In theory, yes. In practice, how often do you hear of prosecutors willing to admit past mistakes? Even when there is overwhelming evidence that the prosecution got it wrong? I believe that the prosecutors have a greater personal interest in their reputation, their chance for higher office, and their pension (see Nifong), than they do in “justice.” Balancing this self interest requires accountability. The current system has not been able to hold prosecutors accountable.

“Supreme Court to hear Los Angeles County district attorney immunity case”

http://www.latimes.com/news/local/la-na-scotus15apr15,0,2869765.story

Remove all immunity from everyone. President, judges, prosecutors, police, everyone.

by draining government coffers, you’re punishing all the citizens of the state rather than specifically the wrongdoer.

If the wrongdoer is sued in his official capacity, then he is an agent/employee of these citizens and hence they are liable for his conduct. When my government acts, it acts as my agent, and I foot the bill. If it acts badly, I am also responsible for the bill — and to elect different officials who will make sure bad acts don’t repeat. When a police officer beats the crap out of someone, he is doing so as my agent and in my name (even though I would disapprove of the action), and I accept responsibility for compensating the victim. When a company commits fraud we don’t allow the shareholders to say “you can’t sue the company directly — that would drain money out of our personal coffers, and we didn’t do anything wrong — you must sue the individual employees who committed the fraud”. We all are the shareholds in the state we are citizens of.

From a different point of view, you seem to say that having each victim of government abuse should bear the costs of his abuse is fairer than sharing these costs among all of society. Does it really make sense?

For example, if the government is regularly harrassing and jailing the poor black population, and then shielding its actions behind “state sovereignty,” then you (from an economic perspective) are transfering resources from a poor community to the general community. I dont know anyone who would agree to a tax that did this. In fact, this is a special tax that is entirely at the whim of the goverment to whom it applies and, as a matter of empirical result, especially targets the poor.

Either way though, the solution is not through law suits per se, but through a more direct means of punsihing prosecutors. It would be great if the political mechanisms work well enough that people would be outraged and that would create changes (read: firings) but that will never happen. Bar overseers and maybe official review boards or Ombudsmans with atual teeth would likely be the best way to punish prosecutors who do those egregious things that are mentioned above.

I disagree on the sufficiency of curbing abuse via disbarring the prosecutors: it stops the prosecutor from continuing the abuse, but it does not compensate those who were harmed by the abuse.

The real outrage here is that you can’t sue these prosecutors and policemen in state court for the torts they commit; and the name of the outrage is “sovereign immunity”. An absolute monarch (say a King of England in the 15th century) cannot be sued in “his own courts” — the judges serve at his pleasure, he is allowed to change the law at any point, and in any case there is no way to enforce a judgement against him. For some strange reason this doctrine has continued to apply to the US States (and the United States) on the theory that they retained the powers of the King after the revolution. The problem is that this doctrine doesn’t make sense in a republican form of government. The people are the real sovereign. It is simply not true that the judges serve at the pleasure of some notional “sovereign” that is also free to amend laws retrospectively etc. Rather, the people should be free to sue government officials (in their official capacity!) for torts they commit in the name of the state. Life tenure for judges, and general judicial independence means that the Courts are not faced with a conflict of interest when they resolve such lawsuits.

You see, for a Federal Court to step in and meddle in the affairs of a State government, something truly extraordinary must have taken place, and the violation must be of constitutional proportions. Thus the bar is set very high. It simply should not be the case that S.1983 should be the only remedy for these violations. Rather, the main remedy should be a tort lawsuit in state court. Even though I hate the even idea of “qualified immunity”, each time the USSC come down on the side of shielding police officers, each time I realize that the problem is not with S.1983 itself, but rather that S.1983 seems to be the only avenue open — that the “sovereign monarch” has exercized his authority to capriciously shield his favorite agents.

Imagine you arrive at a house, and the door is completely barred. Only a small window is one-quarter open. Complaining about S.1983 amounts to thinking “The window seems to be the only way in, but I can’t squeeze myself in through it — let’s try getting it more open”. You should really be thinking “the window isn’t the normal way into a house; we should try to get the door open”.