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The Judges Who Ruled Against La Gordiloca Are Criminalizing Watchdog Journalism (www.texasobserver.org)

submitted 10 months ago by gAlienLifeform to c/politics

8 comments fedilink hide all child comments

The majority opinion, authored by Judge Edith Jones, appointed by former President Ronald Regan, finds that local officials were reasonable when they used an obscure Texas law to arrest Gordiloca and thereby criminalize a wide range of what has been considered basic accountability journalism. The ruling applies in Texas, Louisiana, and Mississippi.

“Any law enforcement agency basically has a green light right now to go out and arrest and threaten or detain journalists who publish documents that are leaked from the government,” said attorney Daxton “Chip” Stewart, a media law professor at Texas Christian University, in an interview about the ruling. “And … if that journalist spends a night in jail, they don’t have a remedy and can’t sue for a civil rights violation.”

The court sidestepped addressing the Texas law’s constitutionality, and Jones couched her findings on whether Laredo officials knowingly violated Villarreal’s civil rights when they arrested her in 2017.

Archived at https://web.archive.org/web/20240129130232/https://www.texasobserver.org/priscilla-villarreal-journalist-la-gordiloca-fifth-circuit/

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[–] agent_flounder 5 points 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago)

I sure do wish more people had seen this coming from a mile away in 2016 but here we are.

Edit to add some more context from the article

In a blow to First Amendment advocates, a majority of the judges on the U.S. Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals decided Tuesday ... to endorse an expansive view of government power that permits police to arrest reporters for seeking basic information through backchannels.

That's both horrifying and unsurprising. Unfortunately I think the voting public will have to experience authoritarianism to be motivated enough to do anything about it. And by then it likely will be too late.