Officers Immune From Suit in Death of Restrained Man, Court Says

California police officers who sat on a man’s back and held him down at the direction of a paramedic before the man died aren’t liable for civil rights violations, a divided Ninth Circuit said Monday.

“The law did not clearly establish, nor was it otherwise obvious, that the officers’ actions, directed by medical personnel, would violate Perez’s constitutional rights,” at the time of Joseph Perez’s death in 2017, Judge Danielle J. Forrest, of the US District Court for the Ninth Circuit, wrote for the majority opinion.

Qualified immunity shields law-enforcement from civil liability unless the “unlawfulness of their conduct ...