1. This § 1983 case raises two serious questions related to the doctrine of qualified immunity. The case arises from the shooting death of Jonathan Victor by Sherriff's Deputy Matthew Hunady at the scene of a car accident. When Officer Hunady shot and killed Mr. Victor, he was—according to eyewitness testimony, supported by video—'just standing there." Ex. 1 at 7. Officer Hunady knew from other first responders that Mr. Victor appeared injured and was acting erratically. Mr. Victor was not armed. Id. at 6. Instead of attempting to deescalate the situation, Officer Hunady aimed a rifle at, shouted at, and ultimately killed Mr. Victor.

First, this case implicates the standards governing failure-to-train claims against supervisory law enforcement officials. Ms. Chisesi, administratrix of Mr. Victor's estate, sued both Officer Hunady and the Sherriff himself, Huey Mack. The claim against Sherriff Mack was based on his total failure—as reflected in fact and expert evidence—to train Officer Hunady on how to deal safely with injured people who shows signs of an altered state of mind. The district court denied Sherriff Mack's summary-judgment motion asserting qualified immunity, finding disputed factual issues, but the Eleventh Circuit reversed. The court of appeals asserted that the evidence was too "equivocal" on whether there was an "obvious need for more or different training" in this area. Ex. 1 at 17-18.

This holding implicates disagreements among the courts of appeals about whether and when such failure-to-train claims turn on questions of fact. The Eleventh Circuit treated this as a purely legal question, so it did not analyze what a reasonable juror could conclude or infer from the evidence about the need for training on this subject. See id. By contrast, other circuits treat this kind of question as at least partly factual. For example, the Tenth Circuit holds that whether a plaintiff showed "the 'need for more or different training'... is not a purely legal question," and thus an appellate court "[can] not review it on an appeal from the denial of summary judgment." See Valdez v. Macdonald, 66 F.4th 796, 818-19 (10th Cir. 2023). Thus, the Eleventh Circuit's divergent approach goes to both the proper merits resolution—since material factual disputes foreclose summary judgment—and whether the court even had appellate jurisdiction in the first place. See Johnson v. Jones, 515 U.S. 304, 314 (1995).

Second, this case is an ideal vehicle to—as Justice Thomas has urged—"reconsider [the Court's] qualified immunity jurisprudence." Ziglar v. Abbasi, 582 U.S. 120, 160 (2017) (Thomas, J., concurring). The Court has "not attempted to locate [the current qualified-immunity] standard in the common law as it existed in 1871... and some evidence supports the conclusion that common-law immunity as it existed in 1871 looked quite different from our current doctrine." Id. at 159 (citing Baude, Is Qualified Immunity Unlawful?, 106 Cal. L. Rev. 45, 51-62 (2018)). What's more, new evidence shows that "the Reconstruction Congress that passed Section 1983 meant to explicitly displace common law immunities," which seriously undermines

Whether the doctrine of qualified immunity in Section 1983 cases should be reconsidered in light of historical evidence about the original understanding of common law immunities and the Reconstruction Congress's intent