Today, the U.S. Supreme Court issued a decision in Kisela v. Hughes, ruling in favor of an Arizona police officer who shot a woman outside her home in Tucson. Jin Hee Lee, Deputy Director of Litigation at the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, Inc., issued the following statement:
“The Supreme Court’s decision serves to expand qualified immunity for police officers to an unprecedented and dangerous degree, becoming, as Justice Sotomayor aptly noted in her dissent, ‘an absolute shield for law enforcement officers’ and ‘gutting the deterrent effect of the Fourth Amendment.’ As the nation continues to mourn the recent deaths of Stephon Clark and Danny Ray Thomas at the hands of police, we remain concerned that this ruling will undermine efforts to hold law enforcement officers accountable for their use of excessive force, which has led to the tragic loss of too many innocent lives.”
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Founded in 1940, the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, Inc. (LDF) is the nation’s first civil and human rights law organization and has been completely separate from the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) since 1957—although LDF was originally founded by the NAACP and shares its commitment to equal rights. LDF’s Thurgood Marshall Institute is a multi-disciplinary and collaborative hub within LDF that launches targeted campaigns and undertakes innovative research to shape the civil rights narrative. In media attributions, please refer to us as the NAACP Legal Defense Fund or LDF.
