Prosecutors and police should simply not have qualified immunity. ANY type of immunity is going to be expanded and abused over time. If more police and prosecutors faced real legal jeopardy for violating the rights of people the problem would solve itself. Until then there is really zero consequences for stealing from a person pulled over on the side of the road, withholding evidence, fabricating witnesses, overcharging, or just outright murdering people.
Qualified immunity got expanded from an immunity to lawsuits over doing your job appropriately to immunity from prosecution over anything you did while holding the job.
Why do we need QI for, e.g., city clerks? Because otherwise every permit issuing decision that they make as part of their job that pisses someone off would result in a lawsuit.
Why do we need QI for police committing murder? We don't.
> Qualified immunity got expanded from an immunity to lawsuits over doing your job appropriately to immunity from prosecution over anything you did while holding the job.
No, it didn't; QI was established in a case accusing Nixon White House officials of corruptly steering government contracts, which is not “doing your job appropriately”.
And QI doesn't apply to everything, but it is a giant catch-22:
It covers anything without clearly established law on the violation of rights (usually, court precedent with very similar circumstances) at the time of the act. But, simply by its own operation, it prevents cases in which it is applied from establishing such law, because it produces dismissals before the merits are reached. (In some cases, lawsuits against the government entity could establish the violation, but their are a different set of immunities there, plus a hugh propensity for cases with even a shadow of a chance to settle without establishing precedent.)
> Why do we need QI for police committing murder? We don't.
QI doesn’t apply to criminal charges (other cops covering for cops and prosecutors not wanting to hurt their relationships with cops are the only “immunity” cops have there, but that alone is a bigger problem than QI; it does compound the problem with QI, because criminal cases are another venue not subject to QI where the clear precedent on rights could be established, if prosecutions actually occurred, and also because the resort to civil lawsuits that QI blocks is, for cops more than any other class of public officers, a workaround for the criminal justice system being loathe to act against them.)
Prosecutors actually get an even stronger version of immunity. Cops get qualified immunity (which is a stupendously easy bar to cross) but prosecutors get absolute immunity.
It's horrifying and clearly not the right way of handling the "well we don't want everybody suing the DA that prosecuted them" problem.
I think this could to some extent be resolved by explicitly not giving criminal immunity and dispensing with any immunity upon conviction (and the clock starts on conviction.) You don't get the officials buried in lawsuits and you establish a hard boundary as to when you're allowed to sue so you don't get problems with suits testing the edge.
I have no problem with some sort of good faith immunity where through some factors it was determined they were in the wrong but were operating in good faith / honest mistake. Yeah it will be vague, but I think it is required to be able to do things where ... you do get to infringe on people's rights (legally or not).
Having said that the example, there was no warrant and the sheriff had no reason to do what they did within the normal function of the job (sharing people's nudie pics...) ... that should be EASILY outside the bounds of QI
This case seems like the poster child where IQ enters he realm of of absurdity and degrades people's lack of trust in institutions. It also seems like an example where a more reasonable form of QI would thrive.
Reading the article it sounds like the problem is the previous supreme court rulings on QI.
It requires that a court had previously ruled that the specific action was a violation of constitutional rights. It had not done that on this specific action previously, but did in this case.
So they get QI here because of a lack of a previous ruling, but if the someone were to do the same thing in the future, they would not be given the benefit of the doubt.
I would personally never want any level of legal immunity. If the citizens know I can not be charged then their only recourse at best is vigilante justice or worse removing everything and everyone I love from my life.
That sounds reasonable on paper as a theory, but we do live in a universe where LEOs, prosecutors and judges have very broad legal immunities. And i can’t recall much vigilante justice hurting them. (Nor do i think it should, just stating for the record.) Definietly not happening as a kind of inevitable predicament as your description seems to imply.
How do you square your comment with that observed reality?
This means that the person with immunity simply has to keep the level of their crimes low enough that sane and rational people would not jump to vigilante justice. A bad actor could do quite a lot within those boundaries.
I think this is a travesty of justice. But this case also reinforces some lessons I've internalized:
1. Never give a law enforcement officer verbal (or certainly written!) consent to search your person or your property. Make them get a warrant. If they threaten something like "We can take you to jail or we can clear this up right here if you give us consent to search" then let them take you to jail.
