Supreme Court must take immunity away from untrustworthy cops
Today's newsletter is being led with a story about Hamdi Mohamud who was wrongfully arrested and spent almost 25 months in federal custody. Because of the doctrine of qualified immunity, Mohamud has struggled to hold a police officer accountable for what happened.
Supreme Court must take immunity away from untrustworthy cops
By The Editorial Board
Hamdi Mohamud's legal nightmare began in 2011 when she and two friends in Minnesota unwittingly stumbled into a major sex-trafficking case.
A teenage girl who was a key witness in the case allegedly tried to attack Mohamud and her friends with a knife. While the alleged victims called 911, the alleged attacker hid in a neighbor's apartment and phoned St. Paul officer Heather Weyker, who was conducting the sex-trafficking investigation.
Weyker intervened, telling the Minneapolis officer who responded to the 911 call that Mohamud and her friends had sought to “intimidate” her witness. But, according to Mohamud's legal team, “Weyker was lying.”
Weyker's witness wasn’t arrested. Mohamud and her friends were arrested on suspicion of federal witness tampering, and all three were indicted. While her friends were detained and later acquitted, Mohamud spent nearly 25 months in federal custody, more than a year of it in a federal prison far from her home, before the charges were dismissed.
“My life was never the same since the time I got arrested,” Mohamud told her Institute for Justice lawyers. “They took my life away.”
Today's Editorial Cartoon
Abortion laws: Viability standard sounds good but is arbitrary
By David Mastio
In arguments over the constitutional right to abortion in Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Organization, one idea was front and center – viability. Mississippi's law bans most abortions after 15 weeks of pregnancy, well before the court's "viability" line at 24 weeks.
The idea that when a fetus can survive outside the womb is the point at which his or her right to life outweighs a potential mother's interest in making choices about her own life has an attractive logic to it.
In last week's arguments before the Supreme Court, the lawyer for Mississippi tried to make the line seem arbitrary and disconnected from the Constitution. Lawyers for the women's health clinic and the Biden administration argued that the viability line was practical, principled and scientific.
As always with abortion, the problem is that they're both right.
'The crisis we face is real': Why Biden is hosting democracy summit
By Antony J. Blinken
Democracy is facing a moment of reckoning.
For 15 years, global freedom has declined, according to the human rights organization Freedom House. It’s happening in authoritarian countries, where rulers have restricted people’s freedoms, canceled and postponed elections, and cracked down on political opponents with increasing brutality – and in democratic countries, where mis- and disinformation have eroded trust in public institutions, political polarization has widened, and long-standing challenges like economic inequality and systemic sexism and racism have left many feeling like the system won’t ever work for them.
The COVID-19 pandemic has made these problems more acute. Unscrupulous leaders have seized the opportunity to crush freedom of assembly and crank up surveillance, and false information about the virus and vaccines has spread widely.
Other columns to read today
- Trump loyalty tests and outrageous behavior throw GOP into disarray
- Omicron is here, but we don't know how hard. We know how to respond.
- Amid COVID and delta variant, omicron has the potential to change the equation
- 'We've reached limits of sensible policy' to fight COVID-19. Now, we need cultural change.
Columns on qualified immunity
We are doing a series examining the issue of qualified immunity. For more on the series read here.
- City officials threw me in jail to silence me. Years later, I'm still seeking justice.
- Colorado took a revolutionary step to reform policing. Here's how we did it.
- Calls to reform qualified immunity are coming from left and right. I'm still skeptical.
- A bad cop sexually assaulted me. Qualified immunity protected him and his boss.
This newsletter was compiled by Jaden Amos.