All the rest of the surrounding context of the case will matter too: precisely the laws he was accused of violating, and how sane those laws are, &c. Maybe, regardless of how they feel about QI, the fact pattern here is just messy; they're not going to put a case that boils entirely down to the legality of Facebook parodies on their docket.
And in the second case (involving retaliatory arrest): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lozman_v._City_of_Riviera_Beac...
> At oral arguments, justices expressed both sympathy for Lozman and hesitance to issue a ruling that might hinder law enforcement. Their eventual ruling in Lozman's favor was very narrow, holding that the Mt. Healthy test was appropriate "on facts like these",[1] based on the alleged "official municipal policy"[2] of retaliation and the importance of the right to petition.
If the guy in the case at hand had spent $875 thousand in suing the Ohio police I wonder if they would have taken up the case. Or perhaps you're right and the court is just loath to pick up any case touching qualified immunity. If anything I'd guess that they just don't have much sympathy for satire against law enforcement (especially when it's not immediately obvious that it's satire).
I edited in a possibility into my comment as your were posting this reply.
Honestly why does anyone think this is not wrong?
In a private context, you could probably sue, but we're talking about public emergency services here. He's literally impersonating a Police department, a wing of the Justice system.
If it was a totally clear 100% parody so that nobody would be confused, fine, but I don't get that gist.
Finally, even if it was theoretically legal, it's not like people aren't arrested for things and then let go because they were innocent. So long as the Judiciary has sufficient cause, well, people get arrested.
If this guy was truly impersonating the police force and it was not clear it was a satire, I think there was 'injustice' that he probably ought to have been slapped on the wrists and told to take it down ASAP. If it was an absolutely clear South Park parody well then maybe it's a bit more complicated.
Probably because they think they're such superior detectors of satire that they will never themselves be hookwinked, and then Just-World-Fallacy away anyone who is.
While also, of course, bragging about all the places they got into by carrying a clipboard, and what an extreme injustice it is every time someone is falsely identified as an intruder.
https://fox8.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/12/2022/10/AD65F49...
It said the department was hiring, asked minorities not to apply, and said that passing a hearing test and a short multiple choice vocabulary test guaranteed employment.
https://fox8.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/12/2016/03/3.png?w...
That seems pretty clearly parody to me.
Evidently a jury presented with the facts of the case disagrees with you since he was acquitted of all charges at trial.
Go ahead and find out yourself: make a 'parody' account of your local police office by using their logo, badge etc. and then some fun posts. Have people call 911 out of confusion. See what happens.
Even more concerning is that the protected speech was criticism of the police force itself. It begs the concerning question of whether someone can be arrested and held for 4 days for criticism of the police at all. Could the police arrest someone for a Facebook post or webpage telling people not to talk to police without a lawyer? What about accusations that the police department is corrupt?
Any charges are unlikely to stick, but spending 4 days in jail is life ruining for a lot of people. People who have jobs could be fired. Single parents may have their children sent to CPS if they can't find someone else to take care of them. People on parole could have that parole revoked.
I think it’s actually a better court for challenging QI than it’s been in decades. Replacing Breyer with KBJ and Scalia with Gorsuch moved things closer. Thomas has also come into his own. Kennedy to Kavanaugh was probably a wash. RGB to ACB maybe a small step back.
What are the practical implications then if it's indeed primarily signal to noise? Just a bunch of lawyers (and their boosters) making political plays that go nowhere but burden the system? And a bunch of police who get caught in the crosshairs while union lawyers take the brunt of the impact, while police spend years on paid leave and amplify police hiring shortages?
There aren’t different courts for lawsuits against the police. It’s not just police sitting on paid leave but innocent people languishing in jail while their case drags on and actual disputes that aren’t frivolous dragging out rather than being resolved so that the parties can move on.
The English Rule makes litigation inherently higher risk for less wealthy litigants while barely limiting more wealthy ones, and further tips the balance of the legal system to the wealthy. And it doesn’t address the need for QI.
OTOH, QI would be fairly comprehensively solved if the immunity was treated as an indemnity by the employing government rather than a simple immunity, such that, should QI be established to apply, instead of the case being dismissed before reaching the merits, it became a case where any damages would be the responsibility of the employing government agency rather than the employer, bypassing any otherwise-applicable governmental immunities. (The logic of QI is that it is unjust to hold a government employee responsible in their personal capacity for a violation of the law done in their capacity as a government agent, within a zone in which they had discretion in the job, and where there was insufficient basis for them to know that the act was a violation; there is, I think, a very good argument that this is the case but that the result should not be that all remedy is lost.)
The problem is when governmental immunities stack with personal immunity under QI and with insufficient prosecution of crimes by public officials to denial all remedy, not with QI alone. In fact, I would argue that QI is, alone, the least important of the three roots of the problem, just that it prevents the last available end-run around the more important ones.
If this sounds absurd, it is: https://eji.org/issues/qualified-immunity/
I don't even understand the point of shifting the civil liability from the police dept to a low wage employee who will not be able to afford the compensation.
My understanding is that the people at the police department thought what they did was illegal and they should be arrested for that. Turns out they were wrong. I get that the system may make it too easy for people in bad faith to get away with things. And the reason why comparing it to development is that the developer and the user's goals are usually aligned, whereas there are different incentives in place for police work, so it's harder to rely on good faith.
I'm not saying that QI doesn't need to be reviewed, just that the notion that police officers should never take into custody someone who's innocent is not realistic. It just can't work together with democracy and the rule of law. The only possibility of police officers only arresting guilty people is if they are themselves the judges.
It will be different because of QI: the reason Amazon will be legally liable is that the individual employee is legally liable in the first instance, and Amazon is jointly and severally liable for the employee’s liability (and a much more attractive litigation target, because you can’t squeeze blood from a stone but you can squeeze money from a trillion dollar corporation) because of the legal principal of respondeat superior.
A citizen suing police officers for a custodial arrest without due cause in retaliation for exercising Constitutionally-protected liberty is not a minor QI case, it is a major one; a minor QI case is something like the case that actually gave us QI, a prospective government contractor suing government officials in their personal capacity for abuse of discretion in dealing with the contract resulting in someone else winning the contract. (Pretty much all the QI cases that make the news these days are major cases, that is, ones involving law enforcement agents (often with the support, tacit or explicit, of their agency) using force, arrest, etc. against civilians, without legally sufficient cause, and often on the basis of race, gender identity, religion, or protected speech.
The allegations here are, on their face (though I’m not sure exactly what cause of action they were litigated under), a civil violation of the Ku Klux Klan Act as well as a criminal violation of Civil Rights Act of 1968. Honestly, I think the entire problem with QI would go away if it was clearly stated that charges under the “color of law” provision of the Ku Klux Klan Act, 42 USC Sec. 1983, were categorically outside of the scope of QI, and a sizable share of civil actions where that is an issue would themselves go away if the federal government enforced the criminal provisions of the Civil Rights Act of 1968, 18 USC Sec. 241, more thoroughly.)
Everything else aside, I don't know why anyone would be in a hurry to get a SCOTUS QI case. You'll get Sotomayor, Kagan, and Jackson, and if you're incredibly lucky and the stars align you might get Gorsuch (but probably not). Every other vote is a foregone conclusion. Why would you want this particular court setting QI precedent?
For the foreseeable future, the path to beating back QI is going to be legislative, and policy shifts about policing start local. Go make friends with your city council or trustees board. You might be surprised what you can get done.