problem with that is that that is
a policy judgment that's supposed to be made by Congress,
and in fact, when Congress passed the Civil Rights Statute
in the late nineteenth century after the Civil War, it
didn't create any defense like we see today with qualified immunity.
It's very frustrating because you're kind of starting from a
weird position, right where the premise of anything like qualified
(14:49):
immunity is that the Constitution shouldn't apply unless But the
entire purpose of the Constitution is to place limits on
the government and the things that it can do, and
so it makes very little sense to say, yes, the Constitution,
which is the law that governs the people who govern us.
The Constitution says, these people can't do these things, and
(15:10):
they did these things, but we shouldn't hold them accountable
because they didn't know they shouldn't do those things. And
you just have to take a step back and realize, well,
that's not how the law works. I mean, if I
violate the law and I didn't know I was committing
a crime, that's no defense to me.
Speaker 3 (15:28):
They know that they aren't accountable. And when you're not accountable,
you are above the law. That the law is there
to hold people to account. And the way it's written
right now, the doctrines have qualified immunity. These are extra
judicial and they're immoral. So the rule of law is
completely out the window on these cases.
Speaker 2 (15:55):
But nevertheless, with the help of the Institute for Justice,
James case pushed forward.
Speaker 4 (16:04):
The way that played out in the district court, which
is the lower court here the federal trial court. The
court agreed with them and it said there's no constitutional
violations here, and the officers are entitled the qualified immunity,
So I'm gonna throw James's case out now. We appealed
that decision to the Sixth Circuit, which is the intermediate
court between the trial court and the US Supreme Court,
(16:24):
and we showed them all the cases that we'd found
and they actually reversed, which is a fairly miraculous outcome
in the issue of qualified immunity, because courts tend to
favor granting qualified immunities. The thing about qualified immunity is
it prevents the court from ever reaching the constitutional question.
They can look at the constitutional question if they want to,
(16:44):
but they don't have to. And so the frustrating thing
is that in a lot of cases involving qualified immunity,
a court will throw the case out without ever saying
whether officers violated someone's constitutional rights or not.
Speaker 2 (17:08):
Today James case sits before the Supreme Court to be
decided along six years after he was beaten on the
streets of Grand Rapids. But despite the waight, James thinks
he's lucky.
Speaker 3 (17:20):
My family was as supportive of me as they as
they possibly could have in every way I didn't come
from means most people would not be able to afford this.
And if I didn't have the Institute of Justice representing me,
and before that, Miller Johnson pro bono, I would have
not been able to fiscally pursue this litigation at all.
(17:41):
But you know, my aunt Land bought me a suit
for the trial. My parents, you know, spent My dad
took out his four toh one cake cash that was
four oh one cake for me to get me out
of jail. So yeah, they were certainly there for me,
and it was pretty tumultuous time for.
Speaker 4 (17:58):
All of us.
Speaker 3 (17:58):
Emotionally. It's it's crazy to say that I'm lucky, but
I am because I have good representation, I'm not in
jail and I wasn't killed, and those those are not
always the case for people that this has happened to.
Speaker 1 (18:14):
And what a story, and thanks so much to James
for telling it. For his lawyer, Patrick Jacamo, my goodness,
the work the folks at the Institute for Justice do,
and they help defend people's civil rights, and not just
on the criminal rights front, but on the civil rights front,
particularly in the civil courts and then the property rights front.
And my goodness, most cops are good. Most do a
(18:37):
really good and hard job. When I was in law school,
the arguments we had over qualified immunity was some of
the most difficult because when a cop goes out, we're
putting him in harm's way. We're literally throwing him into
a place where he's got to make a lot of
judgment calls. So there are good arguments for qualified immunity
and there are bad ones, but ultimately we're always trying
to make good cops better, and so many of the
(18:57):
rules of our constitution just do that because there are
rules for cops and limits, and in a lot of
other places and a lot of other times, there weren't
in a lot of other country the cops are the enemy.
Here there are our neighbors and friends. And again there
are some bad ones out there, and that's why we
have rule of law, because they have to be punished
as well. Another of our great rule of Awe stories
(19:18):
James King's story here on our American Stories
Host
Lee Habeeb
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