Messiah Nantwi was not perfect, but he was a son, a nephew, a Bronxite, and unfortunately, the seventh incarcerated New Yorker to die in custody since 17 February 2025. While we may never truly know what led to his death, it is clear that were it not for the correction officers’ depraved indifference to human life, he would still be alive today. And until the judicial doctrine known as qualified immunity is abolished, the officers may never be held accountable for their actions.
Created in 1967 by the Warren Court to protect police officers from personal liability when acting in “good faith,” qualified immunity is a perversion of the federal civil rights statute 42 US § 1983, which was passed by the Reconstructionist-Era Congress in 1871 to protect African Americans from the Ku Klux Klan and other white supremacist organizations.
District Judge Reeves put it best when he stated in his recent Green v. Thomas (2024) opinion, “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. 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.”
Now one would assume that beating an unarmed person would be deemed unreasonable, however over the last 60 years, both the Supreme Court and lower courts have overly relied on qualified immunity and shirked their responsibility to interpret statutes by holding that unless an officer had violated a “clearly established” right or the plaintiff had found a case with factual similarity where it was denied, the officer was entitled to immunity.
It is time to reconsider and ultimately abolish qualified immunity in our state courts. States like Colorado, Montana, Nevada, and New Mexico have already taken steps in this direction by ending the doctrine in their courts, and New York should follow suit.
The Supreme Court must revisit its decision in Harlow (1982), which has essentially given officers absolute immunity because, as Michael Silverstein notes, “the narrower the right, the more difficult it is to find factually similar precedent.” In other words, a right will never be clearly established, until it is clearly established, thus creating a catch-22 and putting the burden on the plaintiff. The Court must also revisit Graham (1989) and end the myth of the “reasonable officer” upon which the doctrine rests.
Now, some claim that reforming the doctrine would negatively impact officer retention and open officers up to personal liability. The former has yet to be proven but remains a talking point; while the latter has been debunked by UCLA law Professor Joanna Schwartz, who found that “governments paid 99.98% of the dollars that plaintiffs recovered in lawsuits alleging civil rights violations by law enforcement.”
Lastly, to echo Stan German of the New York County Defender Services, “True. [Nantwi] was incarcerated, but he was still entitled, like all of us, to basic human dignity and safety.” Therefore, it is clear that qualified immunity must be reevaluated and abolished, whether through judicial action by the Court or legislative intervention. Messiah Nantwi deserved better. Robert Brooks deserved better. We all do.
Taiquan L. Coleman is a third-generation Brooklynite who has served Black and Brown communities across three of the five boroughs, in various roles, in the New York State Assembly, New York State Senate, and New York City Council.