Immunity, Unqualified
Thanks to a totally made-up 'doctrine' undemocratically imposed by judicial fiat, there will be no justice for a Texas woman falsely indicted for murder after self-managed abortion.
I've been working on an in-depth piece for yall that I won't be finished with until next week, but I just had to stop and remark on breaking news out of Texas…
In 2022, as you may recall, Texas officials arrested, jailed, and charged a young woman with murder for self-managing an abortion—which is not a crime in Texas! A grand jury indicted her. After her name and mugshot were splashed all over the news around the world, the prosecutor begrudgingly dropped the charge and was reprimanded.
An investigation by the State Bar of Texas found that the prosecutor “sought to pursue criminal homicide charges against an individual for acts clearly not criminal.”
Not only did the prosecutor know that the young woman's actions were completely legal, but he allegedly paid for his side piece to get get an abortion.
Despite the charge being dropped, for the young woman the damage to to her had already been done. So, she sued the officials for violating her constitutional rights, false arrest, and malicious prosecution.
Her hopes of holding the county officials accountable ended today, when Republican U.S. District Judge Drew Tipton—a Trump appointee—ruled that the Texas officials are immune from being held accountable for violatinf the yound woman's constitutional rights by arresting, jailing, charging, and getting an indictment against her for perfectly legal behavior.
Pretending like the Fourth and Fourteenth Amendments of the U.S. Constitution don’t exist—which, by all appearances, is the Republican Party’s official anti-America stance now—U.S. District Judge Drew Tipton said that county officials are immune from accountability because they didn’t violate a clearly established law.
Republican U.S. District Judge Drew Tipton based his decision on a so-called doctrine that is found no where in the U.S. Constitution: this legal, practical, and moral failure is known as qualified immunity.
Qualified immunity is a totally made up thing that was imposed upon the country by the whims of the Supreme Court in 1967 (Pierson v. Ray). The “doctrine” was brazenly expanded beyond all justification via the judicial fiat of a Republican-dominated Supreme Court in 1982 (Harlow v. Fitzgerald).
There's no longer any qualified about qualified immunity. It's just immunity.
(As for the prosecutor mentioned above, the judge ruled that he is protected by absolute immunity.)
So here we are.
Forced-birth officials are free to bring bogus murder charges against people who have abortions or who miscarry much-wanted pregnancies, or who suffer stillbirth while Black. Meanwhilr, the misogynistic jerks who maliciously bring such bogus charges are protected—by judicial fiat—can just keep on doing it without fear of accountability. In a post-Dobbs words, that's a very dangerous thing.