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+Part one is the roll of the ballot |
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+1st-the judge is an educator, two warrants |
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+A. Debate is primarily an educational setting, we represent schools in a school |
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+B. The TFA defines it's purpose as to ‘create a means of educating’, the judge is confined by the rules of the tournament thus the judge must be an educator |
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+2nd- Some form of pedagogy is inevitable in debate-participants can never be neutral. Thus debate should operate as a space for critical pedagogy- this is key to accessing identity and agency. |
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+Henry A. Giroux | The Curse of Totalitarianism and the Challenge of Critical Pedagogy Friday, 02 October 2015 00:00 By Henry A. Giroux, Truthout | News Analysis, http://www.truth-out.org/news/item/33061-the-curse-of-totalitarianism-and-the-challenge-of-critical-pedagogy |
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+Pedagogy is a moral and political practice because it offers particular versions and visions of civic life, community, the future and how we might construct representations of ourselves, others, and our physical and social environment. But it does more; it also "represents a version of our own dreams for ourselves, our children, and our communities. But such dreams are never neutral; they are always someone's dreams and to the degree that they are implicated in organizing the future for others they always have a moral and political dimension." (13) It is in this respect that any discussion of pedagogy must begin with a discussion of educational practice as a particular way in which a sense of identity, place, worth and, above all, value is informed by practices that organize knowledge and meaning. (14) Central to my argument is the assumption that politics is not only about the exercise of economic and political power, but also, as Cornelius Castoriadis points out, "has to do with political judgements and value choices," (15) indicating that questions of civic education and critical pedagogy (learning how to become a skilled citizen) are central to the struggle over political agency and democracy. In this instance, critical pedagogy emphasizes critical reflection, bridging the gap between learning and everyday life, understanding the connection between power and difficult knowledge, and extending democratic rights and identities by using the resources of history and theory. |
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+3rd – militaristic authoritarianism has concentrated power in the police state- violence has become the norm. This destroys the possibility of ethics, politics, or critical thought. The task of critical pedagogy should be primarily concerned with disrupting this- thus the roll of the ballot is to disrupt the police state. |
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+Henry A. Giroux 2 | The Curse of Totalitarianism and the Challenge of Critical Pedagogy Friday, 02 October 2015 00:00 By Henry A. Giroux, Truthout | News Analysis, http://www.truth-out.org/news/item/33061-the-curse-of-totalitarianism-and-the-challenge-of-critical-pedagogy |
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+racism has become a mark of celebrated audacity and a politics of disposability comes dangerously close to its endgame of extermination for those considered excess. Under such circumstances, it becomes frightfully clear that the conditions for totalitarianism and state violence are still with us smothering critical thought, social responsibility, the ethical imagination and politics itself. As Bill Dixon observes: The totalitarian form is still with us because the all too protean origins of totalitarianism are still with us: loneliness as the normal register of social life, the frenzied lawfulness of ideological certitude, mass poverty and mass homelessness, the routine use of terror as a political instrument, and the ever growing speeds and scales of media, economics, and warfare. (2) In the United States, the extreme right in both political parties no longer needs the comfort of a counterfeit ideology in which appeals are made to the common good, human decency and democratic values. On the contrary, power is now concentrated in the hands of relatively few people and corporations while power is global and free from the limited politics of the democratic state. In fact, the state for all intents and purposes has become the corporate state. Dominant power is now all too visible and the policies, practices and wrecking ball it has imposed on society appear to be largely unchecked. Any compromising notion of ideology has been replaced by a discourse of command and certainty backed up by the militarization of local police forces, the surveillance state and all of the resources brought to bear by a culture of fear and a punishing state aligned with the permanent war on terror. Informed judgment has given way to a corporate-controlled media apparatus that celebrates the banality of balance and the spectacle of violence, all the while reinforcing the politics and value systems of the financial elite. (3) Following Arendt, a dark cloud of political and ethical ignorance has descended on the United States creating both a crisis of memory and agency. (4) Thoughtlessness has become something that now occupies a privileged, if not celebrated, place in the political landscape and the mainstream cultural apparatuses. A new kind of infantilism and culture of ignorance now shapes daily life as agency devolves into a kind of anti-intellectual foolishness evident in the babble of banality produced by Fox News, celebrity culture, schools modeled after prisons and politicians who support creationism, argue against climate change and denounce almost any form of reason. Education is no longer viewed as a public good but a private right, just as critical thinking is devalued as a fundamental necessity for creating an engaged and socially responsible populace. Education has to be seen as more than a credential or a pathway to a job. Politics has become an extension of war, just as systemic economic uncertainty and state-sponsored violence increasingly find legitimation in the discourses of privatization and demonization, which promote anxiety, moral panics and fear, and undermine any sense of communal responsibility for the well-being of others. Too many people today learn quickly that their fate is solely a matter of individual responsibility, irrespective of wider structural forces. This is a much promoted hypercompetitive ideology with a message that surviving in a society demands reducing social relations to forms of social combat. People today are expected to inhabit a set of relations in which the only obligation is to live for one's own self-interest and to reduce the responsibilities of citizenship to the demands of a consumer culture. Yet, there is more at work here than a flight from social responsibility, if not politics itself. Also lost is the importance of those social bonds, modes of collective reasoning, public spheres and cultural apparatuses crucial to the formation of a sustainable democratic society. With the return of the Gilded Age and its dream worlds of consumption, privatization and deregulation, both democratic values and social protections are at risk. At the same time, the civic and formative cultures that make such values and protections central to democratic life are in danger of being eliminated altogether. As market mentalities and moralities tighten their grip on all aspects of society, democratic institutions and public spheres are being downsized, if not altogether disappearing. As these institutions vanish - from public schools to health-care centers - there is also a serious erosion of the discourses of community, justice, equality, public values and the common good. One consequence is a society stripped of its inspiring and energizing public spheres and the "thick mesh of mutual obligations and social responsibilities to be found in" any viable democracy. (5) This grim reality marks a failure in the power of the civic imagination, political will and open democracy. (6) It is also part of a politics that strips the social of any democratic ideals and undermines any understanding of higher education as a public good and pedagogy as an empowering practice, a practice that acts directly upon the conditions that bear down on our lives in order to change them when necessary. At a time when the public good is under attack and there seems to be a growing apathy toward the social contract, or any other civic-minded investment in public values and the larger common good, education has to be seen as more than a credential or a pathway to a job. It has to be viewed as crucial to understanding and overcoming the current crisis of agency, politics and historical memory faced by many young people today. One of the challenges facing the current generation of educators and students is the need to reclaim the role that education has historically played in developing critical literacies and civic capacities. There is a need to use education to mobilize students to be critically engaged agents, attentive to addressing important social issues and being alert to the responsibility of deepening and expanding the meaning and practices of a vibrant democracy. At the heart of such a challenge is the question of what education should accomplish in a democracy. What work do educators have to do to create the economic, political and ethical conditions necessary to endow young people with the capacities to think, question, doubt, imagine the unimaginable and defend education as essential for inspiring and energizing the people necessary for the existence of a robust democracy? In a world in which there is an increasing abandonment of egalitarian and democratic impulses, what will it take to educate young people to challenge authority and in the words of James Baldwin "rob history of its tyrannical power, and illuminate that darkness, blaze roads through that vast forest, so that we will not, in all our doing, lose sight of its purpose, which is after all, to make the world a more human dwelling place"? (7) What role might education and critical pedagogy have in a society in which the social has been individualized, emotional life collapses into the therapeutic and education is relegated to either a private affair or a kind of algorithmic mode of regulation in which everything is reduced to a desired measurable economic outcome. Feedback loops now replace politics and the concept of progress is defined through a narrow culture of metrics, measurement and efficiency. (8) In a culture drowning in a new love affair with empiricism and data, that which is not measurable withers. Lost here are the registers of compassion, care for the other, the radical imagination, a democratic vision and a passion for justice. In its place emerges what Francisco Goya, in one of his engravings, termed "The Sleep of Reason Produces Monster." Goya's title is richly suggestive, particularly about the role of education and pedagogy in compelling students to be able to recognize, as my colleague David Clark points out, "that an inattentiveness to the never-ending task of critique breeds horrors: the failures of conscience, the wars against thought, and the flirtations with irrationality that lie at the heart of the triumph of every-day aggression, the withering of political life, and the withdrawal into private obsessions." (9) Given the multiple crises that haunt the current historical conjuncture, educators need a new language for addressing the changing contexts and issues facing a world in which there is an unprecedented convergence of resources - financial, cultural, political, economic, scientific, military and technological - that are increasingly used to concentrate powerful and diverse forms of control and domination. Such a language needs to be political without being dogmatic and needs to recognize that pedagogy is always political because it is connected to the struggle over agency. In this instance, making the pedagogical more political means being vigilant about those very "moments in which identities are being produced and groups are being constituted, or objects are being created." (10) At the same time it means educators need to be attentive to those practices in which critical modes of agency and particular identities are being denied. For example, the Tucson Unified School District board not only eliminated the famed Mexican-American studies program, but also banned a number of Chicano and Native American books it deemed dangerous. The ban included Shakespeare's play The Tempest, and Pedagogy of the Oppressed by the famed Brazilian educator Paulo Freire. This act of censorship provides a particularly disturbing case of the war that is being waged in the United States against not only young people marginalized by race and class, but also against the very spaces and pedagogical practices that make critical thinking possible. Educators need to be attentive to those practices in which critical modes of agency and particular identities are being denied. Such actions suggest the need for faculty to develop forms of critical pedagogy that not only inspire and energize. They should also be able to challenge a growing number of anti-democratic practices and policies while resurrecting a radical democratic project that provides the basis for imagining a life beyond a social order immersed in inequality, degradation of the environment and the elevation of war and militarization to national ideals. Under such circumstances, education becomes more than an obsession with accountability schemes, an audit culture, market values and an unreflective immersion in the crude empiricism of a data-obsessed, market-driven society. It becomes part of a formative culture in which thoughtlessness prevails, providing the foundation for the curse of totalitarianism. At a time of increased repression, it is all the more crucial for educators to reject the notion that higher education is simply a site for training students for the workforce and that the culture of higher education is synonymous with the culture of business. At issue here is the need for educators to recognize the power of education in creating the formative cultures necessary to both challenge the various threats being mobilized against the ideas of justice and democracy while also fighting for those public spheres, ideals, values and policies that offer alternative modes of identity, thinking, social relations and politics. In both conservative and progressive discourses pedagogy is often treated simply as a set of strategies and skills to use in order to teach prespecified subject matter. In this context, pedagogy becomes synonymous with teaching as a technique or the practice of a craft-like skill. Any viable notion of critical pedagogy must grasp the limitations of this definition and its endless slavish imitations even when they are claimed as part of a radical discourse or project. In opposition to the instrumental reduction of pedagogy to a method - which has no language for relating the self to public life, social responsibility or the demands of citizenship - critical pedagogy illuminates the relationships among knowledge, authority and power. (11) Central to any viable notion of what makes pedagogy critical is, in part, the recognition that pedagogy is always a deliberate attempt on the part of educators to influence how and what knowledge and subjectivities are produced within