What we thought was 8 minutes and 46 seconds of terror and torture was actually, 9 minutes and 29 seconds. We know now that was how long former police officer Derek Chauvin had his knee on the neck of George Floyd. That was how long two other officers had all their body weight on George Floyd’s back and legs, while a fourth officer kept anyone from intervening as George Floyd cried out that he could not breathe over 28 times.

The rest of Black America is waiting to see if police officers will ever be held accountable for killing unarmed Black men and women.

In the Declaration of Independence are the words “We hold this truth to be self-evident that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness.” These words wring hollow for many of us in the Black community.

During Reconstruction, the 13th, 14th, and 15th amendments were added to the United States Constitution to extend legal protections to former enslaved people and prohibit states from disenfranchising voters on the account of race, color or previous conditions of servitude.

Even after these amendments were added to the Constitution, Black citizens were terrorized with violence and intimidation by the Ku Klux Klan for trying to exercise the right to vote, run for public office, or serve on juries.

In 1870 and 1871, a series of acts, called Enforcement Acts, were passed by Congress to end such violence, often by police officers, who were also members of the KKK. The third Enforcement Act passed by Congress was also known as the Ku Klux Klan Act, which held state officials liable in Federal Court for depriving anyone of their civil rights or the equal protection under the law. It also made many of the KKK tactics federal offenses and gave the president the authority to call out the militia against anyone who conspired against the federal government. It was with this act that the 14th and 15th amendments were finally enforced.

The intent of the Ku Klux Klan Act was to combat lawlessness and civil rights violations in the post-Civil War South, stating that a government agent who violated anyone’s constitutional rights should be liable to the injured party.

In 1982, the U.S. Supreme Court created a special protection for government workers called ”qualified immunity.” The Court maintained that common-law immunities were well-established prior to Section 1983 of the 1871 Ku Klux Klan Act being passed. Therefore, because these immunities were well-understood legal principles at that time, they should be understood to apply to the statute, even though not spelled out in the law.

Because of this broad interpretation of the law, qualified immunity has undermined accountability for public officials, in particular law enforcement. Police officers are often excused by judges for misconduct on technicalities.

Under qualified immunity, government workers can only be held accountable for violating an individual’s rights, if that violation has been previously ruled and clearly established in a court of law that the precise actions were unconstitutional. If no such decision exists, or even if it exists but not in the same jurisdiction, the official is immune, even if the official intentionally or unreasonably violated the law or constitution.

According to the Supreme Court, qualified immunity is needed to make sure government agents are not deterred from acting in split second situations, and that they would not face financial harm from frivolous lawsuits. However, judgments and settlements are paid by the taxpayers when government employers or their insurers pay those judgments.

Qualified immunity only applies to civil lawsuits, not criminal prosecution. There is little incentive for law enforcement to honor and carry-out their oath of office, when they know it is in only the most egregious cases where they are even held criminally responsible for their actions.

The elimination of qualified immunity for police officers is part of the “George Floyd Justice in Policing Act” pending in the U.S. Senate. We wait and pray that the family of George Floyd will see Derek Chauvin pay for his murder. History too often says the lives of Black men and women are not valued, and justice has generally not been given to us.

Chauvin’s defense team has attempted to put George Floyd’s drug use on trial or have us believe that a counterfeit $20 bill was on trial. George Floyd was a man, he was not a perfect man, but who is. But he was not a super predator, or an angry out of control monster. He was a father, a brother, an uncle, just a man. And he deserved to come home safely too.