Pollreis v. Marzolf

Police officers in Springdale, Arkansas detained two children, ages 12 and 14, at gunpoint and in handcuffs, thinking they might be suspects they were looking for. They weren’t. When their mother, Casondra Pollreis, calmly approached the officers to try and identify them, and asked the officers to let them go, the officers threatened her with a taser. Ms. Pollreis, represented by the Institute for Justice, brought an excessive force claim against the officers.

The district court granted qualified immunity to the officers, skipping the question whether the conduct was unconstitutional and jumping straight to the second prong of the qualified immunity analysis, where it held that because it was not clearly-established in the Eighth Circuit that drawing a taser at a non-threatening person was unconstitutional, the officers were entitled to qualified immunity.

We supported Ms. Pollreis’s appeal to the Eighth Circuit with an amicus brief. The brief argued three points related to the doctrine of qualified immunity.

First, as a growing cross-ideological consensus of judges, scholars, elected officials, and the public recognize, qualified immunity is unworkable, unjust, and untethered to any statutory or historical justification. Second, to minimize the problems that flow from the doctrine, the Eighth Circuit should answer both steps of the qualified immunity test in order. Third, at the second prong of the inquiry, “fair notice” of what rights are “clearly-established” can come from sources other than prior appellate decisions concerning identical facts, such as the obvious unconstitutionality of the conduct given the circumstances.

We await a decision from the Eighth Circuit.