Cutting the Thread
Why My Hood River Case Has Always Been About Qualified Immunity
My Hood River civil-rights case may be headed to the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit.
And let me tell you something right now: this case has never been only about me getting money because officers violated my rights. Of course, damages matter. Accountability matters. But I have been building something deeper into this record from the beginning.
This case is about qualified immunity—where it came from, how far the courts have stretched it, and whether the judiciary had the authority to add its modern “clearly established law” requirement to a statute Congress already wrote.
That is the thread I am fighting to cut.
Now, before somebody runs off and says, “Cameron says qualified immunity is already gone,” slow down. That is not what I said. Qualified immunity remains binding law. The Ninth Circuit cannot simply ignore Supreme Court precedent because I have presented a strong statutory challenge.
I understand that. My brief acknowledges it.
But understanding what the law presently requires does not mean surrendering the right to challenge whether that law was properly created in the first place. Those are two separate intellectual exercises, and a serious litigant must know how to do both.
So my appeal operates on two tracks. First, I am arguing that the judgment should be reversed under the law that already exists. Second, I have deliberately preserved the deeper question for possible Supreme Court review:
What authorizes the judiciary to withhold damages under 42 U.S.C. § 1983 merely because a constitutional right was not “clearly established” through a sufficiently similar prior case?
Bruh—come on. If Congress wrote the liability rule, show me where Congress wrote that additional requirement.
That is the question.
Read the Statute—Then Show Me the Immunity Language
When an official invokes qualified immunity today, courts ordinarily ask two questions:
Do the facts show a violation of a constitutional right?
Was that right “clearly established” when the conduct occurred?
Under the modern standard associated with Harlow v. Fitzgerald, an official can be protected from damages unless existing law gave sufficiently clear notice that the particular conduct was unlawful. The Court designed that objective standard partly to protect officials from the burdens of litigation. Harlow v. Fitzgerald, 457 U.S. 800, 818 (1982).
All right. I understand the doctrine.
But now let us read the statute.
Section 1983 imposes liability upon a person who, under color of state law, subjects another person to the deprivation of rights secured by the Constitution and federal law. Read 42 U.S.C. § 1983.
Where does the statute say the injured person must also locate an earlier judicial opinion involving materially similar facts?
It does not.
And I am not making the simplistic argument that every interaction with an officer creates automatic liability. Section 1983 has actual elements. A plaintiff must establish state action, causation, a federally protected right, and a deprivation. The underlying constitutional standard may itself account for reasonableness, necessity, urgency, and what the officer knew at the time.
My challenge begins after those legal requirements are satisfied. If a government actor caused a proven constitutional deprivation under color of state law, why does the injured person face another barrier that Congress never placed in the text?
That is not some wild question. That is statutory interpretation. That is separation of powers. And that is exactly the kind of question courts should be able to answer without hiding behind the fact that the doctrine has been repeated for decades.
Congress Already Spoke in 1871
Section 1983 originated in Section 1 of the Civil Rights Act of 1871—the Ku Klux Klan Act. Congress created a federal remedy against persons who used state authority to deprive people of federally protected rights.
The original enactment went further. It stated that liability applied notwithstanding any contrary state law, statute, ordinance, regulation, custom, or usage. Those were not merely the passionate words of one legislator on the floor. That language was enacted into law. Civil Rights Act of 1871, ch. 22, § 1, 17 Stat. 13.
That matters because the Supreme Court later reasoned that Congress legislated against a background of common-law defenses and implicitly carried certain protections into § 1983. In Pierson v. Ray, for example, the Court recognized a good-faith-and-probable-cause defense for police officers and stated that § 1983 should be read against the background of tort liability. Pierson v. Ray, 386 U.S. 547, 555–57 (1967).
But wait a minute.
If the original enacted language expressly displaced contrary state laws, customs, and usages, how do we mechanically assume that Congress silently imported defenses from that same legal background?
I am not saying the answer must be that every historical immunity vanished. Judicial immunity, legislative immunity, and historically grounded defenses each have their own origins and doctrinal settings. My argument is narrower and more precise.
