Many Americans wonder why cops are so violent, aggressive and lawless. Why don’t they obey the Constitution or Bill of Rights?
The answer is America’s judges. For more than a century, judges have enshrined cops as masters over the rest of humanity. Judges tend to hold that when a person gets hired as a cop and dons a magic suit, he becomes essentially immune from liability for anything he does on the job.
Cops regularly kill, punch, rape, torture and abuse the citizenry, but almost never face any legal repercussions.
Here is a recent Reason Magazine expose on a recent Supreme Court ruling (Kisela v. Hughes) which held that a cop who murdered a knife-holding woman in her kitchen is immune from suit.
It is important to remember that the Supreme Court hears only a small and dwindling number of cases — less than one in 100 of the cases that it is asked to hear will ever get a determination on the merits. Most of those cases, according to the Court’s rules and practices, will be cases where lower courts are divided on the law or an important legal issue is otherwise unsettled. These summary reversals are a notable, and sometimes explicit, exception. The Court takes a comparatively large number of factbound cases that present no lasting legal issue other than whether the Ninth Circuit got it wrong again.
