Next, the police officer needs to face charges for his role in this. He failed in his duty to the community.
Finally, the police department needs to be held accountable for their role and pay damages to this man.
Not a lawyer, but I thought qualified immunity gave protection from civil liability, not criminal.
If you aren't found to be on the hook by a civil court you basically can't be found guilty by a criminal one (barring very specific statutes or legal precedents that are relevant to the facts in question).
People can sue each other for things that are not crimes, and you can go to criminal court over things you can't be sued for. Qualified immunity has no bearing on criminal proceedings. For example, if George Floyd's estate sued Chauvin directly I wouldn't be surprised if they lost because of QI, even though Chauvin was charged and convicted for murder.
However civil lawsuits can be brought by the victim. Criminal lawsuits have to be brought by the state. Which usually will mean the District Attorney. Who normally has a close relationship with the police and should be assumed to be reluctant to bring cases against them.
Therefore, in practice, civil law is the only meaningful remedy. So qualified immunity has been a huge civil rights problem since it was invented in 1982.
(Not a lawyer, but I like to read. BTW it could be worse - look up judicial immunity some time. Corrupt judges truly have nothing to fear from their corruption.)
I’d be more keen here in prosecuting the people who devised the flowchart that the police are following, for not engineering it to be robust against this failure mode. We shouldn’t expect humans to do an extra non-obvious step (checking the criminal’s file against the fingerprints they took) if the flowchart doesn’t require it, especially under time-pressure to “get the job done”; instead, we should make the flowchart require it.
When you’ve devised a system such that the human “components” of your system don’t have the necessary information from their vantage-point to correct the behaviour of the system, the system itself must be designed to be self-correcting. Because, at that point, that’s the only kind of correction it can have.
This is how we do modern medicine: a given doctor or nurse or specialist has no idea who you are or what your story is, outside of the small window they are told to see you in. They’re also just cogs in their machine. But the process itself — run mostly through medical charts — drives patients toward the treatment they need nevertheless; and there are many checks and fallback cases built into both the trained human processes, and the automated processes, to get patients who fall through one crack back on track toward treatment/good health outcomes.
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Also, a tangent re: prosecuting those responsible for engineering the process:
Back in Ancient Greece, the Lottery system of electing a leader had one important feature not oft-mentioned in modern discourse, but which was perhaps the keystone to understanding the Lottery system as a whole: if the polity didn’t like a leader’s policies, they’d drag them out and lynch them (or whatever the Ancient Greek equivalent of lynching was.) There was no concept of “impeachment”; it was just a question of surviving your term, by doing things that don’t anger your polity too much. (And as such, probably the whole reason for electing a leader by sortition in the first place, would have been that nobody wants to go into politics if you’re only one misstep away from a lynching at all times. So you have to force people to do the job; and if you’re forcing people to do a job that’s net-negative for them, you should at least be fair in your selection process by making it random.)
In modern times, capital-E Engineers already have to sign off on the designs that pass through their hands; and they can then be held criminally liable if those things fail for reasons they should have been able to foresee. This rarely happens, though, because Engineers, out of equal parts conscientiousness and self-interest, have built up a large body of best-practices, of meta rules and guidelines to follow when defining domain rules and guidelines, that either avoid failures, or at least outright reject “impossible to make sound” designs.
What I’m saying is: legislators and (especially) regulators really need to hold the burden of ultimate responsibility — criminal liability, even — when a defined-by-regulation process fails. They should be “signing off on” processes and workflows they define, the same way a civil Engineer would sign off on a bridge design. We probably shouldn’t be lynching them, but we should at least be taking all those civil suits over wrongful imprisonment, and targeting them directly at these policy-makers. Being a policy-maker should be a duty, not a privilege: something with perhaps more down-side than up-side.
(To be clear, even without such a policy in place, a large number of criminally-insane people already do claim to be misidentified because “they’re not John Smith, they’re Jesus Christ!” And these people do tend to really believe that, to the point where their behaviour isn’t all that different from someone who’s been misidentified. It’d be very hard to define a policy that would precisely delineate which stories should be looked into, vs. which are balderdash.)
We need more simple automated cross-checks to decrease false-positive rates. We need scalable solutions.
I think you're overestimating the number of people incarcerated for criminal insanity and underestimating the number of resources available.
But maybe the GP meant a not-so-detailed investigation. A regular investigation, per se. A cursory investigation, even.
... but we have the resources to do a security-clearance-style background check on every individual that is incarcerated against their will for reason of mental illness. I'd consider that sufficient.
If the state (or other organization) doesn't have enough resources to do a detailed investigation, then it should not be taking away freedoms for whomever it is unable to perform the detailed investigation for.
I’d expect a system where people are forced into roles of political power and punished for failing to perform to degenerate into a bunch of corrupt policymakers doing what their rich patrons tell them to, in exchange for protection and wealth.
It is the police officer's job and duty to do the investigation. He was negligent at that duty to the point of costing someone dearly. He should be prosecuted. What if a truck driver was negligent in driving, causing someone to spend 2 years in the hospital, wouldn't they be worthy of prosecution?
In my post above I've suggested that police and public officials be prosecuted but I'll nuance that by saying that ought to be in cases of exceptional negligence. Moreover, if the granularity isn't right the law wouldn't be effective, either it would be ignored and the status quo remain, or public servants would become too timid to do their work effectively.
You are right, much of the problem lies with those hidden and unknown gnomes who draft the laws that politicians often blindly pass and also those who 'engineer' the way the police work (and/or the way the law is administered). As I've said in my post it's time these people were brought to account. For starters, their names ought to adorn all draft laws, briefing/organizational documents, etc. Unfortunately, there's a snowball's chance of it ever happening.