A unanimous U.S. Supreme Court on Monday decided a police immunity case that sounds small but carries a larger significance. The narrow holding in the New Mexico case of White v. Pauly was that a police officer who arrived late at the scene of a confrontation and then shot and killed the suspect without having heard other officers issue a warning is protected from a lawsuit. What really mattered was the reasoning: The court said the officer couldn’t be sued because there was no case on the books finding an officer liable under the exact same circumstances.
This decision makes it much harder to sue the police, because almost all confrontations have unique features that could be used to block lawsuits. In essence, the court is signaling that it wants fewer suits against officers in the lower courts, and is chiding the appellate courts for allowing such suits, Bloomberg News reports.
