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See att.com slash iPhone for details. This is our American stories and up next it's time for our Rule of Law series where we tell stories about what happens when the rule of law is present or absent in our lives and we tell these stories because what we have here in this country, my goodness, the rights we have, the interests that are protected from our property rights which are very important right down to our most basic civil rights from free speech and right through the criminal procedure rights, the right to an attorney and the right to a speedy trial. These are not normal things in other places around the world and our founders, well, it's their work that enshrined these rights and the separation of powers that created this great country and that's why we tell these rule of law stories.
And up next, our own Monty Montgomery with a rule of law story you won't believe. James King was born and raised in Michigan and that's where our story begins in the state's second largest city, Grand Rapids. Summer of 2014, I was I think 21 years old at the time going to school at Grand Valley State University. I had an internship at a place called The Geek Group. I also had a summer job as a low voltage technician. I got out of that job a little bit early that day, I stopped at my house for, made some lunch and then I walked to my internship, it was only about six blocks away but I didn't make it there.
I didn't make it all six blocks. I made it about four blocks and then I was stopped by two plainclothes men who had asked me who I was. When they asked me who I was, I, perhaps being a little bit naive but I've always been a little bit pro-social so I told them who I was.
I said, hey, I'm James, what's going on, what's up? Their immediate response to me telling them who I was was, is that your real name? And I said, yes, that's my real name and then they asked if I had my wallet on me. I kind of got a weird vibe from these guys almost immediately so I said no, which was not the truth. I did have my wallet on me but I didn't really want to tell strangers that so I said no and then one of the guys boxed me out. One guy had me step towards him and the other guy went around side me and then I was between the two of them and one man said, oh, if that's true, then what's in your back pocket?
And I'm like, okay, I'm pretty uncomfortable right now. And I was just like, well, it's really none of your business but the one guy reached into my pants and took my wallet out of my pocket. That was the point where I thought that I was being mugged. The men that did this didn't introduce themselves.
I didn't know who they were or what they were after. So I thought I was being mugged and I actually yelled out, are you guys mugging me? And I tried to run, which is where this all goes sideways in a hurry.
Pretty much made it about four steps and it was tackled to the ground. At that point in time, I started screaming and yelling for anybody that was nearby to help call the police. I was yelling for the police over and over again.
A fight ensued for quite a while. I was not fighting them, but I was fighting to get away. And I was eventually just beaten unconscious and put in chokehold and blacked out. And when the uniformed police officer showed up, I thought that I was saved. I thought, thank God they're here. I'm going to get out of this. I thought I was going to die.
So I was relieved. And then very surprised when they arrested me and didn't arrest the people that were assaulting me. Because the men who assaulted James weren't muggers. So this was an undercover fugitive task force, a joint task force between a federal agent and a Grand Rapids City police detective. Who had caught the wrong guy. Having seen the person they were looking for much later on, I look absolutely nothing like him.
They were working off of a license photo and an eight-year-old Facebook photo. So their information was exceedingly bad for the job that they were trying to do. I should probably back up and mention that instead of saying, sorry, we were wrong. We got the wrong guy.
We shouldn't have done that. They charged me with three felonies, a felonious assault, fleeing and eluding and assaulting a federal officer. Beaten and battered, James was taken to the hospital, still confused about what exactly was happening. I went right from being beaten to being cuffed and put in the back of an ambulance. So I don't really, I don't think I pieced it together until much later when I was put in jail after the hospital and then was very confused for more than a few days. I'm going to take a moment to sort of talk about this hospital scenario because it's something that I've sort of ruminated about quite a bit in the last six and a half years. But I remember being, I was in the hospital bed and I was handcuffed to the bed and there was a uniformed officer there that was in charge of just watching me. And we had struck up a conversation and we got to know each other a little bit.
He had a daughter that was going to Grand Valley, same school that I went to. And he, I don't think it took him very long to realize that the situation I was in was not right and I didn't belong there. And what happened to me was not okay. I remember he loosened the cuffs on me and was just overall very nice to me up until one of the, the Grand Valley City Police Detective, his partner came into my hospital room and sort of made some derogatory comments toward me and then took my notepad that I had at the time. Because I knew, I knew I was in trouble. I didn't know what kind of trouble, but I started taking notes as best I could to recollect everything that happened.
And he took that notebook from me never to get that back. But it was a weird, I could feel the tension in the room as that uniformed police officer who was sort of, you know, understanding that what was happening to me wasn't right. When the other person was in the room, he wouldn't look at me and he wouldn't, wouldn't really speak up or speak his mind as if, you know, it's sort of like, I don't know how to say it, like almost like you're in a fraternity, you know, and, and you can't speak out against one of your own. When he left, that uniformed officer that was in charge of watching me, I saw him like want to look towards me and say, I'm so sorry that this happened and I wish you the best.
But because there was other police officers there, he didn't. And I saw that moment of hesitation and I thought about it so much because in a weird way I feel bad for him, for having to see his, the people he works with to do that to people and get away with it and be okay with it. I can barely begin to describe the amount of stress that I was under between the time I was charged, put in jail, arraigned, bailed out, and then I couldn't leave the state and had to wait, I think six months before the criminal trial. So that whole time, and I was trying to go to school, I was trying to be a student while the whole time thinking I may go to prison for crimes I didn't commit.