particular sets of social relations. This approach to critical pedagogy does not reduce educational practice to the mastery of methodologies; it stresses, instead, the importance of understanding what actually happens in classrooms and other educational settings by raising questions regarding what the relationship is between learning and social change, what knowledge is of most worth, what it means to know something, and in what direction one should desire. Pedagogy is always about power because it cannot be separated from how subjectivities are formed, desires are mobilized, some experiences are legitimated and others are not or how some knowledge is considered acceptable while other forms are excluded from the curriculum. Paulo Freire believed that pedagogy was always a form of intervention in the world because it was impossible to separate the teaching of content, theories, values and stories about one's relationship to oneself, each other and the world from how one is formed ethically and politically. Consequently, he rejected the notion that education is neutral just as he embraced a notion of authority that was generous, self-reflective, professionally competent and willing to provide the conditions for students "to question, doubt, and criticize." For Freire, citizens do not develop as a consequence of technical efficiency. They also do not develop under pedagogical conditions that smother the imagination or disable the pedagogical conditions for engaging students in critical dialogue, energizing them to become socially responsible, and making clear that a pedagogy that matters has a relationship to social change. Learning to think critically about the world around them is inextricably related to thinking critically about one's own self and social formation. For Freire, the classroom and any other viable pedagogical space is one in which students come to terms with their own power, make connections to others and cultivate their own sense of agency under conditions in which they engage dangerous memories and historical context, and embrace the right to dream. Freire is quite clear about what it means to be a critical educator. He writes: I am a teacher who stands up for what is right against what is indecent, who is in favor of freedom against authoritarianism, who is a supporter of authority against freedom with no limits, and who is a defender of democracy against the dictatorship of right or left. I am a teacher who favors the permanent struggle against every form of bigotry and against the economic domination of individuals and social classes. I am a teacher who rejects the present system of capitalism, responsible for the aberration of misery in the midst of plenty. I am a teacher full of the spirit of hope, in spite of all signs to the contrary. I am a teacher who refuses the disillusionment that consumes and immobilizes. I am a teacher proud of the beauty of my teaching practice, a fragile beauty that may disappear if I do not care for the struggle and knowledge that I ought to teach. If I do not struggle for the material conditions without which my body will suffer from neglect, thus running the risk of becoming frustrated and ineffective, then I will no longer be the witness that I ought to be, no longer the tenacious fighter who may tire but who never gives up. (12) Pedagogy is a moral and political practice because it offers particular versions and visions of civic life, community, the future and how we might construct representations of ourselves, others, and |
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+And- before evaluating any ethical theory, we must end structural violence in order to include everyone in ethical decision making |
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+Winter and Leighton 99 |Deborah DuNann Winter and Dana C. Leighton. Winter|Psychologist that specializes in Social Psych, Counseling Psych, Historical and Contemporary Issues, Peace Psychology. Leighton: PhD graduate student in the Psychology Department at the University of Arkansas. Knowledgable in the fields of social psychology, peace psychology, and ustice and intergroup responses to transgressions of justice “Peace, conflict, and violence: Peace psychology in the 21st century.” Pg 4-5 ghs//VA |
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+Finally, to recognize the operation of structural violence forces us to ask questions about how and why we tolerate it, questions which often have painful answers for the privileged elite who unconsciously support it. A final question of this section is how and why we allow ourselves to be so oblivious to structural violence. Susan Opotow offers an intriguing set of answers, in her article Social Injustice. She argues that our normal perceptual cognitive processes divide people into in-groups and out-groups. Those outside our group lie outside our scope of justice. Injustice that would be instantaneously confronted if it occurred to someone we love or know is barely noticed if it occurs to strangers or those who are invisible or irrelevant. We do not seem to be able to open our minds and our hearts to everyone, so we draw conceptual lines between those who are in and out of our moral circle. Those who fall outside are morally excluded, and become either invisible, or demeaned in some way so that we do not have to acknowledge the injustice they suffer. Moral exclusion is a human failing, but Opotow argues convincingly that it is an outcome of everyday social cognition. To reduce its nefarious effects, we must be vigilant in noticing and listening to oppressed, invisible, outsiders. Inclusionary thinking can be fostered by relationships, communication, and appreciation of diversity. Like Opotow, all the authors in this section point out that structural violence is not inevitable if we become aware of its operation, and build systematic ways to mitigate its effects. Learning about structural violence may be discouraging, overwhelming, or maddening, but these papers encourage us to step beyond guilt and anger, and begin to think about how to reduce structural violence. All the authors in this section note that the same structures (such as global communication and normal social cognition) which feed structural violence, can also be used to empower citizens to reduce it. In the long run, reducing structural violence by reclaiming neighborhoods, demanding social jus- tice and living wages, providing prenatal care, alleviating sexism, and celebrating local cultures, will be our most surefooted path to building lasting peace. |
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+Part two is the plan: |
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+ The United States federal government should phase out the qualified immunity legal standard, instead applying strict liability standard to civil cases with police officers as defendants. |
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+Bernick 15 explains the plan-strict liability is the standard for every other form of processional. |
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+Evan Bernick (Assistant Director of the Center for Judicial Engagement at the Institute for Justice). “To Hold Police Accountable, Don’t Give Them Immunity.” Foundation for Economic Education. |
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+6 May 2015. https://fee.org/articles/to-hold-police-accountable-dont-give-them-immunity/ |
