Why Are There Different Outcomes For identical Cases Of Cops Violating Someone's Rights ?

[51MEANTXGUNS50]

I don't understand this. I've been contributing to the cop watch movement for quite some time now, and lately I got to wondering: I often FOIA arrest/incident reports, personal files, dashcam footage, things like that. Lately I've noticed that after a while, the stories kind of all sound the same, but the outcomes are always different. Why is it that you can have, say, four cases of police unlawfully searching or seizing one's property, yet in one case, the victim was awarded something like 73,000 dollars in a lawsuit and the officer got fired, yet in another case of a different police officer doing the exact same thing, he simply got a demotion, and in the other two cases, also involving police officers taking property from someone when they had no grounds to do so, both officers simply had to take some kind of retraining class on what constitutes probable cause and reasonable searches and seizures, that if I understand correctly, just rehashes things they initially learned while attending police academy ?

Clearly I'm not a legal expert, but after going thru so many stories that sound the same but have different outcomes it just got me curious. I mean, a violation of someone's rights is a violation of someone's rights. An unreasonable search or seizure is an unreasonable search or seizure. What made the first case different from the other three ? What determines the severity of the officer's misconduct and if it warrants compensating the victim ? To be fair, most of the info that got me wondering about this came second or even third hand, so maybe there are pieces of info I need in order to answer this question, but like I said, it just got me curious and wanting to ask.

[canny]

Juries are unpredictable and that's one reason for different outcomes for very similar situations. They can rule however they want and you're not going to get identical rulings or awards from two different juries for the same case.

Another possibility is there are differences that are hidden in the details of the cases that aren't immediately obvious. For example, if there is another pending complaint about a cop for a different incident the department is going to try hard to settle out of court while if the cop is the mayor's cousin the department is going to try to whitewash the incident.

[ShysterJon]

Cases with different outcomes are, by definition, not identical. You're basically asking, Why are disparate cases not identical? The answer is because they're disparate. No two cases are identical because there are too many factors at play. This isn't true only for cases involving allegations of police misconduct. It's true for all cases of any complexity. I could list the various factors (at least all the ones I can think of off the top of my head), but do I really need to?

The legal system craves predictability -- stare decisis ("a thing decided") -- but predictability is based on looking back, not forward. We want decision makers to render verdicts based on the specific facts in a case, not the facts in a group of previous cases. That's why, for example, a judge would never allow a jury to hear evidence of damages awarded in other cases.

[yancy25]

Most likely have very different policies, regarding both 4th amendment interpretations and employee discipline. Another factor is previous history with an officer under investigation. If they have previously been "retrained" on search and seizure, yet continue to make the same egregious mistakes, that is where reassignment or firing is more likely

[Buying a *Way to Heaven]

The mistake lies in thinking that this sort of thing is governed by rules. Like everything else in life and law, it is governed by the preference of whatever individual happens to have the power to enforce that preference.

[trekker]

Some lawyers do a better job arguing the case than others and some police departments have better unions than others.