Even if some common-law defenses survived the 1871 Act, the modern “clearly established law” requirement still must be reconciled with the liability rule Congress enacted. Pierson discussed good faith and probable cause. Harlow later replaced subjective good faith with a broad objective immunity test. Those are not automatically the same thing merely because courts place them under the same label.
So again: what is the legal source of the modern requirement?
Policy may explain why judges preferred it. Policy does not necessarily establish that judges possessed authority to add it.
Yes, I Corrected the 1874 Issue—That Is What Serious Scholarship Looks Like
One part of this argument requires intellectual honesty.
In an earlier filing, I treated the omission of the original notwithstanding clause as though no intervening legislative enactment had occurred. That premise was incomplete. Congress enacted the Revised Statutes of 1874, and § 1979—the predecessor of modern § 1983—did not reproduce the clause. United States v. Bowen recognizes the revision as enacted law and addresses the effect of its repeal provision. United States v. Bowen, 100 U.S. 508, 513 (1879).
I corrected that premise in my developed appellate argument.
Some people act like correcting a premise weakens you. No. Pretending an error does not exist weakens you. Correcting it forces you to construct the strongest version of the argument that survives the correction.
The real question is not whether the 1871 language can simply override the 1874 revision. It cannot. The question is whether the revisers intended to change the substance of the liability rule or merely condensed its language. The Supreme Court has permitted reference to an original enactment when a revision creates ambiguity about meaning. United States v. Lacher, 134 U.S. 624, 626–27 (1890).
And look at Jones v. Alfred H. Mayer Co. The Supreme Court considered a related Reconstruction-era civil-rights statute and treated the deletion of a similar notwithstanding clause during the 1874 revision as immaterial, describing it as presumably omitted because it was surplusage. Jones v. Alfred H. Mayer Co., 392 U.S. 409, 422 n.29 (1968).
Does Jones automatically abolish qualified immunity? No. Come on—we have to remain disciplined. But it does destroy the lazy assumption that omission of such language from the 1874 revision necessarily meant Congress intended a substantive retreat.
Recent historical scholarship advances that argument further. Patrick Jaicomo and Daniel Nelson contend that § 1983 still displaces qualified immunity and that the 1874 omission reflected editorial concision rather than substantive change. They also acknowledge what the historical evidence does not establish, including the lack of proof that Congress specifically scrutinized this particular omission. Patrick Jaicomo & Daniel Nelson, “Section 1983 (Still) Displaces Qualified Immunity,” 49 Harv. J.L. & Pub. Pol’y 151 (2026).
That article is scholarship. It is not binding precedent. I use it as supporting research, not as a magical citation that does the legal work for me.
Hencely Does Not Abolish Qualified Immunity—but Its Method Matters
My brief also relies on Hencely v. Fluor Corp., a 2026 Supreme Court decision involving judicially developed defenses in a different legal context.
The Court rejected an expansive battlefield-preemption doctrine where no constitutional or statutory text expressly displaced the claims and the challenged conduct had not been ordered or authorized by the military. Hencely v. Fluor Corp., No. 24-924 (U.S. Apr. 22, 2026).
Defendants essentially responded that Hencely had nothing to do with qualified immunity. Doctrinally, yes, it arose in another context. Methodologically, however, their answer is too easy.
I am not claiming Hencely secretly abolished police immunity. I am saying its reasoning supports a fundamental judicial inquiry: What is the legal source of a judge-made defense, and how far may courts extend that defense beyond its source?
That method matters.
Justice Thomas raised a related concern in his separate writing in Ziglar v. Abbasi, questioning whether modern qualified-immunity doctrine remains grounded in the common-law background against which Congress enacted § 1983. Ziglar v. Abbasi, 582 U.S. 120 (2017) (Thomas, J., concurring in part and concurring in the judgment).
Again, that was a concurrence. It is not controlling law. But let us not act like the statutory and historical legitimacy of qualified immunity is some internet theory nobody serious has considered. A Justice of the Supreme Court has expressly questioned its foundation.
The Ninth Circuit Has a Job—and I Know Its Limits
The Ninth Circuit is bound by Supreme Court precedent. A three-judge panel cannot overrule Harlow because Cameron Wilson says the statutory history deserves reconsideration.