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+Simply put, qualified immunity has to go. It should be replaced with a rule of strict liability for bona fide constitutional violations. There are a variety of possible rules. First, police officers could be held personally liable for any rights violations. They’d need to carry personal malpractice insurance, just like lawyers, doctors, and other professionals. Insurance companies are qualified and motivated judges of risk, and they would provide another reasonable level of scrutiny on police conduct, policies, and training. Second, police departments could be held liable for any rights violations by officers and punitive damages could be assessed against individual officers for particularly outrageous conduct. Third, police departments could be required to insure officers up to a certain amount — officers would have to purchase insurance to cover any costs in excess of that amount. As ambitious as these reforms might seem, never underestimate the power of widespreadpublicoutrage. InthecaseofKelo, theCourt’s cavalier treatmentofpropertyrightsled to a number of laws protecting citizens from eminent domain abuse in states across the country. Here, too, the public can force legislators to respond. The question of how to ensure that officers exercise the authority delegated to them with the proper vigor, while also keeping them within the limits of that authority, should be left in the first instance to elected officials — subject to constitutional limits and the requirements of valid federal laws (like Section 1983). Qualified immunity enables officers to flout those limits and those laws. We must replace the judicially invented impunity that police officers currently enjoy with a realistic avenue for the vindication of constitutional rights. |
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+The plan isn’t extra t- I am specifying how I limit qualified immunity. Once you change a legal doctrine, something has to replace it. Thus it is a necessary to describe what doctrine replaces QI |
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+And, limit is defined as “a restriction on the size or amount of something permissible or possible” by Oxford (https://en.oxforddictionaries.com/definition/limit) By eliminating qualified immunity I am restricting it |
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+Part 3 is method |
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+Armed or political resistance strategies fail-bottom up individual acts of people directly checking government abuses is key to any hope of improvement. The aff allows individuals to hold officers accountable without appeals to the state |
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+Whitehead, Rutherford institute We Are the Government: Tactics for Taking Down the Police State 193 46 61 By John W. Whitehead August 18, 2015 https://www.rutherford.org/publications_resources/john_whiteheads_commentary/we_are_the_government_tactics_for_taking_down_the_police_state |
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+Saddled with a corporate media that marches in lockstep with the government, elected officials who dance to the tune of their corporate benefactors, and a court system that serves to maintain order rather than mete out justice, Americans often feel as if they have no voice, no authority and no recourse when it comes to holding government officials accountable and combatting rampant corruption and injustice. We’re impotent in the face of SWAT teams that break down doors and leave toddlers scarred for life. We’re helpless to prevent police shootings that leave unarmed citizens dead for no other reason than the police officer involved felt “threatened.” We shrug dismissively over the plight of fellow citizens who have their heads cracked, their bodies broken and their rights violated for failing to jump to attention when a police officer issues an order. And we fail to care about the thousands of individuals who have been punished with extreme sentences for nonviolent offenses and are forced to spend their lives as modern-day slaves in bondage to private prisons and the profit-driven corporations they serve. Make no mistake about it: virtually anything and everything is a crime nowadays (feeding the birds, growing vegetables in your front yard, etc.) to such an extent that if a prosecutor, police officer and judge were so inclined, you could be locked up for any inane reason. This is tyranny dressed up in the official garb of the police state. It is the self-righteous, heavy-handed arm of the law being used as a decoy to divert your attention to the so-called criminals in your midst (the fisherman who threw back small fish into the ocean, the mother who let her child walk to the playground alone, the pastor holding Bible studies in his backyard) so that you don’t focus on the criminal behavior being perpetrated by the government (bribery, cronyism, electoral fraud, slush funds, graft, pork, theft, and on and on). In the face of such abject injustice, outright corruption and overt inequality, it’s hard to feel empowered to believe the average citizen can make a difference. It’s hard to persuade anyone to stand against tyranny when all you can promise them as a reward is persecution, prosecution and a one-way trip to the morgue. And when the outcome seems to be a foregone conclusion—the government always wins—it can seem pointless, even foolhardy, to dare to challenge the system. As such, it’s far easier to buy into the political process, even though elections amount to nothing of consequence. There are also those who subscribe to the notion that an armed revolution is the only thing that will save America. These armed resistors are making themselves easy targets and will be the first to be taken down by militarized police who are trained to kill and armed to the teeth with every kind of weapon imaginable, from grenade launchers and sniper rifles to armored vehicles and Black Hawk helicopters. So how do you not only push back against the police state’s bureaucracy, corruption and cruelty but also launch a counterrevolution aimed at reclaiming control over the government using nonviolent means? You start by changing the rules and engaging in some (nonviolent) guerilla tactics. Employ militant nonviolent resistance and civil disobedience, which Martin Luther King Jr. used to great effect through the use of sit-ins, boycotts and marches. Take part in grassroots activism, which takes a trickle-up approach to governmental reform by implementing change at the local level (in other words, think nationally, but act locally). And then, while you’re at it, nullify everything the government does that is illegitimate, egregious or blatantly unconstitutional. Various cities and states have been using this historic doctrine with mixed results on issues as wide ranging as gun control and healthcare to “claim freedom from federal laws they find onerous or wrongheaded.” Where nullification can be particularly powerful, however, is in the hands of the juror. As law professor Ilya Somin explains, jury nullification is the practice by which a jury refuses to convict someone accused of a crime if they believe the “law in question is unjust or the punishment is excessive.” According to former federal prosecutor Paul Butler, the doctrine of jury nullification is “premised on the idea that ordinary citizens, not government officials, should have the final say as to whether a person should be punished.” Imagine that: a world where the citizenry—not the government or its corporate controllers—actually calls the shots and determines what is just. In a world of “rampant overcriminalization,” where the average citizen unknowingly breaks three laws a day, jury nullification acts as “a check on runaway authoritarian criminalization and the increasing network of confusing laws that are passed with neither the approval nor oftentimes even the knowledge of the citizenry.” Indeed, Butler believes so strongly in the power of nullification to balance the scales between the power of the prosecutor and the power of the people that he advises: If you are ever on a jury in a marijuana case, I recommend that you vote “not guilty” — even if you think the defendant actually smoked pot, or sold it to another consenting adult. As a juror, you