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In a welcome win for police accountability and gun rights, a federal court rejected a Connecticut police officer’s demand for qualified immunity after he arrested a driver with a valid gun permit for his legally-owned firearm. Blocking the driver’s lawsuit and siding with the officer, Judge Janet Bond Atherton wrote in her opinion, “would eviscerate Fourth Amendment protections for lawfully armed individuals.”
One November night in 2018, Basel Soukaneh was driving through Waterbury, Connecticut when his iPhone GPS froze. To better troubleshoot, he stopped his car but kept the engine running. Unfortunately, as Judge Atherton recounted, Soukaneh had stopped in a “dark and high-crime area...well-known for prostitution, drug transactions, and other criminal activity.”
In a welcome win for police accountability and gun rights, a federal court rejected a Connecticut police officer’s demand for qualified immunity after he arrested a driver with a valid gun permit for his legally-owned firearm. Blocking the driver’s lawsuit and siding with the officer, Judge Janet Bond Atherton wrote in her opinion, “would eviscerate Fourth Amendment protections for lawfully armed individuals.”
One November night in 2018, Basel Soukaneh was driving through Waterbury, Connecticut when his iPhone GPS froze. To better troubleshoot, he stopped his car but kept the engine running. Unfortunately, as Judge Atherton recounted, Soukaneh had stopped in a “dark and high-crime area...well-known for prostitution, drug transactions, and other criminal activity.”
From there, it escalated quickly. Andrzejewski grabbed and shoved Soukaneh out of his own car, slammed him on the ground, and threw him in handcuffs in the back of a squad car, Soukaneh recalled. The officer put his hands in Soukaneh’s pockets and said he found drugs; they were nitroglycerin pills for Soukaneh’s heart. Andrzejewski also removed—and promptly seized—$320 in cash and a flash drive containing photos and videos of Soukaneh’s deceased father he found on Soukaneh’s person.