I know that.
That is why the brief does not ask the panel to pretend stare decisis does not exist. My existing-law grounds for reversal stand on their own. The Ninth Circuit can determine whether the District Court improperly resolved disputed facts, failed to view the evidence in my favor as the nonmovant, misapplied the constitutional standards, or granted qualified immunity despite precedent that clearly governed the officers’ conduct.
Those are issues the appellate court can decide now.
But if the Ninth Circuit concludes that a constitutional violation occurred—or must be assumed at summary judgment—yet holds that the modern clearly-established-law requirement independently bars recovery, I want that basis identified distinctly.
Why?
Because “no constitutional violation occurred” and “a violation may have occurred, but immunity defeats damages” are not the same judgment. The second presents the statutory legitimacy of the immunity requirement in a much cleaner posture for Supreme Court review.
That is how preservation works. You do not walk into the Supreme Court one morning with a big idea and ask the Justices to discuss it. You raise the issue below. You develop it. The opposing party responds. The court rules. You carry it through every proper stage.
I raised this challenge at ECF 57, pages 37–39, and ECF 57-1, pages 5–12 and 18–19. Defendants answered at ECF 67, pages 25–26. The District Court rejected it because binding precedent controlled at ECF 70, page 3.
The issue was raised, contested, and decided. The thread is now in the record.
Bruh, Think About What This Doctrine Actually Does
Qualified immunity can allow a court to recognize—or at least assume—that a government official violated the Constitution and still deny the injured person damages because no earlier case described sufficiently similar misconduct.
Think about that for a second.
The conduct can be unconstitutional, but the remedy disappears because nobody committed that precise variation of the violation before—or because no court previously reached the constitutional question.
Then courts sometimes avoid deciding whether conduct was unconstitutional and dispose of the case only on the clearly-established prong. That leaves less precedent for the next person. The next plaintiff then hears that the law was not clearly established.
Bruh. Come on.
At some point, we have to ask whether that cycle reflects the statute Congress enacted or a remedial policy the judiciary created for itself.
This does not mean officers must be liable whenever someone is unhappy with an encounter. The Constitution already contains standards of objective reasonableness. Those standards account for real-world conditions, safety threats, rapidly evolving circumstances, and the information available to an officer at the time.
The issue is whether, after applying those constitutional standards, courts may impose an additional immunity rule absent from the enacted cause of action.
Longevity matters. Governmental reliance matters. Stare decisis matters. But none of those considerations answers the foundational question of statutory authority. A judicial doctrine does not become enacted text merely because courts have repeated it long enough.
This Is Why Hood River Is Bigger Than Hood River
My case began with one encounter in Hood River. But the legal fight now reaches beyond one city, one group of officers, or one judgment.
It asks who writes federal law.
It asks whether constitutional rights come with a meaningful remedy.
It asks whether the judiciary may acknowledge a deprivation and then withhold accountability through a requirement Congress never expressed.
And it asks whether a pro se litigant—or any litigant willing to do the work—can construct a record serious enough to carry that question toward the Supreme Court.
I am not promising that the Supreme Court will hear my case. Nobody intellectually honest can promise that. I am saying I have done what litigants must do when they want a question to survive: research it, plead it, preserve it, correct it where necessary, and refuse to let it disappear merely because the existing doctrine is difficult.
That is what “cutting the thread” means.
It means tracing qualified immunity back through Harlow and Pierson. It means confronting the 1871 text and the 1874 revision. It means separating historical defenses from the modern clearly-established-law formula. It means respecting what the Ninth Circuit is presently bound to do while preserving what only the Supreme Court can ultimately reconsider.
The District Court entered judgment. Fine. That does not make the statutory question vanish.
The record exists. The challenge was preserved. The path to the Ninth Circuit is taking shape. And if qualified immunity becomes the barrier between a constitutional violation and an actual remedy, then I intend to make the judiciary identify that barrier plainly.
The thread is visible. I am pulling it. And, bruh, I am not letting go.
Cameron J. Wilson is the founder of Power Inherent in the People and Operation Wisedome. This article discusses issues raised in his own litigation and is intended for public education, not individualized legal advice.