have this power under the Bill of Rights; if you exercise it, you become part of a proud tradition of American jurors who helped make our laws fairer. In other words, it’s “we the people” who can and should be determining what laws are just, what activities are criminal and who can be jailed for what crimes. Not only should the punishment fit the crime, but the laws of the land should also reflect the concerns of the citizenry as opposed to the profit-driven priorities of Corporate America. Unfortunately, for thousands of Americans who are serving life sentences for nonviolent crimes as a result of harsh mandatory sentencing laws passed by “tough on crime” politicians, the punishment rarely fits the crime. As I point out in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People, with every ill inflicted upon us by the American police state, from overcriminalization and surveillance to militarized police and private prisons, it’s money that drives the police state. And there is a lot of money to be made from criminalizing nonviolent activities and jailing Americans for nonviolent offenses. This is where the power of jury nullification is so critical: to reject inane laws and extreme sentences and counteract the edicts of a profit-driven governmental elite that sees nothing wrong with jailing someone for a lifetime for a relatively insignificant crime. Of course, the powers-that-be don’t want the citizenry to know that it has any power at all. They would prefer that we remain clueless about the government’s many illicit activities, ignorant about our constitutional rights, and powerless to bring about any real change. Indeed, so determined are they to keep us in the dark about the powers vested in “we the people” that the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in 1895 that jurors had no right during trials to be told about nullification. Moreover, anyone daring to educate a jury about nullification runs the risk of prosecution. Just recently, for example, 56-year-old Mark Iannicelli was charged with seven counts of jury tampering for handing out jury nullification fliers outside a Denver courtroom. Now Iannicelli is not being accused of advocating for or against any case in progress, nor is he charged with targeting any particular members of the jury. Nevertheless, Iannicelli could be sentenced to one to three years in prison because he dared to educate the jurors about an option that no judge or prosecutor ever mentions in court: the right to acquit someone who may be guilty if they also believe that the law is unjust. Such intimidation tactics proved less successful when used against Julian Heicklen, who was accused of jury tampering for handing out nullifications pamphlets in Manhattan. A federal district court judge found Heicklen not only innocent of the charge of jury tampering, but went so far as to warn that the law—18 U.S.C. § 1504—raises significant First Amendment concerns (“the First Amendment squarely protects speech concerning judicial proceedings and public debate regarding the functioning of the judicial system, so long as that speech does not interfere with the fair and impartial administration of justice”). Jury nullification has played a significant role in our nation’s history. It was championed early on by John Hancock and John Adams and relied on at various points since then to push back against laws deemed egregious, unjust or simply out of step with the times. Most recently, jury nullification has become a popular tactic to thwart laws that mandate harsh punishments for those convicted of possessing even minimal amounts of marijuana. For instance, in one case I worked on years ago, a jury refused to convict a 54-year-old man who had been charged with possession of marijuana. Prosecutors claimed that a SWAT team, doing an area-wide land and air sweep, had spotted two marijuana plants growing in the hollow of a dead tree on the man’s 39-acre property. Had the man been found guilty, he would have been sentenced to jail and his 90-year-old mother, blind, deaf and dependent on him for care, would have had to be institutionalized. In delivering his closing arguments, the prosecutor warned the jury that disagreement with the laws against pot possession and disapproval of police tactics are not valid reasons to nullify a case. Of course, those are exactly the reasons why more Americans should opt for nullification. In an age in which government officials accused of wrongdoing—police officers, elected officials, etc.—are treated with general leniency, while the average citizen is prosecuted to the full extent of the law, jury nullification is a powerful reminder that, as the Constitution tells us, “we the people” are the government. For too long we’ve allowed our so-called “representatives” to call the shots. Now it’s time to restore the citizenry to their rightful place in the republic: as the masters, not the servants. Jury nullification is one way of doing so. The reality with which we must contend is that justice in America is reserved for those who can afford to buy their way out of jail. For the rest of us who are dependent on the “fairness” of the system, there exists a multitude of ways in which justice can and does go wrong every day. Police misconduct. Prosecutorial misconduct. Judicial bias. Inadequate defense. Prosecutors who care more about winning a case than seeking justice. Judges who care more about what is legal than what is just. Jurors who know nothing of the law and are left to deliberate in the dark about life-and-death decisions. And an overwhelming body of laws, statutes and ordinances that render the average American a criminal, no matter how law-abiding they might think themselves. As I’ve said before, when you go into a courtroom, you’re going up against three adversaries who more often than not are operating off the same playbook: the police, the prosecutor and |
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+Part 4 is case |
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+Advantage one is accountability- the aff plan is key to holding officers personally liable for misconduct. This checks back against authoritarianism by insisting that we the people still matter. |
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+1st- due to QI individual police cannot be held responsible. This allows officers to escape justice. |
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+Robert Hennelly, May 13, 2015, Slate, Poisonous Cops, Total Immunity: Why an epidemic of police abuse is actually going unpunished, http://www.salon.com/2015/05/13/poisonous_cops_total_immunity_why_an_epidemic_of_police_abuse_is_actually_going_unpunished/ |
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+No matter how big the settlement might be, Schwartz notes that police officers enjoy a qualified immunity that shields them from personal liability for whatever actions they take while on the job. Schwartz asked 70 of the nation’s largest police departments to submit the total amount they paid out to settle police misconduct cases from 2006 to 2011. Forty-four of the 70 agencies responded. All told, they paid out $730 million to settle 9,225 civil rights suits. Yet in just one half of one percent of those settlements were officers required to pay anything. |
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+2nd- QI has made it effectively impossible to sue police for misconduct, creating a police state. The only way to stop the creation of militaristic authoritarianism is via the plan. |
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+Norm Pattis, attormey, Qualified Immunity and the Police State, http://www.pattisblog.com/index.php?article=Qualified_Immunity_And_The_Police_State_2675 |
