OPINION: Say his name: Justice for Kohen Wiley Why we must abolish qualified immunity

By Taiquan L. Coleman

JA Guest Writer

As I pen this editorial more than 1,000 miles away in what has been described as the “birthplace of American Democracy” on the eve of our nation’s semiquincentennial, I may have gone my entire life without knowing Senatobia, Mississippi, existed. But now, I stand with Mississippians and Americans across the country calling not only for justice for one-year-old Kohen Wiley, who was fatally shot because of an officer’s reckless indifference, but also an end to qualified immunity.

Established in Pierson v. Ray (1967) and cemented in Harlow v. Fitzgerald (1982), qualified immunity has no basis in the constitution and is a bastardization of federal civil rights statute Section 1983, which the Reconstruction Era Congress introduced and passed with the intention to establish “a system in which federal courts were to enforce newly created federal constitutional rights against state officials through civil and criminal sanctions.”  

Unfortunately, this Warren Court advent now states that unless a “clearly established” right was violated, regardless of officer bias or intent, the officer is entitled to immunity. This narrow interpretation has allowed the Supreme Court and lower courts to dismiss officers’ egregious behavior with impunity, and has allowed the officers themselves to evade accountability. Or as Mississippi’s very own District Judge Carlton Reeves contended in his 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. 

Whether through judicial or legislative intervention, both of which seem unlikely at present, we must reevaluate and abolish this unconstitutional shield. Moreover, the Court must reverse the 11th Circuit’s holding in Corbitt v. Vickers (2019), which granted an officer immunity because, despite this wanton disregard for life, the force was intended for the family dog, Bruce, not the ten-year-old he shot. The child identified in Corbitt (2019) as SDC survived; Kohen did not.

The Wiley family deserved better, and as Ella Baker once said, until the killing of “[B]lack mothers’ sons, becomes as important to the rest of the country as the killing of a white mother’s son, we who believe in freedom cannot rest…” 

Mississippi, goddamn. 

Taiquan L. Coleman is an independent researcher and third generation Brooklynite. In addition to more than a decade of service in the New York City and New York State legislatures, he holds an M.S. in Government Affairs and Advocacy from Albany Law School and a B.A. in American History from the State University of New York at Albany.