So that was certainly some of the most stressful times of my entire life. And in hindsight too, it's one of those things where I couldn't really tell anybody about it because it was such a bizarre thing that nobody really understood. Um, I, you know, I had some people that would want to hear about it. They would be like, Oh, Oh, I bet that's not the whole story.
You know, what did you really do? That kind of thing doesn't really happen, you know? And in some sense that's, that's understandable because it sounds, it's such a crazy story. And to have it happen to me and I've never met anybody else that has that happened to him.
So there's no, you know, I don't have any, a sounding board for this and I, and I haven't for, for six and a half years. Then came the criminal trial against James. The first day of the trial, the prosecution goes first.
So I had to sit there and listen without any avenue of having people understand that that what they're saying was not true at all. Basically referring to me as a growling animal, like a vicious criminal and that I, um, spun around on them and assaulted them and all these just ludicrous statements that is insane to me that you can work for the public as a police officer and be willing to get on stand and take an oath and lie through your teeth because you don't want to admit that you made a mistake. So at the end of the second day of the trial, the jury went into deliberation and my attorney told me that he didn't know how long it would take.
It could take anywhere from a few minutes to a few days to a few weeks. So I went home and I don't think I was home for more than 20 minutes and my attorney called me and said, hey, get back to the courthouse right now. And so I had, uh, I actually beat my parents and my family back to the courthouse and then the jury, this four person stood up and said, on all three counts, um, we find the defendant not guilty. After all that, um, when I was going to walk out of the courthouse, one of the jurors came up to me, an older woman, and she said, she gave me a hug and said, I'm so sorry for what those officers put you through.
She said, I knew the whole time that you had not done anything wrong. When we come back, more of this remarkable story here on our American stories. Black Friday is coming. And for the adults in your life who love the coolest toys, well, there's something for them this year too. Bartesian is the premier craft cocktail maker that automatically makes more than 60 seasonal and classic cocktails, each in under 30 seconds at the push of a button. And right now, Bartesian is having a huge site-wide sale. You can get $100 off any cocktail maker or cocktail maker bundle when you spend $400 or more. So if the cocktail lover in your life has been good this year or the right kind of bad, get them Bartesian at the push of a button, make bar quality cosmopolitans, martinis, Manhattan's and more, all in just 30 seconds, all for $100 off. Amazing toys aren't just for kids, get $100 off a cocktail maker when you spend $400 through Cyber Monday. Visit Bartesian.com slash cocktail.
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Call one eight eight eight eight four two six three two eight for details about credit costs. And we continue with our American stories and with James King's story. Here's James lawyer Patrick Giacomo from the Institute for Justice with why they decided to open up a civil case against the officers who beat James and the astounding legal hurdles they faced. Pretty much from top to bottom, what these officers did was unconstitutional. They didn't have a reasonable basis to mistake James for the fugitive, which means that they had no reasonable basis to stop him at all, let alone arrest him or beat him up. Basically the constitution requires that officers have probable cause to arrest you for a crime. And if they don't have probable cause, they're taking you into custody is unconstitutional. And similarly, if they use excessive force against you, even if they do have probable cause that's unconstitutional here. The police had no reasonable suspicion to stop James in the first place, no probable cause to arrest him. And then they exceeded whatever restrictions on force there might've been, even if he had been the fugitive that they were looking for when they tackled him, choked him unconscious and beat him severely in the head and face. However, there's this wonderful and terrifying doctrine of qualified immunity that the police get to hide behind.
So qualified immunity is a relatively recent invention. Basically from the founding up until the middle of the 20th century, government officials were strictly liable when they violated your constitutional rights, which means they didn't have any excuse. The point that the courts drove home was we're here to decide the law and the question of law is whether this person violated your constitutional rights.
And if they did, we're going to assign damages for your injury. And then if they acted in good faith, they can ask Congress or their employer to indemnify them by paying them back the damages owed. But in the middle of the 20th century, the Supreme court carved out its first exception, which it called qualified immunity. And that's very different from the qualified immunity we have today. But in that case, the court basically said, if someone acts reasonably and in good faith, which means reasonably is any person would know that what we did was okay and good faith was I actually believed what was happening was okay, then an officer is entitled to qualified immunity, meaning you can't get any damages from them, even though they violated your constitutional rights. But in the 1980s, the Supreme court basically inverted that in a case called, um, Harlow versus Fitzgerald. And they said, you know, it's really a lot of trouble to adjudicate these cases because we're looking into whether someone had good faith.
