H.R. 7290 — Qualified Immunity Accountability Act

This section revises the federal criminal statute prohibiting deprivation of rights under color of law (18 U.S.C. § 242)—which criminalizes officials' deprivations of constitutional rights, with enhanced penalties based on resulting harm—by (1) changing the required mental state from "willfully" to "knowingly or recklessly"; (2) eliminating the death penalty for offenses resulting in death or involving specified aggravated acts (e.g., kidnapping, aggravated sexual abuse, or attempted killing), limiting maximum punishment to life imprisonment; and (3) clarifying that an act results in death if it was a substantial factor contributing to the person's death.

This section amends 42 U.S.C. 1983 to provide that neither (1) good faith or a belief that conduct was lawful nor (2) lack of clearly established constitutional rights or unclear state of the law constitutes a defense or immunity in any action under that section against a local law enforcement officer (as defined in section 2 of the George Floyd Justice in Policing Act of 2025) or in any action under any source of law against a federal investigative or law enforcement officer (as defined in 28 U.S.C. 2680(h)). (As background, 42 U.S.C. 1983 authorizes private civil suits for damages against state or local officials who deprive persons of federal constitutional or statutory rights while acting under color of state law; qualified immunity, a judicially created doctrine, generally protects such officials unless they violate clearly established rights of which a reasonable person would have known. Thus, this provision eliminates those two prongs of qualified immunity for the specified law enforcement officers.)