Did you watch the trial? Because use of force trainers said 'Actually, he would have been justified to use more force here.'
And officers from Chauvin's own department testified that it was a blatant violation of policy and procedure.
So here's my point of view.
For EMTs and firefighters, professional immunity for liability (both criminal and civil) hinges on whether or not we followed our training and procedures. If we did what we were trained to do and remained within our scope of practice, we are not legally responsible for a negative patient outcome. We can still be sued for it, but showing that we followed proper procedures and best practices provides an affirmative defense. This is one of the biggest reasons that we are taught that is is important to properly document everything we do; we can reference our patient care forms and field notes to show exactly what we did, and then we can show that this exactly matches our training and the standing patient care protocols.
Professional immunity for police officers legally rests on the same basis, but historically police officers have been granted tremendous deference by the courts in a way which EMTs and firefighters have not. As a result, there has been a dramatic
judicial expansion of police immunity from, "You are not liable if you followed proper procedure." to, "You are not liable
unless it can be shown that you acted with malicious bad faith.
" Whereas EMTs and firefighters who are accused of misconduct must raise an affirmative defense at trial with facts and evidence, police who are accused of misconduct can simply have the case dismissed before reaching actual trial
unless the prosecution presents sufficient evidence to build a case for actual malice.
Note that the argument that police are being considered "guilty until proven innocent" if any other standard of defense is used does not fly, because
qualified immunity does not work that way for anyone but the police. Affirmative defenses as a whole require a demonstrated basis in fact; that's literally what makes an affirmative defense different than a "regular" defense.
More importantly, police being treated this way is a matter of
judicial fiat and not actual black-letter law. By black-letter law, qualified immunity for police officers is
not fundamentally different from qualified immunity for other professions, and this case (apparently) pushing back to the procedural standard is
not a violation of Chauvin's rights; it is simply the court sticking to the
actual law and not giving him the traditional but
extralegal deference which police are normally granted by the justice system.
I believe this is the just and proper outcome. The way judges and prosecutors regard police officers as colleagues and habitually grant them not only maximum benefit of discretion but also unofficial privileges far beyond what the law actually says, is an absolute blight upon the justice system.