Supreme Court gives officers more protection from being sued

Last Monday the Supreme Court passed a ruling giving extra protection to police officers who are sued over the use of excessive force. In a 6-to-3 decision, the court ruled that a lawsuit against a police officer for using excessive force must be dismissed even if the officer's behavior was unreasonable under existing law, as long as a reasonable officer could have made the same mistake under the particular circumstances.\nThe decision overturned a ruling by the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit, in San Francisco, that grew out of a brief altercation at the Presidio Army base in 1994. The New York Times reported that during an appearance by Al Gore, an animal-rights activist at the front of the crowd started to unfurl a banner objecting to the possible use of an Army hospital there as a site for animal experiments. The Times reported two military police officers quickly dragged the man away and threw him into a nearby van. The man, Elliot Katz, president of a group called In Defense of Animals, sustained no injuries, but still sued one of the officers, Donald Saucier, for subjecting him to an unreasonable seizure in violation of the Fourth Amendment.\nAlthough the Supreme Court found the force Saucier used to be reasonable, Katz said he was thrown into the van head first with enough force to injure him. \n"I did not sustain any injuries, only because I managed to catch myself before my head split open on the metal partition of the van. The officer definitely wanted to see me hurt." \nFortunately for Katz, a news crew on the scene taped the officers throwing him into the van. Without the tape, Katz said, the case would not have gotten to the Ninth Circuit. And what the Supreme Court saw in the taping of the event appeared to be different from what the Court of Appeals saw.\n"This is a Supreme Court whose members apparently have worse eyesight than the juries of the lower courts," Katz said.\n"We are dealing with a Supreme Court that is too old and too conservative to protect the 1st and 4th Amendment rights of American citizens. (In passing this ruling) they are making people afraid to protest and afraid to exercise their 1st Amendment rights. The Supreme Court, in making this ruling, acted like they did with the Gore / Bush election, ignoring the wishes of America's citizens."\nKatz, who has been arrested at least 37 times for nonviolent civil disobedience acts, said never before had the cops gotten violent with him. \nAmnesty International has collected information on more than 90 cases of alleged ill-treatment, or excessive use of force resulting in ill-treatment or death, by New York City police officers dating from the late 1980s to early 1996. The allegations include people being repeatedly struck with fists, batons or other instruments, often after very minor disputes with officers on the street; deaths in police custody; and shootings in apparent violation of the New York Police Department's own very stringent guidelines. The victims include men and women, juveniles and people from a variety of social, racial and ethnic backgrounds. But according to Amnesty International's Web site, the evidence suggests the large majority of the victims of police abuses are racial minorities, particularly African-Americans and people of Latin American or Asian descent. Amnesty International found racial disparities appeared to be especially marked in cases involving deaths in custody or questionable shootings.\nAmnesty International also found that it is rare for NYPD officers to be criminally prosecuted for on-duty excessive force and even rarer for convictions to be obtained. Officers charged with serious crimes in New York City will usually elect to be tried without a jury as the chances of acquittal by a judge in a non-jury trial are thought to be greater in inner city districts. \nJanet Mongillo, public relations representative for the New Haven Police Department, said she thought that the extra protection given to officers is "a good thing." \n"The police are in a catch-22," said Mongillo. "People want to sue the police all the time. This ruling will protect officers in cases where the circumstances of the case are ambiguous and where… the force used was in fact reasonable and necessary." \nKatz disagreed. "This ruling is unfair against the people whose 4th Amendment rights have been violated who want to sue the police. There should be a trial with a jury of one's peers. It isn't fair for the policeman to be able to say 'No, I wasn't using excessive force.' The law becomes very subjective when the police are given too much discretion." \nCaptain Ralph McLian of the District of Colombia Metropolitan Police Force said that policy changes in the training and protocol of the District of Colombia's officers will be implemented within the month. He would not comment on his own opinion of the ruling, saying that talk over such matters was "strictly hush-hush."\n"We have had no lawsuits in recent years over excessive force," deputy chief Randy Williamson of the Bloomington Police Department said. "All the cases brought against us were thrown out because they were invalid. If someone said an officer used excessive force, then we investigate those incidents."\nWilliamson defined acceptable force as "enough force necessary to effect an arrest" and stated the complaints thrown out were cases in which the officer was found to have used force which was acceptable under the circumstances.