And so instead, what we're going to do is we're going to get rid of the subjective requirement. Any government official, whether it's state or federal police or non-police, it doesn't really matter if you allege that they violated your constitutional rights, they can assert qualified immunity, and then the burden is on you to provide a specific case where a court has said basically exactly what those officials did is in fact a constitutional violation. And so the way that it comes in here is we filed a civil rights lawsuit against these officers and we said, when they did what they did to James, they violated his fourth amendment right to be free from unreasonable searches and seizures. And the officer has just said, we get qualified immunity and you can't find another case that's specific enough that shows that at every step of the way, along our interaction with James, we were violating his constitutional rights. Which is crazy because to prevent the police officers from simply getting qualified immunity and your constitutional rights hearing their day in court, you have to cite a past case that's almost perfectly identical to your own. And if there's tiny inconsequential differences, such as if you were laying down and the person in the past case was standing up when you were detained, that's different enough that you can't cite it as precedent.
The police officers get qualified immunity and your case and your rights get thrown out. The theoretical basis behind all this was that they didn't want government officials to, you know, be apprehensive about doing their job because they might get sued. And they didn't want people to act reasonably and end up being held liable for it just because they happened to technically violate the Constitution.
And the main problem with that is that that is a policy judgment that's supposed to be made by Congress. And in fact, when Congress passed the civil rights statute in the late 19th century after the Civil War, it didn't create any defense like we see today with qualified immunity. It's very frustrating because you're kind of starting from a weird position, right, where the premise of anything like qualified immunity is that the Constitution shouldn't apply unless.
But the entire purpose of the Constitution is to place limits on the government and the things that it can do. And so it makes very little sense to say, yes, the Constitution, which is the law that governs the people who govern us, the Constitution says these people can't do these things, and they did these things, but we shouldn't hold them accountable because they didn't know they shouldn't do those things. And you just have to take a step back and realize, well, that's not how the law works. I mean, if I violate the law and I didn't know I was committing a crime, that's no defense to me.
They know that they aren't accountable. And when you're not accountable, you are above the law. The law is there to hold people to account. And the way it's written right now, these doctrines of qualified immunity, these are extrajudicial, and they're immoral. So the rule of law is completely out the window on these cases.
But nevertheless, with the help of the Institute for Justice, James Case pushed forward. The way that played out in the district court, which is the lower court here, the federal trial court, the court agreed with them and it said there's no constitutional violations here and the officers are entitled to qualified immunity, so I'm going to throw James' case out. Now, we appealed that decision to the Sixth Circuit, which is the intermediate court between the trial court and the U.S. Supreme Court, and we showed them all the cases that we'd found and they actually reversed, which is a fairly miraculous outcome in the issue of qualified immunity because courts tend to favor granting qualified immunity. The thing about qualified immunity is it prevents the court from ever reaching the constitutional question. They can look at the constitutional question if they want to, but they don't have to. And so the frustrating thing is that in a lot of cases involving qualified immunity, a court will throw the case out without ever saying whether officers violated someone's constitutional rights or not. Today James' case sits before the Supreme Court to be decided, along six years after he was beaten on the streets of Grand Rapids.
But despite the wait, James thinks he's lucky. My family was as supportive of me as they possibly could have in every way. I didn't come from means. Most people would not be able to afford this, and if I didn't have the Institute of Justice representing me, and before that, Miller-Johnson, pro bono, I would have not been able to fiscally pursue this litigation at all. But my Aunt Leanne bought me a suit for the trial, my parents spent... My dad took out his 401k, cashed out his 401k for me to get me out of jail. So yeah, they were certainly there for me, and it was a pretty tumultuous time for all of us emotionally. It's crazy to say that I'm lucky, but I am because I have good representation.
I'm not in jail, and I wasn't killed. And those are not always the case for people that this has happened to. And what a story, and thanks so much to James for telling it, for his lawyer, Patrick Giacomo. My goodness, the work the folks at the Institute for Justice do, and they help defend people's civil rights, and not just on the criminal rights front, but on the civil rights front, particularly in the civil courts, and in the property rights front. And my goodness, most cops are good, most do a really good and hard job. When I was in law school, the arguments we had over qualified immunity was some of the most difficult, because when a cop goes out, we're putting him in harm's way.
We're literally throwing him into a place where he's got to make a lot of judgment calls. So there are good arguments for qualified immunity, and there are bad ones. But ultimately, we're always trying to make good cops better, and so many of the rules of our constitution just do that, because there are rules for cops and limits, and in a lot of other places, and a lot of other times there weren't, in a lot of other country, the cops are the enemy. Here there are our neighbors and friends. And again, there are some bad ones out there, and that's why we have rule of law, because they have to be punished as well.
Another of our great rule of law stories, James King's story, here on Our American Story. When you're with Amex Business Platinum, you have the card that helps you do more of what you love, like a flexible spending limit that adapts with your business. And with five times membership rewards points on flights and prepaid hotels booked on AmexTravel.com, going the extra mile for your business is even more rewarding. That's the powerful backing of American Express. Not all purchases will be approved.
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Visit standuptoallhate.org to help. Join us in calling for a hashtag timeout against hate by following at what's up with hate or posting the blue square emoji. Wakey, wakey, Sunday morning football is back in Germany. An NFL network as an NFC clash live from Allianz Arena in Munich. As the Giants square off against the Panthers, set your alarms because this waits for no one. Rise, shine football, Giants Panthers Sunday, November 10th at 9 30am Eastern only on NFL network.
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