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Notes -
I am not really against universal background checks, but the state enforcing a law which is technically blocked by a court order seems bad.
The fix would be to limit immunity for (executive) politicians, the police and even the courts. Basically, if the court finds that a reasonable person would have recognized that your action had no legal basis, then it is treated no different than if the mob had done it.
The analogy would be medical malpractice. Doctors generally are mostly exempt from laws forbidding you to cut people up and so forth. In general, there is (and should be) a broad road of defensible medical opinions, and as long they stick to that spectrum they should be fine and not get sued about 'why did you prescribe this antibiotic and not that' etc. This changes completely when they go beyond that road. A doctor who decides to murder their patient through poisonous medication will not be treated leniently because we generally allow doctors to put substances with harmful side effects into their patients' bodies. Instead, they will be treated more harshly, because in addition to breaking an important general civilizational rule, they also betrayed the trust which societies puts in physicians.
If a cop shoots a cosplayer dressed up as the Joker, we should book him for murder. If his defense is that they thought they were supposed to thwart evil-doers, then we will say "you are sadly mistaken about what the law is, and we do not believe a reasonable person would make this mistake, and we will punish you more harshly because you betrayed the trust we place in cops".
I am simply proposing extending this principle to more cases. If the DA orders the enforcement of laws which are plainly not in force (which is the story here, from what I get from you), then any arrest becomes a kidnapping charge for the whole chain of command (although there are some corner cases where we might apply a higher standard to the DA than to beat cops, just as we might apply a higher standard to physicians than nurses).
The ideal outcome would be that the police unions would go "we checked with our lawyers, and we advise our members to not follow orders to enforce that law because they would actually commit felonies if they did". (No, it does not suffice to go after the top guy, because then you end up in situations where the top guy kills himself in some bunkers and all his goons were blameless people merely following orders.)
This would also fix that FIRE case about a sheriff and judge randomly locking someone up for 1A speech. If we treat it the same as if they had abducted their victim in a van and kept him locked up in some basement for a month, the penalties we have on the book for that should deter re-offense.
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