Qualified Immunity Gets Yet Another Boost From Scotus

Matthew Mangino
Tue, 28 Apr 2026 11:56:12 -0700
Opinion

Recently, the U.S. Supreme Court reversed a decision by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 2nd Circuit that permitted a civil rights suit to move forward against a Vermont police officer who allegedly used excessive force against a woman during a 2015 demonstration at the governor's inauguration.

Detective Jacob Zorn was sued by Shela Linton. The Vermont Capitol was closed for the inauguration. Protesters showed up anyway and were told by police that they had to leave or they would be arrested for trespassing. The protesters were unfazed and the police moved in.

Zorn asked Linton to stand up. According to the U.S. Supreme Court opinion, Zorn took Linton's arm, put it behind her back, placed pressure on her wrist and lifted her to her feet. Linton sued Zorn for using excessive force under the federal civil rights statute — Title 42 of the U.S. Code 1983 — alleging a state actor violated her constitutional rights.
Updated: Tue Apr 28, 2026

Recently, the U.S. Supreme Court reversed a decision by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 2nd Circuit that permitted a civil rights suit to move forward against a Vermont police officer who allegedly used excessive force against a woman during a 2015 demonstration at the governor's inauguration.

Detective Jacob Zorn was sued by Shela Linton. The Vermont Capitol was closed for the inauguration. Protesters showed up anyway and were told by police that they had to leave or they would be arrested for trespassing. The protesters were unfazed and the police moved in.

Zorn asked Linton to stand up. According to the U.S. Supreme Court opinion, Zorn took Linton's arm, put it behind her back, placed pressure on her wrist and lifted her to her feet. Linton sued Zorn for using excessive force under the federal civil rights statute — Title 42 of the U.S. Code 1983 — alleging a state actor violated her constitutional rights.

Section 1983 grew out of the Civil Rights Acts of 1871. The Act was passed after the Civil War to prevent public officials and the Ku Klux Klan from violating the constitutional rights of former slaves.

Section 1983 provided relief — in the form of money damages — to claimants whose constitutional rights had been violated by a police officer or public official acting under state authority. The Act provides that a wrongdoer "shall be liable to the party injured in an action at law."

About 100 years after the Civil Rights Act, the Supreme Court established qualified immunity, a potential defense to wrongdoers. About a decade later, the high Court further refined qualified immunity. The Court ruled a state actor would be immune from liability if, at the time of the harm, the conduct "was not clearly established" as a civil rights violation. The Court continued, "An official could not reasonably be expected to anticipate subsequent legal developments, nor could he fairly be said to 'know' that the law forbade conduct not previously identified as unlawful."

The 2nd Circuit Court reasoned that its 2004 decision in a case involving the arrest of anti-abortion protesters at a women's health center in Connecticut "clearly establish(ed)" that the tactics that Zorn had used in arresting Linton, "such as a rear-wristlock on a protestor who is passively resisting arrest constitutes excessive force and is therefore violative of that arrestee's Fourth Amendment rights." Therefore, the court of appeals concluded that law enforcement officials like Zorn would have been on notice that they could be held personally liable for such conduct.

The U.S. Supreme Court disagreed. The high court held, according to SCOTUSblog, that government officials are entitled to qualified immunity "unless they could have 'read' the relevant" cases governing their behavior before acting "and 'know(n)' that it proscribed their specific conduct." The Court found that the 2004 case on which the court of appeals relied "did not clearly establish that Zorn's specific conduct violated the Fourth Amendment."

The Supreme Court has yet again made it more difficult to establish qualified immunity, providing further protection to police officers who harm individuals by violating their constitutional rights. The standard of "clearly established" unlawful conduct is clearly getting more and more beyond the reach of most claimants.

In 2018, Justice Sonia Sotomayor wrote that a decision favoring the police tells officers that "they can shoot first and think later and it tells the public that palpably unreasonable conduct will go unpunished."