2. Never volunteer information to law enforcement or answer their questions (beyond what's required by law, e.g. identifying yourself in some jurisdictions) unless your lawyer is present.
3. Never have marijuana in your car if you're driving across a border from a state where it's legal to a state where it isn't. State troopers sit at those borders and look for any excuse to pull you over because it's an easy win for them.
4. Be careful in eastern Oregon because while it's not densely populated, it's still very Red. They have to follow state law w.r.t. marijuana but that doesn't mean they won't try to find creative ways to screw you over. The most surprising thing to me about this case is that most of the malfeasance was on the Oregon side rather than the Idaho side.
Might even have a driver have something fall out of their pocket. It's basically a certainty that our cars have been driven by complete strangers whose identities we generally never know: the vast majority of auto service you give them the keys and their employees will move your car around.
These used used to apply, but you don’t even have to do this anymore. No court is going to see this type of case unless you pleed guilty, lazy DAs are the vast majority they will not prosecute cases if they won’t help them personally so just promise to drag out the case is an auto win. I beat 3 drug charges link this, doesn’t matter exactly what you say as long as you cast doubt on exact words and facts. Stonewalling isn’t as effective as just pretending to be innocent, don’t want them to think you’re a threat.
doesn't look like that's working out in CO that well, aside from some officers resigning, which is a step. I'm curious how the federal court would view any of those colorado cases if it went up to them.
How is it not working out? Seems citizens are getting some monetary damages, even if they're limited to $25k.
I don't see resigning as a bad thing (not that you're representing it that way); if you want to resign because you feel like you need/want to violate someone's rights, you shouldn't have been there to begin with.
Is a full capacity police force with a significant number of 'bad apples' better or worse than one down by half, or more, with little to no 'bad apples'?
There is a classic Dave Chapelle bit where his friend gets pulled over for driving recklessly. After being confronted he says to the cop, "I'm sorry officer, I didn't know I couldn't do that." The officer, to Dave's shock, replies, "Well now you know! Get outta here!". Then Dave's friend turns to him and says, "That was good, wasn't it? Because I did know I couldn't do that!"
To those wondering, the missing context is that Chapelle's friend is white. In the story, he's brazen in his interaction with a police officer because he doesn't get hassled by cops as a white man.
>A three-judge panel of the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ruled 2-to-1 that Grant County District Attorney Jim Carpenter’s actions amounted to “a troubling example of the intrusion on Fourth Amendment rights” against illegal searches.
>But all three judges upheld a lower court’s decision to grant Carpenter qualified immunity and dismiss the woman’s lawsuit.
This is confusing, if there was no warrant, and they violated her 4th amendment rights… how do they get QI?
The way that the modern Supreme Court (starting with its extremely conservative turn around 2005 with the replacement of O'Connor with Alito) has treated Qualified Immunity is that the constitutional violation (in this case, the violation of her 4th Amendment rights) needs to have been clearly found in previous cases in this particular circuit (or by the Supreme Court itself). These sorts of search and seizure cases hinge on things like "she signed a document allowing another agency to search her phone, but not share it with another one, and they want to search for anything that might implicate her boyfriend an officer for Brady violations" and the 9th Circuit had never found this kind of sharing without consent or warrant for searching your own officers history to be a constitutional violation. So in this case, she can't sue for damages etc. But the next case that exactly meets these parameters with no novel grounds for argument, they can be sued.
Not surprisingly, clever lawyers find a way to make something slightly novel in most every one of these cases, at least in one particular circuit, and so basically nothing of consequence happens.
This entire doctrine only exists because the Supreme Court invented it, 8-1, in the 1960's to prevent Freedom Riders from suing courts and police officers who arrested them for trying to racially integrate public places. And somehow it's gotten worse over time.
>...The way that the modern Supreme Court (starting with its extremely conservative turn around 2005 with the replacement of O'Connor with Alito) has treated Qualified Immunity is that the constitutional violation (in this case, the violation of her 4th Amendment rights) needs to have been clearly found in previous cases in this particular circuit (or by the Supreme Court itself).
The modern over-expansion of QI actually started in 1982:
>The modern test for qualified immunity was established in Harlow v. Fitzgerald (1982).
Since then, while several justices (Kennedy, Scalia, Thomas, Sotomayor ) have sometimes dissented and criticized the over expansion of QI, the overall court doesn't seem to want to touch it.
