SCOTUS sides with officer over protester in qualified immunity case, reversing lower-court opinion

In a case stemming from a protest over a decade ago, the Supreme Court delivered a decision this week about qualified immunity.

The Supreme Court on Monday ruled in Zorn v. Linton that a Vermont state police sergeant is entitled to qualified immunity in a case brought by a protester following a dispute at the Vermont Capitol in 2015.

‘We reverse.’

In an unsigned per curiam opinion, the majority reversed the decision of a lower court, which had sided against the police officer’s use of force in the case: “The Second Circuit held that Zorn was not entitled to qualified immunity.

“We reverse,” the SCOTUS opinion stated.

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Photo by Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images

The case revolves around a protest at the Vermont governor’s inauguration on January 8, 2015. Shela Linton, a protester participating in an organized sit-in at the state Capitol building to demand universal health care, “anticipated being forcibly removed.”

After some other protesters were removed by police officers, Sergeant Jacob Zorn approached Linton and attempted to get her to comply. When she resisted, Zorn unlinked her arms from the human chain the protesters had formed, “put [her arm] behind her back in a rear wristlock, and twisted her arm.”

Linton alleged that Zorn’s actions resulted in “physical and psychological injuries including post-traumatic stress disorder,” the opinion stated.

Officials enjoy qualified immunity “unless their conduct violates clearly established law,” the opinion said. The bar for finding an official in violation is quite high since it generally demands both a precedent in case law as well as a “high degree of specificity.”

The Supreme Court’s ruling argued that the lower court relied too heavily on a 2004 case, Amnesty America v. West Hartford, which itself arguably did not clearly establish that the specific use of force employed by Zorn violated the Constitution: “Reasonable officials would not ‘interpret [Amnesty America] to establish’ that using a routine wristlock to move a resistant protester after warning her, without more, violates the Constitution.”

Justice Sonia Sotomayor dissented from the majority opinion and was joined by Justices Elena Kagan and Ketanji Brown Jackson. The dissenting opinion held that “the Second Circuit did not err in holding that Zorn is not entitled to qualified immunity at this stage. At the very least, the decision below was not so wrong as to warrant the ‘extraordinary remedy of a summary reversal.'”

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