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+I get many calls each week from people who believe they have been abused by the police. That is because for many years I was at the forefront of police misconduct litigation. But these days I rarely file a complaint against police officers. It is not that I have become a police groupie. Rather, I've read the handwriting on the wall. In the past decade, there has been a silent coup d' etat. Our courts have transformed themselves into the guardians of a police state in a stunning, and largely unnoticed, act of judicial activism. Their primary tool was a tricky legal doctrine known as qualified immunity. This coup has gone unnoticed by the general public. Even academics seem blind to its import. Practitioners know better. Consider the following fact pattern: A man calls to complain that his son was brutalized by local law enforcement officers. He was hit with fists, kicked and subjected to high-voltage shock by a police officer using a Taser. The man is angry. How could police do this? I ask what crime the boy was charged with. The man seems surprised by the question. How had I known his son had been arrested? I know the boy must have been charged with interfering with a police officer, a charge that makes it a misdemeanor to obstruct, hinder or delay an officer in the performance of his lawful duty. Just what does this mean? The statute is so broad that almost anything other a supine bending of the knee is a crime. Police routinely charge the crime when force is used to take a person into custody. It is the first line of defense against a charge of unreasonable force: We needed to use force against resistance. The boy's father did not want to hear a word of it. How can a boy in handcuffs resist arrest?, he asks with scorn. I tell him about cases I have seen. Young men in handcuffs who kicked out windows of police cruisers, in one case kicking so hard as to dislodge a car door from its joints. I try to explain that the law permits the police to use reasonable force to overcome a person's resistance. There are many judges who would conclude that the use of a Taser is justified against a person wildly kicking while cuffed. Bringing a civil action against the police carries with it a substantial risk that the case will be thrown out by a judge granting the police officers qualified immunity. By now the caller has transferred his anger against the police to me. The police were wrong, he tells me. The case is a slam dunk, he insists. I tell him to take the slam dunk elsewhere. There is no such thing in the world of police misconduct. The call ends with the man no doubt wondering whether I am defending police officers. I hate fielding such calls. We boast about the rule of law, saying that no one is beyond the law's reach. That's not quite true. The law recognizes broad immunities. If life is a board game, the rule of law defines what pieces on the board can do to one another. An immunity removes a piece from the board, placing it beyond the reach of the law. Thus, a lawmaker trashing a person on the floor of a legislative chamber is absolutely immune from a suit for defamation. We say the lawmaker is immune by operation of law: In other words, any person who knows the law knows that the lawmaker cannot be sued. A qualified immunity is one that a judge is free to impose or not, depending on the facts presented to the judge. In the context of police misconduct litigation, judges are free to grant a police officer immunity from suit if the officer's conduct does not violate clearly established law or if reasonable police officers could disagree about whether the alleged conduct violated the law. Translated into lay terms, police officers are given the benefit of the doubt in close cases. But judges, not juries, make this call. That's the coup. Qualified immunity is a prime example of judicial activism, yet no one on the right seems very concerned when judicial activism narrows the rights of ordinary Americans. Fifteen years ago, the courts rarely granted qualified immunity to police officers; now it happens with a regularity that makes it pointless to file suit against police officers in all but the most egregious cases. In other words, a powerful legal doctrine created by judges has declared broader and broader ranges of police conduct beyond the reach of the law. Police misconduct cases rarely it to juries any longer. Judges, not the people, decide what is reasonable for police to do. The judiciary is self-satisfied about this, and why not? Throwing a case out of court is a whole lot less trouble than going to trial. But it comes at a cost. The cost is a police state. Officers are free to act with impunity, their conduct beyond the review of ordinary citizens so long as it satisfies the jaundiced eye of a judiciary free to decided without real review what is and is not reasonable. I read these judicial decisions and although I do not weep, I heed what they teach. There is little point in filing a suit that will simply be tossed from court. I send most callers away these days. There are a lot of angry people out there who aren't getting justice in the courts. I suppose when there are enough of them out there someone will listen. But the listeners aren't on the bench; the nation's judges have become accomplices in a police state; most of them don't even realize it. |
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+AND- Criminal law can’t hold police accountable; civil suits are key- its try of die for the affirmative if we ever want change. Criminal suits reinforce state power as they allow the government to control the rules of the game. It also is key to restoring justice to the injured |
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+Geller and Toch William A. Geller, JD, (Director of Geller and Associates) and Hans Toch (professor of psychology in the School of Criminal Justice at the University of Albany). “Police Violence: Understanding and Controlling Police Abuse of Force.” Yale University Press, Nov 12, 1959. Google Books. |
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+The main objective of a criminal case is to adjudicate guilt and express societal condemnation of morally culpable individuals.. Criminal law can punish and, in some instances, deter police brutality, but it cannot of itself force fundamental change in how a department is run, supervised, led, and made accountable. Criminal law’s most appropriate application, therefore, is against “bad apples”-individual officers who have committed sanctionable acts. By contrast, the civil law, because of its greater flexibility and scope, has the potential to serve as the instrument of systemic reform. In adjusting rights and settling wrongs, civil remedies generally offer distinct advantages over criminal sanctions. First, a victim of police misconduct can sue on his or her own behalf and need not await the government’s decision to go forward. Second, an injured party need not overcome the heightened procedural protections afforded the criminally accused. For example, a plaintiff can prevail under a preponderance of evidence standard rather than proof beyond a reasonable doubt. Third, although the civil law, like the criminal law, can punish via its potential for imposition of punitive damages, the civil law provides compensation to victims who have been harmed by police misconduct. Recompense is beneficial in itself, and damage awards can spur reform if the costs of misbehavior are high. Fourth, civil lawsuits permit broad discovery of information and may provide a means to uncover police misbehavior and stir public reaction. Finally, the civil law offers various possibilities for framing relief which go beyond punishment or compensation and include remediation. That is, the civil law offers equitable relief, via court injunction and specific orders, that can force a deficient department not only to pay for harm caused but to reform so that the harm is not likely repeated. |
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+ |