From the article, I took the court's final decision as "nobody said you couldn't, but we're saying it now, so don't get caught doing it again".
Despite the fourth amendment clearly saying they couldn't.
This is how QI cases work nowadays. The problem is that you only need a teeny tiny difference in facts for the prior situation to not count and for QI to be granted. "Oh, we've only found that shooting a kid within state borders is a violation of rights and this time the cop shot a kid across state borders so they clearly can't be expected to know that this is a violation of rights: QI granted."
The net effect is that it is remarkably difficult to sue cops who violate your rights since there is almost always going to be some minor factual thing that makes your case "unique".
Not a lawyer, but as I understand it, the original doctrine of qualified immunity was designed to shield law enforcement acting in good faith from frivolous lawsuits. But it's morphed into . . . this.
No, it was designed to shield law enforcement officers violating the Ku Klux Klan Act from legitimate lawsuits. See [1], which is the case where it started. Qualified immunity is only relevant when the lawsuit is not frivolous anyway...
Part of me wonders whether it is sincerely possible to violate someone's constitutional rights "in good faith". I feel like being a functional police officer should entail knowing the limits on your power, in the same way you're obligated to know what laws you're actually enforcing.
Which facts are complicated here? The sherif in her home town got access to her the contents of her phone under dubious reasons, gossiped about her arrest, and showed off her nude photos. Seems pretty cut and dry to me
fourth amendment prevented prosecution from unwarranted search. It did not make the search illegal. The police did something somewhat illegal and got qualified immunity for that thing.
I think it’s terrible that these unscrupulous officers are hiding behind QI when they knew what they were doing was both wrong and unconstitutional…not to mention mean. Their mothers taught them better than this.
I also think we should find a way to reform the function of QI as a protection for civil servants.
But.
This is why moral leadership matters in government, at every level. The government’s agents will always possess enough power to hurt or embarrass or kill its citizens and the truth is that no amount of fear of prosecution will fully take that away. The particular law enforcement office in this case has a massive cultural problem if it would tolerate this kind of thing in the first place. If the officers involved knew their superiors would discipline the hell out of them for engaging in this kind of behavior, it wouldn’t happen nearly as much.
But the reform there isn’t just to fix the law, it’s to fix the process of selecting and incentivizing law enforcement leadership, too. Sheriffs and prosecutors should be expected to run on a zero tolerance policy for this kind of evil and be hauled in front of city council to testify every time it happens. It’s embarrassing for a community and we should all expect better of the people we trust with our public safety.
I understand that there are recruiting challenges with LEO’s and it can be tenuous for a mayor to get too confrontational with the sheriff. Maybe we need an independent oversight board or something. But we can re-incentivize good behavior, and then expect our leaders to exhibit it.
The literal president of the US is issuing scam-crypto and the supreme court has ruled that they can take bribes.
From my perspective - honor and integrity in the government is clearly gone. The moral leadership has exited the building, and is currently getting buried in the ditch out back. There's not even enough accountability to pretend anymore.
It's going to be a long, hard road back to anything that approaches "ok", and my guess is it's going to have to happen at the extreme local level.
Yes, but I think it's pretty clear the "majority" of Americans don't consider moral leadership to be of much value, certainly not compared to the price of eggs or making sure trans people use their "God ordained bathroom".
> Under qualified immunity, government officials can be held accountable for violating someone’s rights only if a court has previously ruled that it was “clearly established” those precise actions were unconstitutional.
Who made this rule?! So a court would have to rule on each and every possible abuse of the law by a government official??
It was created out of whole cloth by the Supreme Court in 1967's Pierson v. Ray.
That case was a grim reminder of just how terrible the Supreme Court has always been: 15 Episcopal Priests were taking part in the Freedom Rides in 1961 (racially integrated groups taking public transportation across the South to defacto desegregate what had been defacto segregated, the group was 12 white priests and 3 African-American ones). Two police officers arrested all 15 priests while they were sitting in a restaurant for "breach of the peace." A judge convicted them and sentenced them each to four months in prison. They sued the police officers and the judge for false imprisonment. An all-white Jury found the police officers not liable. The Mississippi state supreme court ruled that the judge couldn't even be sued. A Federal Appeals court found the original law (the breach of the peace law) completely unconstitutional, but that the Judge couldn't be sued for upholding the law as it exists: "Mississippi law does not require police officers to predict at their peril which state laws are constitutional and which are not." The Supreme Court ruled 8-1 in favor of the Judge and against the Priests, creating the concept of Qualified Immunity.
