Beyond the Brief

What can Americans do if the government retaliates against them for speaking out? Today we're going to discuss real world examples of governments retaliating against citizens for speech they don’t approve of. We are joined by IJ Attorneys Kirby Thomas West and Ben Field.

https://youtu.be/Yhji-Uyn23Y

Does qualified immunity actually accomplish what the Supreme Court intended? Kim Norberg and co-host Keith Neely discuss qualified immunity and how it plays out in the real world. IJ Senior Attorney Bob McNamara and data scientist Jason Tiezzi join to discuss Unaccountable, IJ’s new report that examines qualified immunity by the numbers.

The report uses the largest ever collection of federal appellate cases, covering the 11-year period from 2010 through 2020. It is also the first to use cutting-edge automated techniques to parse thousands of federal circuit court opinions and answer key questions about cases where government defendants claim qualified immunity—what kinds of officials and conduct it protects, its impact on civil rights cases, and whether the doctrine is achieving its aims.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ag6SLAnfKtw

Unaccountable

When people hear “qualified immunity,” they tend to think “police misconduct.” But IJ’s qualified immunity cases frequently involve other types of officials and allegations. Now a new IJ study of more than 5,500 federal qualified immunity appeals shows those cases aren’t outliers. Unaccountable finds only 23% of appeals involved police accused of excessive force. Police often claimed qualified immunity, of course, but so did social workers, college deans, mayors, and many other government officials. And the violations victims alleged were similarly diverse, with almost 20% of appeals featuring First Amendment claims, usually premeditated retaliation for disfavored speech or other protected activity. Unaccountable finds qualified immunity hobbles victims of government abuses like these and fails to accomplish the goals supporters claim it’s needed to achieve, strengthening the case for ending the doctrine.

Read Report

Unbeknownst to parents, a portion of their baby’s blood remained unused after a standard screening was complete. And New Jersey had unilaterally decided that it could keep that blood for 23 years. Even worse, New Jersey, along with other states, believed it could use that blood however it saw fit, whether that be selling it to third parties, giving it to law enforcement, or even turning it over to the Pentagon.

On today’s episode of Beyond the Brief, hosts Kim Norberg and Keith Neely talk to IJ Attorneys Rob Frommer and Brian Morris about New Jersey’s creepy baby blood collection scheme.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1ypXPwkNoFI

Case Page:  https://ij.org/case/new-jersey-genetic-privacy/

News Article: https://newjerseymonitor.com/2023/11/14/civil-rights-concerns-grow-over-baby-blood-tests-as-state-mulls-genomic-sequencing/

Deep Dive is now becoming Beyond the Brief.  We will still bring you the same great IJ-related content as before, but now in a studio setting.  Stay tuned.

One of the most controversial practices in modern policing is law enforcement's power to "stop and frisk" individuals without probable cause that a crime has been committed. On today's show, we talk about the origins of this practice, the court rulings that normalized and expanded it, and the need--and opportunity--for the U.S. Supreme Court to scale it back.

Jeremy Bennett had no idea that asking an Ohio Department of Natural Resources officer to come back when his taxidermy shop was open for the season meant that he might face jail time for “denying” an inspection. Unfortunately, the courts have opened the door to this troubling disregard for property rights and facilitated warrantless inspections policies that affect a wide variety of businesses. In today’s show, we’ll discuss how this happened, how it affects ordinary Americans like Jeremy, who are just trying to earn a living, and what can be done to make things right.

In Virginia, any one of 176 so-called barrier crimes can disqualify a person from work in certain occupations for life—no matter how old the conviction, how unrelated it is to the work the person desires to do, or how little it reflects the person’s fitness today. These laws kept IJ client Rudy Carey from fulfilling work as a substance abuse counselor for people he is uniquely fit to help. In today’s show, we talk about what happened to Rudy and how he is fighting against collateral consequences laws that are irrational and unjust.

https://youtu.be/zjOqwT5M7Xw

Click here for more Deep Dive episodes.

Download the MP3 here.

In Wilmington, Delaware, any car with more than $200 in outstanding fines can be towed by private towing companies. Vehicle owners have no way to contest the tickets or seizure without first paying the city everything it demands in parking tickets, fines, fees, and penalties. If they can’t afford to pay in 30 days, the companies get to scrap their cars and keep their full value, returning nothing to the property owners and not even crediting part of the value of the car to the underlying fines. In exchange, the city gets a free impound program; property owners lose everything. In today’s episode, we will talk about all the ways that this system violates constitutional rights—and what two residents are doing to fight it.

Before he was IJ’s president, Scott Bullock spent 25 years as an IJ attorney. In this episode, he recounts his years in the trenches as a litigator, from the first case he litigated on behalf of African hairbraiders in Washington, D.C., to arguing at the 5th Circuit that Benedictine monks should be able to earn an honest living selling hand-crafted wooden caskets. Scott also discusses what went into launching IJ’s civil forfeiture initiative and the way that IJ client Russ Caswell helped set the standard for forfeiture cases.

Though Susette Kelo’s fight to save her home from her city’s efforts to take it for a private developer ended in 2005, the fight against eminent domain abuse has continued. In today’s show, we revisit that landmark decision and talk about the aftermath and where the biggest eminent domain battles are happening now, from pretextual takings to “common carrier” seizures. We also discuss Eychaner v. Chicago and other signals that the Supreme Court is ready to correct its Kelo errors.