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+Advantage two is deterrence-qualified immunity is key to the violent actions of the police- they have no incentive to stop abuses. Police abuse functions as the enforcer of state violence- we have to check this |
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+1st- Qualified immunity means the police are never deterred from bad conduct |
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+ |
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+The Internationalist, Summer 2015, Killer Cops, White Supremacists: Racist Terror Talks Strike Black America, http://www.internationalist.org/killercopswstalkblackamerica1507.html DOA: 10-2-16 |
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+One is called qualified immunity, and it is a protection for government officials, such that even if they have violated a plaintiff’s constitutional rights, they will be immune from liability if that right was not clearly established. The way that the Supreme Court has instructed lower courts to assess that question is to look at other published decisions by the Supreme Court or other courts, and to look to see whether the constitutional violation in question has previously been declared unlawful. And if it hasn’t, the officer will be immune from suit. This is a protection that is a very strong one. The Supreme Court has said that the qualified immunity standard protects “all but the plainly incompetent, or those who knowingly violate the law.” It’s a very strong protection. It’s premised on the notion that if you expose police officers and other government officials to liability, it will over-deter them. People won’t apply to become police officers, or when they’re on the street they won’t vigorously enforce the law. But if officers are not subject to financial liability, or if judgments and settlements against them are indemnified by their employers, then there is not that kind of financial pressure that’s assumed by the court in that qualified immunity doctrine. So that’s one area of the law. |
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+2nd- Studies show officers are never held financially liable in the status quo-liability is shifted to the police department, incentivizing future abuses. The aff is absolutely key to stop this. |
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+Joanna Schwartz (Law Professor at UCLA); interview with Paul Rosenberg (California-based writer/activist, senior editor for Random Lengths News, and a columnist for Al Jazeera English). “We must make the police pay: When cops go too far, they must feel the pain too.” Salon. 9 May 2015. http://www.salon.com/2015/05/09/we_must_make_the_police_pay_when_cops_go_too_far_they_must_feel_t |
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+So, what was the scope of your investigation in terms of timeframe and the jurisdictions you looked at? I began this project in 2012, and sent out public records requests to the 70 largest law enforcement agencies, including both municipal agencies and county and state agencies. My public records request essentially asked for information about the amounts spent, in civil rights claims, over six years—from 2006 to 2011—and the frequency with which punitive damage judgments were awarded, and any instances in which officers were required to personally pay, in part, any of those awards. There was, as you might imagine, a lot of runaround with a lot of jurisdictions to get the information. I would say 80 percent of jurisdictions to 20 percent of my time, and the final 20 percent of the jurisdictions took 80 percent of my time. Sometime in about 2013, after about a year and a half, or almost two years, I tracked down information from 44 of those 70 departments, and then I presented the paper at Berkeley, at Boalt Law School, and someone asked a very good question: they said, “These are the 70 largest agencies. How do you know what happens is smaller agencies?” That was a very good question, because there are 18,000 law enforcement agencies across the country, and many of those are very small, so I decided to then submit public records requests to a randomly selected group of 70 smaller law enforcement agencies, and got responses from 37 of those 70. So that is how I got the 81. The results you found were sort of what I expected, only more so, I would say personally, but I don’t know about the general public. And certainly it didn’t match the expectations out there in the legal literature. So what did you find? I found that indemnification of officers is virtually certain and universal. During the six year period across the 81 jurisdictions, there were over 9,200 civil rights cases in which plaintiffs received payments. The total awarded was over $730 million, but there were just 37 to 39 cases in which officers contributed something. When they contributed, it was a rather small amount. The median payment was just over $2,000 by officers per case. And those could be cases where there were five- or six-figure settlements for the plaintiffs in most cases. So the officers really contributed, when they contributed—which was very infrequent—they contributed a rather small amount. No officer paid more than $25,000 in any case. The next-highest amount was $16,500, and the next amount was $12,000. And most of the amounts in most cases were far smaller. So, as you said, it was sort of what I imagined, but more. Those findings amazed me, but what I found particularly amazing was jurisdictions indemnified officers for punitive damages. Punitive damages are awarded in cases in which officers are found by a jury to have engaged in reckless conduct, intentional misconduct; and punitive damages are intended not compensate victims, but to punish wrongdoers. I found 20 cases in that six-year period, in those 81 jurisdictions, in which a jury had awarded punitive damages against one or more defendants, and the jurors awarded over $9.3 million in punitive damages in those 20 cases. In many instances those awards were reduced by the courts, often based on argument by defense counsel that the punitive damages awarded would be a financial hardship for the individual officer–but not one officer paid a nickel toward any of those punitive damages. They were either indemnified, paid by the cities and counties that employed them, or the cities and counties entered into some post-trial settlement that waived the punitive damages judgment, and essentially the city paid the entirety of the settlement—which was a settlement in the shadow of the punitive damages judgment. The other thing that I suppose really shocked me, there has been an assumption, even with people who believe that officers are usually indemnified, there’s usually some sort of caveat, that of course officers wouldn’t be indemnified if they were fired, if they were criminally prosecuted, if they were criminally convicted. What I found during my study was that in multiple instances in which officers were terminated, when they were indicted, when they were criminally prosecuted, even when they went to prison, they did not suffer these financial consequences of the suits. They were nonetheless indemnified. |
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+3rd- Qualified immunity undermines judicial checks on police authority-prevents even the smallest checks on police power-ending it is key to addressing broader problems with the police. |
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+Evan Bernick (Assistant Director of the Center for Judicial Engagement at the Institute for Justice). “To Hold Police Accountable, Don’t Give Them Immunity.” Foundation for Economic Education. 6 May 2015. https://fee.org/articles/to-hold-police-accountable-dont-give-them-immunity/ |
