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My law practice is not criminal-focused, and I'm not an expert on immunities. So caveat emptor.
With that said, your post really reads like a really interesting story about open and obvious law enforcement malfeasance, with a complete non-sequitur tacked on at the end. Ending qualified immunity (as I understand that doctrine to exist) would not change the result of this investigation. It would not provide any additional substantive or procedural rights to Mr. Nordean with regard to his membership in the Proud Boys, his actions on or relating to J6, or any other conduct of his that is at issue here.
The only thing it would do would be to enable Mr. Nordean to personally sue individual agents/officers for money damages arising from their bad conduct. And given that law enforcement is a decently-paying, but not overwhelmingly-lucrative profession, the likelihood of Mr. Nordean actually being able to recover any sizeable amount pursuant to a judgment in his favor would seem to be rather small.
Getting money damages against the agents wouldn't get them fired, and such a judgment wouldn't even necessarily result in policy changes at the agencies in question. So I fail to see how ending qualified immunity would resolve the issue of FBI agents behaving badly and hiding Brady info. Even if you want to argue that exposing agents to individual liability would incentivize them to change their behavior, I fail to see how that kind of bankshot is better than the more obvious remedy of directly attacking the problem through suits against the governmental agencies themselves (e.g. "pattern and practice" civil rights litigation).
Can you tell me what I'm missing?
The purpose of these lawsuits isn't so much to make the victim whole as it is to serve as a deterrent for future bad behavior. No, a police officer probably isn't ever going to be able to pay a two million dollar judgment. But in some ways that's a stronger deterrent—any officer who gets such a judgment against him will spend the rest of his life hiding from it. He wakes up every morning not knowing if the contents of his bank account will gone, the subject of a court levy. Any property he owns will have liens on it. If he lives in a state with wage garnishment, he'll see 25% of his paycheck cut out until the judgment is paid off. And since he's never paying it off, it's going to accumulate interest at a statutory rate (usually around 6%) every year; on a cop's salary, he won't be able to even service the interest on a multi-million dollar judgment let alone make a dent in the principle. And bankruptcy? Judgments for intentional torts aren't dischargeable. And if by some grace of God it's not an intentional tort, he better pass the means test for Chapter 7 because he's over the debt limits for a 13 and will be forced into an expensive and grueling personal Chapter 11.
The thought is that police departments will be forced to provide liability insurance to cover such verdicts, and as such will be under pressure from insurance companies to make sure that officers with a ton of complaints will be too risky to insure and this will force police departments to either get rid of them or put them on desk jobs where they can't do any real damage. The reality is that joint and several liability would largely protect individual officers anyway; since most lawsuits will also name the department as a defendant the department will be liable for the whole award regardless of its individual contribution to the damage. The vast majority of states have limited this doctrine under the guise of tort reform, but one area where it's still largely unchanged is intentional torts. That being said, if departments can offload the insurance burden on to individual officers, they might do it.
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I think part of the reason Miller was comfortable lying so fragrantly is because she's not used to facing (and can reasonably expect to never) any real sort of consequence for misconduct. Part of that reason is because of the insular nature of the field (who among the people she works with are going to rat her out?) and part of it is the lack of discouragement that comes from real accountability (QI). Getting rid of QI on its own won't be enough to help uncover the misconduct, for that you need more open discovery rules such as the open-file rule. I'm indifferent on whether agents or their agency should burden the liability. At minimum, I'd want to see something closer to law enforcement facing the same accountability rules as doctors and I don't care if it's hospitals or malpractice insurers that shoulder the financial hit. Another option is to have a more robust method of criminally prosecuting obvious malfeasance, but given how the apparatus is currently constructed (cops and prosecutors are besties), I don't have a viable plan to put that into action.
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