HUNTSVILLE, Ala. – In the past four days, there have been three major developments in three different stories involving people who have had deadly encounters with local law enforcement.
Steve Perkins, Ray King and Matthew Norwood are three people who lost their lives because of the actions of law enforcement.
If the officers and deputies involved in each situation were to be sued, attorney Mark McDaniel says they’d be protected by qualified immunity if a judge rules they acted within the bounds of the Constitution.
“Certainly, if there’s a lawsuit, the lawyers are going to go through the training manuals and everything and go through it with a fine tooth comb to see if any rules, any regulations were violated and any kind of training manual they have,” he said. “Did they follow that training manual or not?”
He says qualified immunity is a judge-made law and varies depending on which state you’re in. For Alabama to pass laws that would limit qualified immunity, it would have to go through our state legislature.
“If they violate a person’s constitutional rights and they are not acting within the law – the constitution, the statute, the law or the ordinance – they lose qualified immunity,” McDaniel said.
That’s exactly what happened in a recent federal appeals court ruling.
In September, the court said two Huntsville police officers did not have qualified immunity during an encounter with a mechanic. The man claims he was wrongfully arrested, and the judges agreed, saying the man’s Fourth Amendment rights were violated in the encounter.
“You arrest him for not surrendering his driver’s licence. You had no right to ask him for it, then you arrest him for obstructing governmental administration because he didn’t give you his licence,” McDaniel said. “You had a right to ask his name and what he was doing, but you didn’t have a right to make him give you his licence. He wasn’t driving a car.”
As more facts of each situation come to light, only time will tell how much qualified immunity will come into play.