US Supreme Courtroom decide ‘usually dominated for police’ in pressure instances | US & Canada

Amy Coney Barrett, as an appellate judge, has often been on the police side in cases of excessive violence, according to a Reuters analysis.

In her three years as a federal appeals judge, US Supreme Court nominee Amy Coney Barrett has consistently sided with the police or prison guards who are alleged to have used excessive force.

Barrett, Republican President Donald Trump’s third Supreme Court candidate, has written or served on three-judge panels that have ruled in 11 out of 12 cases in favor of law enforcement charges in violation of law To have used the law of excessive force is the US Constitution.

The Republican-controlled Senate is expected to vote to confirm for life Barrett, a judge on the 7th Chicago Court of Appeals, Monday and cement a 6-3 Conservative majority.

While her Senate confirmation hearings focused attention on how to resolve abortion, Obamacare and election-related cases, the Reuters review reveals Barrett’s report on the use of police force at a time of reckoning in the United States States.

There has been a wave of protests across the country and abroad since May 25, when a black man named George Floyd died by a Minneapolis police officer. This is just one of many murders that civil rights activists claim to be evidence of racial prejudice in the criminal justice system.

“Her records also show her willingness to stand on the side of law enforcement in connection with cases of excessive violence,” said Kristen Clarke, president of the Civil Rights Advisory Committee, who opposed Barrett’s confirmation.

Other groups advocating reform of the criminal justice system say they have issued some encouraging judgments, the overall results of which are mixed. Barrett could not be reached for comment.

Qualified immunity

In five cases, the panel in which Barrett attended examined a motion by the police or judicial officers to be protected from excessive violence lawsuits by a controversial legal defense known as qualified immunity. The court granted these requests in four of the five cases.

A Reuters investigation published two weeks before Floyd’s death found that immunity defenses created 50 years ago by the Supreme Court made it easier for police to kill or injure civilians with impunity. The report showed that federal appeals courts have increasingly granted police immunity in recent years.

Barrett, who was appointed to the Court of Appeal by Trump in 2017, wrote a ruling in July stating that Green Bay, Wisconsin officials who shot and killed a suicide who threatened them with a knife, did not use excessive force in violation of the Constitution had Fourth Amendment prohibiting illegal searches and seizures.

It was also part of judgments that overturned lower court rulings against Indianapolis police officers. In one case, a federal judge had denied officers qualified immunity in the case of shoplifting suspect Terrell Day, who died in handcuffs after telling officers he had difficulty breathing.

Barrett disagreed with a 7th Circle Panel decision in 2019 to retrial a lawsuit against prison guards in an Illinois prison for firing warning shots over a dining room to end a fight and injuring several inmates.

She has also handled claims for qualified immunity outside the context of excessive violence.

Barrett charged last year a lawsuit by three black men suing Chicago police officers for dragging them over while investigating a passing gunfight near a school. Unrelated to the shooting, the men said they had been targeted because of their race, citing the “racist nature of the ridicule and threats” of one of the officers. The driver, Marcus Torry, told police officers that he was complying with the rules because he feared the police’s brutality.

Barrett granted the officers qualified immunity in the absence of “clear determination” that the officers’ actions were inappropriate and found that plaintiffs matched the description of the suspects “in number, race and body color.”

In other cases, she has shown a willingness to join the plaintiffs.

In 2019, she wrote a ruling denying the immunity of a police officer who made false statements to prosecute a murder suspect. She also joined a ruling denying immunity to officials accused of falsifying evidence that resulted in a man being jailed for two years.

“I don’t think we can draw any definitive conclusions about how Judge Barrett would deal with qualified immunity while on the Supreme Court,” said Jay Schweikert, political analyst with the Cato Libertarian Institute, which campaigns against qualified immunity. “Your decisions all look like reasonable applications of existing precedents.”

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