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+from the police. So much for “every person” “shall be liable.” Qualified immunity shields police misconduct not only from liability but also from meaningful judicial scrutiny. Private lawsuits are an essential tool in uncovering the truth about police misconduct. The discovery process can yield information that makes broader policy changes within police departments possible. At trial, judicial engagement — an impartial, evidence-based determination of the constitutionality of the officer’s actions — can take place. Qualified immunity can cut this search for truth short. If qualified immunity is raised as a defense before trial and the judge denies it, that decision is immediately appealable. If it is granted, discovery stops, and there is no trial on the merits. |
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+ |
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+Advantage three is spillover-ending qualified immunity signals a broader move away from the authoritarian state. |
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+1st- If QI is lost by police, there is no rationale to extend it to other government officials – police were the first ones to get it |
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+Andrew Weis, 2014, J.D. Candidate, 2014, Georgia State University College of Law, Georgia State University Law Review, Qualified Immunity for “Private” ;$ 1983 defendants after Filarsky v. Delia, p. 1047 |
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+ |
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+The doctrine of qualified immunity represents further importation of traditional tort immunities as § 1983 defenses stemming from the conclusion that Congress would not have abrogated these immunities without doing so expressly. n46 The doctrine emerged in the Court's 1967 decision of Pierson v Ray. n47 In Pierson, police officers who made arrests under a statute later held unconstitutional argued that they should not be held liable if they acted in good faith and with probable cause. n48 The Court agreed because police officers enjoyed such a defense at common law, and § 1983 "should be read against the background of tort liability." n49 Under Pierson, the police defendants established qualified immunity (as they would defend under the common law) by satisfying a two-part test that required good faith and probable cause. n50 The Court later extended this qualified immunity test to all government officials and employees. n51 In determining the availability of qualified immunity to private § 1983 defendants, the Court employs a two-part test that looks to historical and policy bases for immunity. The Court's first two decisions addressing private party qualified immunity were narrow decisions denying immunity to the private defendant. As a result, lower courts lacked guidance as to when a private defendant could assert qualified immunity, if ever. The Court's decision in Filarsky brings much needed clarity in this regard. Filarsky offers a broad rule in favor of immunity for those private party § 1983 defendants working for the government, and helps define the reach of the Court's earlier decisions. |
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+2nd- Civil liability is the best starting point for challenging police misconduct more broadly |
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+Lindsey De Stefan (J.D. Candidate, 2017, Seton Hall University School of Law). “ “No Man Is Above the Law and No Man Is Below It:” How Qualified Immunity Reform Could Create Accountability and Curb Widespread Police Misconduct” (2016). Law School Student Scholarship. Paper 850. http://scholarship.shu.edu/student_scholarship/850 |
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+In recent months, it has been impossible to ignore the overwhelming presence of police violence in the media.1 Hardly a month has gone by without headlines asserting use of excessive force, brutality, or other misconduct in some corner of the United States. 2 It seems that no region of the nation has been unaffected by the violence, with civilian deaths at the hands of law enforcement cropping up from San Francisco3 to New York City4 to South Carolina, 5 and almost everywhere in between. And with public confidence in law enforcement at a twenty-two year low—with only 52 percent of U.S. citizens asserting that they have considerable confidence in law enforcement6— the nation has clearly taken notice.7 Naturally, these violent incidents raise important questions for many Americans, regardless of locale or the type of community in which they reside. Why is this happening? And how can we stop it? Unsurprisingly, extensive media commentary has ultimately invited a myriad of proposed answers to these inquiries and has even generated some potential solutions. Some point to a lack of education and opine that officers need more comprehensive training to teach them how to “defuse the sorts of deadly racially charged confrontations” that have recently been highlighted in numerous communities throughout the country.8 Others suggest that allowing citizens to record police would create officer accountability, serve as a disciplinary basis for abusive behavior, encourage the use of justified policing tactics, and generally deter misconduct.9 Others still suggest that police culture is to blame since rookies shape their attitudes about the use of force based on the words and actions of fellow officers, 10 and because the warrior mentality of policing fosters an “us” versus “them” relationship between law enforcement and citizens.11 In fact, a few experts have even suggested that there has not been a wave of police violence, but that mainstream media is merely covering brutality more frequently and comprehensively. 12 Irrespective of whether there has been an increase in the incidence of brutality or whether the nation is merely recognizing what has been an ongoing reality for many U.S. citizens, the existence of a problem is now inescapably obvious. The solution, however, is decidedly less clear. Perhaps none of the aforementioned proposals are the right answer. Alternatively, and more likely, maybe they are all the answer—at least partially and in combination with a number of other considerations. It is improbable that a single factor can be deemed the sole cause of widespread police misconduct. Of course, an elaborate problem with multiple dimensions will require an equally multifaceted solution. In fact, any adequate resolution will likely require the cooperation of many individuals and entities across various disciplines and industries.13 But no matter how winding, every path to change must begin with a single step. And the most logical place to begin is by reforming the stringent protection from civil liability enjoyed by law enforcement officers alleged to have violated individual constitutional rights. This Comment will explore how judicial amendment of the qualified immunity doctrine— specifically as it is applied to law enforcement officers—could serve as a catalyst to begin to rein in police misconduct. Part II will describe the general history of the most significant statutory provision in this context, Section 1983, and the expansion of constitutional torts that occurred in the mid-twentieth century. Part III focuses on the judicial development of qualified immunity in the Supreme Court and explains the status of the doctrine today. Part IV discusses some of the most significant practical problems with the modern qualified immunity jurisprudence and its application. Part V goes on to analyze the recent spotlight on police use of force. Finally, Part VI proposes that judicial amendment of qualified immunity application will serve as an effective first step in decreasing the overall incidence of police misconduct in the United States. |
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+Part five is the underview |