holding that § 1983 does not “authoriz[e] a convicted person to assert a claim for damages against a police officer for giving perjured testimony at his criminal trial”
How later courts described this case
- holding that § 1983 does not “authoriz[e] a convicted person to assert a claim for damages against a police officer for giving perjured testimony at his criminal trial”
- stating that “‘[t]he demands of public policy on which the rule [of absolute immunity] is based are so controlling that diere is only one considered case in the English or American reports in which the existence of the general doctrine of absolute immunity under the common law has ever been questioned’ ” (quoting Van Vechten Veeder, Absolute Immunity in Defamation: Judicial Proceedings, 9 Colum. L. Rev. 463, 465-66 (1909))
- holding that 42 U.S.C. § 1983 does not authorize a convicted person to assert a claim for damages against a police officer for giving perjured testimony at his criminal trial on the ground that absolute immunity protects any witness from civil liability based on his testimony in a judicial proceeding
- concluding that witness immunity was " "so well grounded in history and reason' that we cannot believe that Congress impinged on it "by covert inclusion in the general language before us' " (quoting Tenney v. Brandhove, 341 U.S. 367, 376 , 71 S.Ct. 783, 788 , 95 L.Ed. 1019 (1951))
Written by the judges who cited it.
Distinguished
Distinguished by Wynn v. Earin, 131 Wash. App. 28 (2005)
But Briscoe is distinguishable because there the policy of witness immunity did not contravene a statute.
The opinion
Justice Brennan,
dissenting.
Justice Marshall’s dissenting opinion, post, presents an eloquent argument that Congress, in enacting § 1983, did not intend to create any absolute immunity from civil liability for “government officials involved in the judicial process . . . .” Post, at this page and 347. Whatever the correctness of his' historical argument, I fear that the Court has already crossed that bridge in Pierson v. Ray, 386 U. S. 547 (1967), and Imbler v. Pachtman, 424 U. S. 409 (1976).
I entirely agree with Justice Marshall, however, that the policies of § 1983 and of common-law witness immunity, as they apply to witnesses who are police officers, do not justify any absolute immunity for perjurious testimony. I therefore dissent for the reasons stated in Part IV of Justice Marshall’s opinion.