“I certainly think the police activity, or non activity, was awful but I don’t think there is any recourse in suing the police officers,” David Crump, law professor at University of Houston, said in an interview Friday.
According to the Doctrine of Sovereign Immunity a government isn’t liable to its citizens for their injuries. The Texas Torts Claims Act grants permission to sue in certain limited circumstances, but according to legal experts interviewed, those wouldn’t apply in the Uvalde school shooting case.
“The police were doing what police do,” Dick DeGuerin, a criminal defense attorney in Houston, said in an interview. “They may have been terribly negligent in how they did it. But it’s got to be more than negligence, it’s got to be a policy fault” for civil liability to stick in court.
Dan Cogdell, another criminal defense attorney in Houston, agreed with DeGuerin.
“Unless the Uvalde Chief of Police has a written policy that says, ‘Wait an hour before you go in and rescue the kids,’” the parents won’t win in a wrongful-death liability suit, Cogdell said.
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