The 1980s Supreme Court Case That Made It Almost Impossible to Hold Police Accountable
Originally reported by Balls and Strikes — 2023-06-13
Institutionally, the Supreme Court and the police share a special bond. Though I’m sure Samuel Alito would absolutely love to hang “thin blue line” flags all over the joint, the Court doesn’t need the decor and bumper stickers to prove its pro-police bona fides. It does so through its jurisprudence. In many respects, today’s 6-3 conservative supermajority doesn’t even have to do the police’s legal dirty work. A case from the early 1980s shows that the Court has spent generations shaping a system in which holding cops accountable is functionally impossible. In City of Los Angeles v. Lyons, a case about police chokeholds, the conservative legal movement was building the foundation for the massive structural obstacles to suing the police—obstacles that persist to this day. In October 1976, Ad
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The 1980s Supreme Court Case That Made It Almost Impossible to Hold Police Accountable — Balls and Strikes
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