On December 9, 2011, three police officers in a K-9 unit responded to a call at Louisiana apartment complex. There, they came upon 21-year-old Kwamein Mason. Mason was carrying a weapon. Within minutes, one of the officers would shoot Mason five times. While Mason was on the ground, the officer fired two more rounds. D, as his friends call him, died at the scene. Mason's family sued the officer in civil court. In the ensuing trial, the jury rendered a head scratchingverted. The officer used excessive force against Mason, but was not liable for his death. The reason? Qualified immunity. An obscure 1960s air doctrine created by the Supreme Court that shields public officials like police officers from liability when they harm civilians on the job. Kwamein was a very intelligent young guy. He kind of had an old soul if you want to call it that. I think it's a tragedy. I mean, there should be no way in the world that a jury can find guilty of something, and there'd be no repercussions. As the killings of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor and Ray Shard Brooks have reignited the national debate over police accountability, advocates say it's finally time to end qualified immunity. Qualified immunity is a judge made doctrine that says that when government officials violate your constitutional rights, you still can't sue them unless they did something that was so egregious that only something who was intentionally out to get you would have done it. William Boat teaches law at the University of Chicago. He wrote an influential paper questioning the legal underpinnings of qualified immunity. The doctrine of Qualified immunity is a crucial part of the conversation about police reform. It's so fundamentally a marker that at least are above the law that don't have to obey the same rules everybody else do. The story of qualified immunity goes back to the years following the Civil War. In 1871, as the Ku Klux Klan terrorized formerly enslaved people across the South, Congress passed a series of laws aimed at crippling the group. In a nod to the reality that government officials often ignored and sometimes even participated in these racist crimes, the laws included a stack of people who were not in the state of the statute that allowed citizens to sue public officials who violated their civil rights. For the next hundred years, this statute, section 1983, became the principal tool people used to pursue justice against wayward police. Until 1967, that's when the Supreme Court introduced a new element into civil suits against public officials, the Good Faith Defense. Bloomberg Law Supreme Court reporter Kimberly Robinson explains. In the 1960s, the Supreme Court had a case involving some white and black clergy members who had tried to promote racial integration at a bus terminal. They were arrested under a law that was later found to be unconstitutional. The clergy members sued under section 1983, claiming false arrests and imprisonment. But the justice kind of read back around the rules and supposed to say that there has to be some kind of an exception when an officer had good faith believes that they were not active in law that was an awful thing. In other words, as long as an officer can argue that he believed his conduct was justified within the context of his job, even if a court rules otherwise, he cannot be held liable. Over time, the Good Faith Defense evolved into a catch-22 for citizens trying to sue police. Today, often before courts will even consider if an official's conduct is illegal, plaintiffs must first cite a previous court decision that ruled against an officer in virtually identical circumstances. Otherwise, the case is thrown out. Meeting this requirement has a time-led to some perverse outcomes. This Supreme Court recently was considered taking up a case where an individual was bit by police dog while they were sitting on the ground with their hands up. The plaintiffs had offered up a previous case that found that an individual who was bit by a dog who was lying on the ground with his hands up had been subject to constitutional violation. For the law report, that wasn't close enough. There was enough of a distinction between the person sitting down with their hands up and the person laying down that the officer was entitled to call it by the committee. So a consequence of this two-step process is that a lot of the time the court can say, yes, what you did is unconstitutional, but because nobody had ever done it before, or because nobody had ever said it before, we're still going to hold the officer immune because until we ruled, you know, maybe the officer wouldn't have known. One analysis found that between 2015 and 2019, courts granted police immunity more than half the time. Supporters of the doctrine say that policing is hard, and officers shouldn't have the threat of lawsuits hanging over them while doing their job. But police reform advocates are starting to push back. I think it's true that police officers have a really hard job. I just don't think we're doing them any favors by telling them, therefore you just shouldn't worry about what the law requires of you. Opposition to qualified immunity has found some strange bedfellows. Lawmakers from both parties, and even the House's lone libertarian, have voiced support for abolishing it. The President Trump and Senate Republicans have called it a non-starter. Even the Supreme Court has split two of its members from opposite ends of the ideological spectrum, opposed qualified immunity. But the full court has declined numerous opportunities to revisit the doctrine. Just because the Justice's didn't act on it now, it doesn't mean that they won't return to the question in the future and maybe even in the near future. Qualified immunity appears to be safe for now. But in a moment of renewed focus on police accountability, advocates hope its judgment day is coming soon. The doctrine of qualified immunity really offends fundamental principles of justice and basic principles of common sense. And you think about it, why should people who are trained and given this intense responsibility and immense power be eligible lower standards than all the rest of us? We love him, we miss him. And I hope that something good comes with this qualified immunity thing. At least we can help somebody else if we couldn't help. We couldn't help him.