Jeanine Liberti, et vir v. City of Scottsdale, Arizona, et al.

For 42 U.S.C. § 1983 cases, this Court has created a qualified-immunity doctrine. It lacks support in the common law, in this Court’s pre-1974 caselaw, and in the statute’s text and history. Moreover, instead of shielding good-faith conduct, as originally intended, the qualified-immunity doctrine has evolved to shield police officers and other public officials from liability for bad-faith conduct. Only in the rarest of cases will they be held liable for violating Section 1983. Should this Court abolish the qualified-immunity doctrine and return to its original practice of asking whether the common law historically provided immunity for the public officials in analogous situations?

Could the police officers who attacked Dylan Liberti have possibly thought that the United States Constitution, or any other legal or common-law authority, would let them attack a peaceful, cooperative, lawabiding citizen, just because they wanted him to sit on hot concrete pavement, and he wanted to stand?

Could a reasonable trier of fact find that the police officers’ unprovoked attack on Dylan Liberti at the six-minute mark in their encounter with him contributed to causing his fatal shooting just two minutes later?