Plaintiff-Appellant Richard Allen Paz was at home when armed police officers broke into his backyard and ordered him outside at gunpoint. They had an arrest warrant for a fugitive, whom Mr. Paz denied knowing. Officers lacked a search warrant for the property. They ran Mr. Paz’s fingerprints and arrested him upon discovering that he had outstanding arrest warrants.

Mr. Paz brought a Section 1983 suit pro se seeking redress for the officers’ blatant violation of his Fourth Amendment rights. He was denied relief by the district court because of qualified immunity. A panel of the Fifth Circuit affirmed, holding that “[b]y failing to brief the matter before the district court and not having any evidence of clearly established law at the time of violation, Paz did not meet his burden to defeat qualified immunity.”

The panel opinion imposes yet another baseless procedural hurdle between victims of government misconduct and the relief to which they are legally entitled under Section 1983. For many victims of civil-rights violations, the clearly established law standard in qualified immunity doctrine imposes a practically insurmountable barrier to holding public officials accountable for their misconduct. The panel’s decision exacerbates this injustice by gratuitously limiting courts’ legal inquiry to those cases cited by the plaintiff—shifting the focus from what officers should have known when they committed the conduct at issue to what litigants know about the law. This rule places yet another judicially invented obstacle to congressionally mandated relief for plaintiffs, like Mr. Paz, who cannot afford legal representation and are not conversant in legal research, analysis, or writing—and yet still have viable claims for which the legislature has established remedy. En banc review is needed to eliminate the conflict between the panel’s errant decision and Congress’s democratically enacted remedial scheme.