Starting with the mid-aughts conservative turn of the Supreme Court (basically the time that O'Connor is replaced by Alito) it has grown to cover pretty much every act that law enforcement takes, with the modern standard being, basically, "your circuit needs to have found this particular violation to be unconstitutional already for it to count." The recent Supreme Court case finding that President's are immune to prosecution for "Official Acts" has a similar philosophical (though not legal) basis.
Do you honestly think, as a principled position, that police officers should be personally liable for enforcing a law which is later decided to be unconstitutional?
For example, if a police officer in 1994 arrested someone for violating the Gun Free School Zones act (struck down as unconstitutional in 1995), should they be personally liable for the damages? Should the judge who decided the case?
Similarly, if a police officer in NYC arrested someone in 2018 for violating the ban on "gravity knives" (struck down as unconstitutional in 2019), should they be personally liable?
If a police officer in Washington, DC arrested someone for violating the city's ban on handguns in 2007 (struck down by the Supreme Court in 2008), should they be personally liable?
Would it be a good thing if police officers and officials refuse to enforce Washington state's ban on "assault weapons", or Oregon's magazine capacity limit, because the "conservative turn" of the Supreme Court means that the law might get struck down as unconstitutional, and then they'd be personally liable for the damages?
I think it's clear that QI sometimes leads to bad outcomes, but honestly, I'm not sure how the system would function without some similar concept.
From what I've seen, it has to have been "clearly established" before meaning that unless there is an incident already labeling the act unconstitutional, no dice for the poor lady. It's how you make it so that as society evolves, officers can't be held accountable for new acts.
> Jessop v. City of Fresno: The Ninth Circuit granted immunity to the officers. The court noted that while “the theft” of “personal property by police officers sworn to uphold the law” may be “morally wrong,” the officers could not be sued for the theft because the Ninth Circuit had never issued a decision specifically involving the question of “whether the theft of property covered by the terms of a search warrant, and seized pursuant to that warrant, violates the Fourth Amendment.”
> Corbitt v. Vickers: ... the court went on to say that “[n]o case capable of clearly establishing the law for this case holds that a temporarily seized person—as was [the child] in this case—suffers a violation of his Fourth Amendment rights when an officer shoots at a dog—or any other object—and accidentally hits the person.”
> Kelsay v. Ernst: The majority noted that there were no prior cases involving the “particular circumstances” of this case; that is, no prior cases specifically held that “a deputy was forbidden to use a takedown maneuver to arrest a suspect who ignored the deputy’s instruction to ‘get back here’ and continued to walk away from the officer.”
> Allah v. Milling: The appellate court agreed that the prison guards violated Allah’s rights, specifically holding that this treatment was unlawful punishment because Allah’s treatment “cannot be said to be reasonably related to institutional security, and Defendants have identified no other legitimate governmental purpose justifying the placement.” Nevertheless, the court said the guards were entitled to immunity because there was no prior case concerning the particular disciplinary practice employed by the prison.
It's basically judicial Calvinball. "Oh, established case law says you can't kill an innocent person at 6:35pm, but it's not clearly established you can't kill an innocent person at 6:36pm!"
Time for a civil lawsuit. I thought sharing nude pictures against the person's will against the law. I hope she gets a nice big settlement from the people involved.
This was the civil lawsuit, resolved without ever going any further, thanks to the court created doctrine of Qualified Immunity. This is the end of all legal consequences anyone involved will ever face.
The Sheriff did lose his job when he lost the election in 2020, and presumably this played a role in that election? But that's not a legal consequence, that's a political one.
Readit News
Why do we need QI for, e.g., city clerks? Because otherwise every permit issuing decision that they make as part of their job that pisses someone off would result in a lawsuit.
Why do we need QI for police committing murder? We don't.
No, it didn't; QI was established in a case accusing Nixon White House officials of corruptly steering government contracts, which is not “doing your job appropriately”.
And QI doesn't apply to everything, but it is a giant catch-22:
It covers anything without clearly established law on the violation of rights (usually, court precedent with very similar circumstances) at the time of the act. But, simply by its own operation, it prevents cases in which it is applied from establishing such law, because it produces dismissals before the merits are reached. (In some cases, lawsuits against the government entity could establish the violation, but their are a different set of immunities there, plus a hugh propensity for cases with even a shadow of a chance to settle without establishing precedent.)
