Welcome to Amped Up. This is your host Ryan Knight and our guest today is Ben Cohen.

Ben is an activist and leader of the campaign to end qualified immunity and the

co-founder of Ben Jerry's Ice cream. Ben welcome to Amped Up.

Uh, hello Ryan. For a show called Amped Up, you sound pretty laid back.

Oh, we'll just get, you just wait you just hold

hold tight

look I want to start off you know this past July you convened a coalition of

650 current and former CEOs, founders, and business leaders across the country to send

a letter to Congress urging members to end qualified immunity.

Along with the American Sustainable Business Council, you are encouraging more leaders to sign on and increase pressure on elected officials to end qualified immunity and help end the state sanctioned murder of black people in America.

Just to get my listeners, you know, just a brief introduction, can you just explain what

qualified immunity is and why ending qualified immunity is so

vital to criminal justice reform and police accountability? Sure, yeah, qualified

immunity is a term that's hard to understand just on the on the face of it. But the way it works is that if a policeman does something that essentially infringes on somebody's constitutional rights,

qualified immunity prevents that person

from suing the policeman,

from getting redress for the wrongs.

It's a very strange judicial doctrine

that was created through a series of Supreme Court decisions that essentially nullified a law that was passed in the late 1800s,

which was known as the Ku Klux Klan Act at the time.

And what was going on at the time

was that this was just after the end of slavery.

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