Chapter 30: Civil Rights Summarily Denied Race, Evidence, and Summary Judgement in Police Brutality Cases

Authors

Jasmine Gonzales Rose, Boston University School of LawFollow

Document Type

Book Chapter

Publication Date

2022

ISBN

9781479805938

Publisher

NYU Press

Language

en-US

Abstract

Within seconds of arriving to conduct a mental health wellness check, white police officers from Dallas, Texas, shot Jason Harrison, a 39- year- old Black man, and let him die on the ground.¹ The officers claimed that the victim had lunged at them with a screwdriver.² The victim’s mother, an eyewitness and plaintiff in the ensuing § 1983 action, claimed otherwise.³ The district court— relying on the Supreme Court case Scott v. Harris⁴— found that a body camera video⁵ spoke for itself, and it granted summary judgment for the police defendants.

Harrison’s case is but one example of the tripartite system of racialized police violence in the United States. First are the officers on the ground who directly enact violence on people of color. They are backed up by the police departments, which may try to cover up or otherwise shield the officer and themselves from prosecution and liability.⁷ Second are prosecutors who are reluctant to prosecute officers for on- duty killings and brutality.⁸ In light of the lack of prosecution and their own losses, surviving victims’ and families’ only recourse is the civil justice system. Enter the third level of this system of injustice: the judiciary. Here, summary judgment motions on qualified immunity present the opportunity for institutional racial insiders to maintain racial order.

Because the judiciary is disproportionately white when compared to jury pools, summary judgment, as a procedural device, is a racialized one.⁹ When judges use videos as evidence in summary judgment decisions, they compound the racial implications and injustice. In this context, Dan Kahan has demonstrated that judges suffer from “cognitive illiberalism.”¹⁰ In other words, judges are not the neutral, unbiased adjudicators they believe themselves to be. When viewing judicial cognitive illiberalism under the lens of Critical Race Theory, the problem intensifies. This chapter situates the phenomena of cognitive illiberalism into the system of racial stratification and racism in the United States by examining judicial reliance on “racial character evidence.”

Recommended Citation

Jasmine Gonzales Rose, Chapter 30: Civil Rights Summarily Denied Race, Evidence, and Summary Judgement in Police Brutality Cases , in A Guide to Civil Procedure: Integrating Critical Legal Perspectives 286 (2022).
Available at: https://scholarship.law.bu.edu/faculty_scholarship/3924