> Why do we need QI for police committing murder? We don't.
QI doesn’t apply to criminal charges (other cops covering for cops and prosecutors not wanting to hurt their relationships with cops are the only “immunity” cops have there, but that alone is a bigger problem than QI; it does compound the problem with QI, because criminal cases are another venue not subject to QI where the clear precedent on rights could be established, if prosecutions actually occurred, and also because the resort to civil lawsuits that QI blocks is, for cops more than any other class of public officers, a workaround for the criminal justice system being loathe to act against them.)
It's horrifying and clearly not the right way of handling the "well we don't want everybody suing the DA that prosecuted them" problem.
Dead Comment
Having said that the example, there was no warrant and the sheriff had no reason to do what they did within the normal function of the job (sharing people's nudie pics...) ... that should be EASILY outside the bounds of QI
This case seems like the poster child where IQ enters he realm of of absurdity and degrades people's lack of trust in institutions. It also seems like an example where a more reasonable form of QI would thrive.
It requires that a court had previously ruled that the specific action was a violation of constitutional rights. It had not done that on this specific action previously, but did in this case.
So they get QI here because of a lack of a previous ruling, but if the someone were to do the same thing in the future, they would not be given the benefit of the doubt.
How do you square your comment with that observed reality?
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1. Never give a law enforcement officer verbal (or certainly written!) consent to search your person or your property. Make them get a warrant. If they threaten something like "We can take you to jail or we can clear this up right here if you give us consent to search" then let them take you to jail.
2. Never volunteer information to law enforcement or answer their questions (beyond what's required by law, e.g. identifying yourself in some jurisdictions) unless your lawyer is present.
3. Never have marijuana in your car if you're driving across a border from a state where it's legal to a state where it isn't. State troopers sit at those borders and look for any excuse to pull you over because it's an easy win for them.
4. Be careful in eastern Oregon because while it's not densely populated, it's still very Red. They have to follow state law w.r.t. marijuana but that doesn't mean they won't try to find creative ways to screw you over. The most surprising thing to me about this case is that most of the malfeasance was on the Oregon side rather than the Idaho side.
You might get the cop that takes an hour to remove all of the seats and scratches things up, and they aren't going to help you put it back together.
Maybe you had a passenger who had something fall out of their pocket and end up between the seat cushions that you don't know about.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d-7o9xYp7eE
https://www.kxlf.com/news/national/an-inside-look-at-colorad...
Citation: cop in my family repeats those lies.
I don't see resigning as a bad thing (not that you're representing it that way); if you want to resign because you feel like you need/want to violate someone's rights, you shouldn't have been there to begin with.
Is a full capacity police force with a significant number of 'bad apples' better or worse than one down by half, or more, with little to no 'bad apples'?
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This is how QI works.
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>But all three judges upheld a lower court’s decision to grant Carpenter qualified immunity and dismiss the woman’s lawsuit.
This is confusing, if there was no warrant, and they violated her 4th amendment rights… how do they get QI?
Not surprisingly, clever lawyers find a way to make something slightly novel in most every one of these cases, at least in one particular circuit, and so basically nothing of consequence happens.
This entire doctrine only exists because the Supreme Court invented it, 8-1, in the 1960's to prevent Freedom Riders from suing courts and police officers who arrested them for trying to racially integrate public places. And somehow it's gotten worse over time.
The modern over-expansion of QI actually started in 1982:
>The modern test for qualified immunity was established in Harlow v. Fitzgerald (1982).
Since then, while several justices (Kennedy, Scalia, Thomas, Sotomayor ) have sometimes dissented and criticized the over expansion of QI, the overall court doesn't seem to want to touch it.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qualified_immunity
https://www.cato.org/policy-analysis/qualified-immunity-lega...
The net effect is that it is remarkably difficult to sue cops who violate your rights since there is almost always going to be some minor factual thing that makes your case "unique".
1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pierson_v._Ray
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I also think we should find a way to reform the function of QI as a protection for civil servants.
But.
