Question: What is “qualified immunity” as it relates to civil rights complaints against police officers?
Answer: Qualified immunity is immunity from suit rather than a mere defense to liability.
The doctrine of qualified immunity protects government officials from liability for civil damages insofar as their conduct does not violate clearly established statutory or constitutional rights of which a reasonable person would have known. Qualified immunity balances two important interests—the need to hold public officials accountable when they exercise power irresponsibly and the need to shield officials from harassment, distraction, and liability when they perform their duties reasonably. The protection of qualified immunity applies regardless of whether the government official’s error is “a mistake of law, a mistake of fact, or a mistake based on mixed questions of law and fact.
Police officers are entitled to qualified immunity, when their actions do not violate clearly established law. For example, an officer conducting a search is entitled to qualified immunity where clearly established law does not show that the search violated the 4th Amendment. This inquiry turns on the “objective legal reasonableness of the action, assessed in light of the legal rules that were clearly established at the time it was taken.”