“James Ho, a Trump judge whose opinions resemble Rush Limbaugh’s most incoherent rants, accused the majority of enabling mass shootings when it withheld qualified immunity from cops who apparently shot an innocent man to death.” The quoted sentence appears in Mark Joseph Stern’s jurisprudence essay that Slate posted online yesterday evening under the headline “What Happened When Trump Reshaped a Powerful Court: For the 5th Circuit, 2019 was an experiment in extreme right-wing jurisprudence.”
Stern’s statement that the majority “withheld qualified immunity from cops who apparently shot an innocent man to death” is mistaken, as a reader of my blog kindly pointed out to me by email shortly after my original post about the Fifth Circuit‘s denial of rehearing en banc included the very same erroneous characterization of the original divided three-judge panel’s ruling.
To be sure, Circuit Judge James C. Ho‘s dissent from the denial of rehearing en banc in this case can easily be understood to suggest that the original panel’s decision denied qualified immunity to the officers, but the original panel’s majority per curiam opinion makes clear that it affirmed the district court’s grant of qualified immunity in favor of the officers. This perhaps explains why four of the Fifth Circuit’s ordinarily most conservative judges voted against rehearing en banc, resulting in a 10-to-6 vote against full court review, instead of a 10-to-6 vote in favor had those four believed that full court review was merited.
Posted at 11:28 AM by Howard Bashman
