SCOTUS Shields Cop, Skips Rifles

The Supreme Court reversed a lower court ruling Monday, handing qualified immunity back to a Vermont detective and sidestepping a stack of high-profile gun cases for the second time.

State of play: In a six-page unsigned opinion, the majority reversed the 2nd Circuit and held that Detective Jacob Zorn — who used a rear-wristlock on a nonviolent sit-in protester at the Vermont State House in 2015 — couldn't be held personally liable because existing case law didn't clearly establish that his specific actions were unconstitutional.

The legal question: Qualified immunity doesn't require perfection from officers. It requires that the law clearly prohibit the specific conduct before courts can hold them liable. The majority said a 2004 Second Circuit case about anti-abortion protesters didn't meet that bar — it never even found a Fourth Amendment violation, just sent the case back to a jury.

What they're saying:

"Simply disagrees with how the Second Circuit applied a correctly stated legal standard to this particular set of facts." — Justice Sonia Sotomayor, dissenting, joined by Kagan and Jackson

Sotomayor called it a resurrection of a "one-sided approach to qualified immunity" that turns the doctrine into an absolute shield — gutting the Fourth Amendment's deterrent effect on police misconduct.

The guns angle: The Court declined — again — to take up petitions challenging state bans on assault rifles and large-capacity magazines. Those cases have been sitting at conference after conference with no action. The justices also passed on a Fourth Amendment stop-and-frisk case and the FBI's state-secrets privilege dispute.

No action isn't a ruling. A cert denial doesn't mean the Court agrees with the lower courts. It means four justices couldn't agree the case was the right vehicle. But repeated passes on the assault weapons challenges, after Bruen raised the bar for gun regulations, is a pattern worth watching.

Zoom in: Two other denials are worth noting. Rodney Reed — a Texas death row inmate who's been fighting for DNA testing of the belt used to strangle the victim — was turned away again after the Court had already sent his case back to the 5th Circuit once. And a Texas citizen journalist arrested for asking a public official a question got no review either, with Sotomayor noting she was arrested "for doing something journalists do every day."

What to watch: The assault weapons petitions aren't going away. Lower courts are split, and eventually the justices will have to engage. Whether that happens before another circuit deepens the conflict is the open question.