Reeves wrote that it was “difficult to see qualified immunity’s creation as anything other than a backlash to the civil rights movement,” given the historical context. “The justices took a law meant to protect freed people exercising their federal rights in Southern states after the Civil War, then flipped its meaning,” he noted. “In creating qualified immunity, the high court protected the Southern officials still violating those federal rights 100 years after the war ended. Southern trees bear strange fruit, indeed.”
Qualified Immunity is the most bizarre and backward doctrine. It basically says that the constitution–you know, that piece of law that lays out how the government will protect its people from itself?–that it doesn’t always apply. As long as the government can think of a slightly new way to violate it, then it doesn’t count.