Let’s get personal here. Again.

I allege that UAMS doctors, nurses and other personnel falsely imprisoned, assaulted, battered and technically raped my son as defined by the Clery Act.

We filed a claim against UAMS for its part in allowing the medical staff to run amuck.

UAMS answered that it denies all the allegations. This compounds the respondeat superior liability as UAMS did not make a reasonable investigation before filing the answer. (See Rule of Civil Procedure 11)

There were plenty of videos online and that I was more than happy to share informally.

Jumping ahead a bit, lead attorney for UAMS, Mrs. Sherri Robinson, met with me briefly for a formal production of documents earlier this week. We touched on the plausibility of a suit against individual doctors, nurses, clinicians, etc. Mrs. Robinson informed me that for the nurses and clinicians who don’t carry private medical malpractice insurance, she would be defending them and she would probably assert Qualified Immunity.

Sherri, Sherri, Sherri…

First, it is not a medical malpractice case. It is a tort case for false imprisonment, aggravated assault and battery. As I told Mrs. Robinson, a seasoned attorney earning over $160K per year, even if the nurses were Florence Nightingales, which they were not, they were not allowed to treat a patient without informed consent. They certainly were not allowed to bind his hands and feet to a cot and inject him with enough chemical restraints to kill a man.

“Qualified immunity” is not a get out of jail free card.

Qualified immunity is a legal doctrine that protects government officials from civil lawsuits for money damages, as long as they didn’t violate a person’s “clearly established” constitutional or statutory rights that a reasonable person would know.

In civil court, qualified immunity might protect the official if the battery happened in the course of doing their job and there wasn’t a clearly established legal precedent saying that specific behavior was unconstitutional.

It only applies to civil suits, not criminal charges. So, if a government employee commits a crime (like battery or assault), they can still be criminally charged—qualified immunity has zero bearing on that.

Qualified immunity typically only applies to discretionary acts, not ministerial acts or outright criminal behavior.

Discretionary acts = things an official has to use judgment or choice to carry out. For example: deciding what treatment to propose to help a patient in a state-run hospital give informed consent. (It is possible to hold a person for 72 hours, if not done with reckless disregard for the truth, but in this case, my son was held for about 332 hours and was not informed of his rights or provided an attorney to advocate for his right to leave. There was not a single document filed in court to contend that he was a danger to himself or others.)

Ministerial acts = routine, required tasks where the official has no real room to choose. For example: where the doctor did not inform the patient of his options or the patient was informed, refused treatment and asked to leave against medical advice, the doctor is required to discharge the patient.

Regardless of the civil consequences, the UAMS self-policing agency was required to make at least a rudimentary investigation into the alleged criminal conduct. Here, the police told me to stop communicating evidence to them. And any surveillance video taken by security, the doctors or the police, even in the emergency room, was purportedly destroyed.

My layperson, aced-the-LSAT, on my way to study law answer to the question, “is qualified immunity a get-out-of-jail-free card?” No.

What say you? Comment below.