This morning, IJ secured a resounding victory for government accountability and against qualified immunity when a federal appeals court ruled 3-0 that our client’s case against the officer who threatened him at gunpoint can move forward.

In 2018, Mario Rosales was driving home and passed a pickup truck. Unknown to Mario, that truck was driven by an off-duty sheriff’s deputy with an explosive temper. Enraged at being legally passed by Mario’s Mustang, deputy David Bradshaw followed Mario home, blocked him in the driveway, yelled and cursed, and pointed a gun at him. All of this unfolded in front of Bradshaw’s young child, seated in the passenger seat of his truck. Bradshaw only left after another deputy, aware of the situation and of Bradshaw’s temper, arrived on the scene.

Mario sued Bradshaw to vindicate his constitutional rights—and ran straight into the obstacle of qualified immunity, the judge-made legal doctrine that routinely shields government officials from accountability even for egregious abuse. The lower district court agreed the deputy violated Mario’s rights, but it granted Bradshaw qualified immunity and dismissed Mario’s case, saying what Bradshaw did wasn’t clearly established as illegal.

But a government agent pointing a gun at a peaceful person in a fit of road rage is obviously unlawful (and well outside any legitimate law-enforcement purpose)—and today a panel of 10th Circuit judges agreed ([link removed] ) . Declaring that “qualified immunity does not protect an officer where the constitutional violation was so obvious … that any reasonable officer would have known the conduct was unconstitutional,” the court reversed the district judge’s ruling, meaning Mario can continue fighting for his rights.

Today’s win marks IJ’s first triumph over qualified immunity at a federal appeals court, an exciting milestone for our young Project on Immunity and Accountability. The doctrine has been applied to shield officials for all sorts of outrageous, unreasonable, and clearly abusive behavior—and it is notoriously difficult to overcome. Yet constitutional rights mean nothing if government officials can violate them with impunity. Mario’s case is just one of more than a dozen IJ cases designed to restore critical paths to government accountability.

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Scott

Scott G. Bullock

President and Chief Counsel

Institute for Justice

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