I’m not a defender of the concept of Qualified Immunity, my point is that it’s not an absolute shield. Even if it successfully shielded them from 100% of civil rights cases (which it objectively has not) it provides no protection from criminal charges.
I won’t argue against the idea that it covers them far more than can be rationally defended, I’m just saying it’s not an absolute shield, and (in my opinion) there is every reason to imagine that the specific group we are discussing here will routinely violate the rights of the people they detain in such an egregious fashion as to satisfy even that narrow range of criteria in a higher than you might expect number of civil cases once this is all said and done.
I’m not a defender of the concept of Qualified Immunity, my point is that it’s not an absolute shield. Even if it successfully shielded them from 100% of civil rights cases (which it objectively has not) it provides no protection from criminal charges.
I won’t argue against the idea that it covers them far more than can be rationally defended, I’m just saying it’s not an absolute shield, and (in my opinion) there is every reason to imagine that the specific group we are discussing here will routinely violate the rights of the people they detain in such an egregious fashion as to satisfy even that narrow range of criteria in a higher than you might expect number of civil cases once this is all said and done.
Objectively, the planets sometimes align, too: the odds are highly against it.
Also exceedingly rare: we’ve only seen any decent prosecution recently. It’s likely to fail.
While that fight should continue, society has more mundane tools to ostracize & make people’s lives hell.