Techdirt By  Tim Cushing
For the second time in about as many weeks, an appeals court has handed down a decision denying qualified immunity to a government employee. That’s good! We don’t see a lot of these. Getting more than one in a month almost feels excessive, as if we’re being set up by the courts for a few months of anger and disappointment to offset this judicial largesse.
Offsetting this unexpected goodwill towards the appellate courts in general is this fact: both cases also involve what should unquestionably be obvious violations of rights. Both cases involve fabricated evidence.
The one recently handled by the Third Circuit alleged officers hid evidence that would have cleared a man falsely accused of murder⊠and they, along with the prosecutor, kept this information from the imprisoned man for 25 years. Truly obscene and truly a blindingly obvious violation of rights, as the court noted:
We conclude that the constitutional rule that framing criminal defendants through use of fabricated evidence, including false or perjured testimony, violates their constitutional rights applies with such obvious clarity that it is unreasonable for us to conclude anything other than that the detectives were on sufficient notice that their fabrication of evidence violated clearly established law.
