His own pocket is now under threat! No wonder he is appealing the verdict
"In September, I wrote about a legal victory in the remarkable case of Hayden Barnes, a former student at Georgia's Valdosta State University (VSU) who was kicked out of his college for protesting a planned parking garage complex. As justification for expelling him, the university cited only a collage he had placed on Facebook, which criticized the environmental impact of the proposed garages.
According to the decision, VSU President Ronald Zaccari ignored the advice of his top administrators who warned him that punishing Barnes would violate the First Amendment, the Constitution's guarantee of due process rights for students, and the university's own contractual promises of fair procedures. Despite these warnings, Zaccari even ordered an investigation "into Barnes's academic records, his medical history, his religion," and his records with the campus psychological counseling center. When his staffers reported back to Zaccari that Barnes--a decorated emergency medical technician and Buddhist--was a threat to no one, Zaccari unilaterally decided to kick Barnes out anyway.
Having determined the facts, the federal district court decided that Zaccari had no claim to the defense of qualified immunity. Public employees enjoy immunity from liability for violating the constitutional rights of others only if they can honestly say they did not and should not have known they were violating a constitutional right. Here, not only was it quite clear to any public campus administrator that you can't kick out a student without a hearing for simply protesting a parking garage without violating the Constitution, according to the district court opinion, Zaccari was actually told as much by other administrators. There is no protection from personal financial liability for a state official who acts as a rogue agent and violates the constitutional rights of a student, nor should there be.
Unsurprisingly, Zaccari has appealed this decision to the United States Court of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit. My organization, the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE), which has been fighting for Barnes since 2007, has put together a spectacular coalition of organizations from across the political and ideological spectrum to explain to the Eleventh Circuit why the Barnes case is so important in an amici curiae ("friends of the court") brief.
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3 comments:
The threshold for qualified immunity really needs to be lowered.
If only more government officials could be personally sued, maybe they would remember that they work for the people and not be insulated after working to destroy people's lives.
Great idea, but that would require a strong, intelligent population that has the will and ability to think for itself. In other words, forget about it!
Surely Anon. 10:37 you mean 'raised' - as in, "the threshold for a defence of qualified privilege to any given claim ought be harder to satisfy".
No?
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