A college student is heading back to the U.S. Supreme Court for a second time, still hoping to obtain justice for the brutal beating he endured from the hands of cops while he was in college.
The case is being handled by the Institute for Justice on behalf of student James King.
The fight is over immunity given to the cops, according to the IJ.
The events that triggered the extended legal battle happened in 2014 when King, a student, was walking from one summer job to another in Grand Rapids, Michigan.
“Two men stopped him, demanded his name, and took his wallet. Thinking he was being mugged, James ran. But the men caught him, beat him to the point that his face was unrecognizable, and choked him unconscious,” the IJ said.
“James only later discovered that the men were members of a police task force – one an FBI agent and the other a local detective. The officers never identified themselves as law enforcement to James, and bystanders who witnessed the beating were equally in the dark, calling 911 to report what they believed to be an attempted murder in broad daylight.”
When the cops beat him, uniformed officers arrived, arrested King , took him to a hospital and handcuffed him to his bed.
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The IJ reported that when the Supreme Court heard the case in 2020, “the government asked the justices to recognize a new immunity under a law called the Federal Tort Claims Act (FTCA). If the Justices approved this immunity, the door would be slammed shut on James’ case.”
But they declined, instead sending it back to the 6th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals.
There, the government won its argument, but the judges applied am “outdated” precedent to reach that conclusion so the case is going back to the Supremes.
“Instead of seriously engaging with the arguments against the immunity, the Sixth Circuit applied it and created a poison pill for any constitutional claims against the officers who violated James’ rights,” said IJ Senior Attorney Patrick Jaicomo. “We’re asking the Supreme Court to hear this case again and make clear that if citizens have to follow the law, the government has to follow the Constitution.”
King said, “After all this time, I still want to hold accountable the officers who put me through this unconstitutional hell, but the courts continue to prevent me from doing so.”
At the beginning of the fight, a district court had granted the officers immunity for the beating, so they could not be held accountable.
Then an appeals court reversed that, setting up a procedure that normally would return the case to the district court for trial. Instead, the government appealed to the Supremes in its effort to shield the cops from responsibility for the beating.
This case is part of IJ’s Project on Immunity and Accountability, which seeks to hold government officials who violate people’s rights accountable.
“Other cases include one where a Texas grandmother was thrown in jail for opposing a mayor and his political allies, one where a corrupt former prosecutor brought bogus charges against a group of nurses who wanted to quit an abusive job and charged their attorney with ‘conspiracy’ for helping them, and another where a family court judge led a warrantless search of a man’s home during a divorce hearing and threatened to jail him for recording it,” the IJ explained.
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