Ending Kool-ified Immunity, OH YEAH!
When an average person destroys the property of another person, the victim may file a lawsuit and be compensated for his losses. However, when the Kool-Aid man trespasses and destroys an external wall of your home, Kool-ified immunity means that he is not liable for any losses you may face. His blatant disregard for private property is regularly on display not only implicitly in his actions, but in his words. “Walls are nothing but obstacles between me and kids in need of refreshment,” the Kool-Aid Man said. “I pretend like they’re not even there.”
The doctrine is unconstitutional, even though it may have origins around the founding of the United States. Photographic evidence places the Kool-Aid man with Benjamin Franklin in 1752, to whom he presumably time-traveled.
The flawed doctrine has also been replicated over the years, spurring something called “qualified immunity” in 1967. Unlike Kool-ified immunity, “qualified immunity” applies to police officers, rather than anthropomorphic beverages. The doctrine protects police officers who knowingly violate constitutional rights from lawsuits.
The Civil Rights Act of 1871, signed into law by Ulysses S. Grant (a notorious beverage enthusiast, but a non-drinker of Kool-Aid) included a provision now known as 42 U.S. Code Section 1983 that makes government officials liable for violating the constitutional rights of citizens. But the Supreme Court would later render this law effectively useless by protecting officials from liability unless they violated “clearly established law.” In other words, a plaintiff would need to point to a prior case with functionally identical facts.
This standard, nearly impossible for a civil rights plaintiff to clear, has protected officers from lawsuits accusing them of tasing a pregnant woman, handcuffing a crying 7-year-old and cruelly sicking a police dog on a surrendering person, among countless other offenses. Qualified immunity has thus damaged citizens’ trust of the legal system, reduced accountability for police officers with long track records of abuse and robbed victims of justice.
Similarly, the Kool-Aid man has committed innumerable crimes in the name of thirst (I mean, whom’st among us…) without liability. Kool-Aid man isn’t going away. It’s time we hold him accountable and eliminate Kool-ified immunity.