This is why moral leadership matters in government, at every level. The government’s agents will always possess enough power to hurt or embarrass or kill its citizens and the truth is that no amount of fear of prosecution will fully take that away. The particular law enforcement office in this case has a massive cultural problem if it would tolerate this kind of thing in the first place. If the officers involved knew their superiors would discipline the hell out of them for engaging in this kind of behavior, it wouldn’t happen nearly as much.
But the reform there isn’t just to fix the law, it’s to fix the process of selecting and incentivizing law enforcement leadership, too. Sheriffs and prosecutors should be expected to run on a zero tolerance policy for this kind of evil and be hauled in front of city council to testify every time it happens. It’s embarrassing for a community and we should all expect better of the people we trust with our public safety.
I understand that there are recruiting challenges with LEO’s and it can be tenuous for a mayor to get too confrontational with the sheriff. Maybe we need an independent oversight board or something. But we can re-incentivize good behavior, and then expect our leaders to exhibit it.
From my perspective - honor and integrity in the government is clearly gone. The moral leadership has exited the building, and is currently getting buried in the ditch out back. There's not even enough accountability to pretend anymore.
It's going to be a long, hard road back to anything that approaches "ok", and my guess is it's going to have to happen at the extreme local level.
Yes, but I think it's pretty clear the "majority" of Americans don't consider moral leadership to be of much value, certainly not compared to the price of eggs or making sure trans people use their "God ordained bathroom".
Who made this rule?! So a court would have to rule on each and every possible abuse of the law by a government official??
Starting with the mid-aughts conservative turn of the Supreme Court (basically the time that O'Connor is replaced by Alito) it has grown to cover pretty much every act that law enforcement takes, with the modern standard being, basically, "your circuit needs to have found this particular violation to be unconstitutional already for it to count." The recent Supreme Court case finding that President's are immune to prosecution for "Official Acts" has a similar philosophical (though not legal) basis.
For example, if a police officer in 1994 arrested someone for violating the Gun Free School Zones act (struck down as unconstitutional in 1995), should they be personally liable for the damages? Should the judge who decided the case?
Similarly, if a police officer in NYC arrested someone in 2018 for violating the ban on "gravity knives" (struck down as unconstitutional in 2019), should they be personally liable?
If a police officer in Washington, DC arrested someone for violating the city's ban on handguns in 2007 (struck down by the Supreme Court in 2008), should they be personally liable?
Would it be a good thing if police officers and officials refuse to enforce Washington state's ban on "assault weapons", or Oregon's magazine capacity limit, because the "conservative turn" of the Supreme Court means that the law might get struck down as unconstitutional, and then they'd be personally liable for the damages?
I think it's clear that QI sometimes leads to bad outcomes, but honestly, I'm not sure how the system would function without some similar concept.
Deleted Comment
> Jessop v. City of Fresno: The Ninth Circuit granted immunity to the officers. The court noted that while “the theft” of “personal property by police officers sworn to uphold the law” may be “morally wrong,” the officers could not be sued for the theft because the Ninth Circuit had never issued a decision specifically involving the question of “whether the theft of property covered by the terms of a search warrant, and seized pursuant to that warrant, violates the Fourth Amendment.”
> Corbitt v. Vickers: ... the court went on to say that “[n]o case capable of clearly establishing the law for this case holds that a temporarily seized person—as was [the child] in this case—suffers a violation of his Fourth Amendment rights when an officer shoots at a dog—or any other object—and accidentally hits the person.”
> Kelsay v. Ernst: The majority noted that there were no prior cases involving the “particular circumstances” of this case; that is, no prior cases specifically held that “a deputy was forbidden to use a takedown maneuver to arrest a suspect who ignored the deputy’s instruction to ‘get back here’ and continued to walk away from the officer.”
> Allah v. Milling: The appellate court agreed that the prison guards violated Allah’s rights, specifically holding that this treatment was unlawful punishment because Allah’s treatment “cannot be said to be reasonably related to institutional security, and Defendants have identified no other legitimate governmental purpose justifying the placement.” Nevertheless, the court said the guards were entitled to immunity because there was no prior case concerning the particular disciplinary practice employed by the prison.
It's basically judicial Calvinball. "Oh, established case law says you can't kill an innocent person at 6:35pm, but it's not clearly established you can't kill an innocent person at 6:36pm!"
The Sheriff did lose his job when he lost the election in 2020, and presumably this played a role in that election? But that's not a legal consequence, that's a political one.