Mark Milner, et al. v. Vincent Mares, Executive Director, New Mexico Racing Commission, et al.

At some point the line that appears to drift farther away from protecting the civil rights of American citizens and towards granting greater qualified immunity to government actors must become capable of being crossed, the public must be allowed to hold their government to account for trampling constitutionally protected liberty interests. Otherwise at some point those constitutionally protected rights and the will of Congress in passing 42 U.S.C. § 1983 means nothing. As the jurisprudence becomes broader on when a government actor enjoys qualified immunity and the instances where a citizen can hold that government actor accountable becomes more limited, beginning with this Court’s guidance in Harlow v. Fitzerald 457 U.S. 800 (1982) requiring that a person’s violated rights must be “clearly established,” Id., this case presents the rare situation where both this Court’s precedent and the substantive law of the jurisdiction clearly establishing a right to due process of law that was ignored by the lower courts to grant qualified immunity to the government defendants. Thus, the question presented is: Did the lower courts err in dismissing Petitioners’ cases on the basis of Qualified Immunity in the face of US Supreme Court precedent and New Mexico jurisprudence clearly establishing the right that was violated?