The Real Scandal Behind Qualified Immunity
28th November 2020
Legally speaking, the victim of the crime is not the person who was beaten up, it is the state he lives in. If Mr. Smith assaults me and the case comes to trial, it will be not Friedman vs Smith but State of California vs Smith. Criminal prosecution is controlled by the state, so crimes the state does not want to prosecute don’t get prosecuted. If Mr. Smith happens to be a police officer, the state knows that prosecuting him, convicting him, and locking him up for a year will make it harder to hire police officers, as well as provoking conflict with the police union. So, most of the time, it doesn’t. A civil case is created and controlled by the actual victim, so in practice civil cases are usually the only way of punishing criminal acts by people the state approves of, such as its employees.