“We decided the two cases were similar enough in some particulars, each appalling in its own way. We wanted to send a strong signal, a one-two punch,” Cate Stetson said.
- Stetson and Malone intentionally filed two petitions on the same day: a one-two punch at qualified immunity.
- The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit is not heeding the justices’ warnings, the two lawyers said.
- The facts behind the two cases are particularly egregious.
Hogan Lovells’ Cate Stetson and Dean Malone of Dallas, Texas, recently teamed up to offer the U.S. Supreme Court two opportunities to rein in the controversial doctrine of qualified immunity.
In one case, police officers tased a man to prevent him from setting himself on fire after dousing himself in gasoline. In the second case, an officer stood and watched a known-suicidal pretrial detainee hang himself with the 30-inch cord of the telephone left on the wall of his isolation cell.