112
The Judges Who Ruled Against La Gordiloca Are Criminalizing Watchdog Journalism
(www.texasobserver.org)
this post was submitted on 29 Jan 2024
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The headline and article are misleading. Here's a better article from Reuters.
The criminal case against Villarreal was dismissed on constitutional grounds in 2018. The recent ruling is a qualified immunity question: should the police officers have known that applying the law in the way they did was unconstitutional? That ruling does not criminalize anything or even set a particularly strong precedent; if police were to attempt to use the same law again in the same unconstitutional way after the 2018 ruling, there would be a much stronger case that they should have known better.
The original article says:
which is misleading because a state court already ruled that applying the law the way it was in this case is unconstitutional, and that ruling was not being appealed in the recent civil case.
This is in fact, a much better article and (horrifying texan political hellscape aside) the key except is copied here for convenience:
Begin quote: The Texas statute she was charged under made it a crime to solicit non-public information from a government official with an intent to obtain a benefit. Prosecutors alleged she used the information to amass more Facebook followers.
A Texas state court judge in 2018 tossed the charges, finding the law unconstitutionally vague, and she sued in 2019. A judge ruled the officers and prosecutors were entitled to qualified immunity, but a 2-1 panel reversed in 2021.
But in Tuesday's ruling, U.S. Circuit Judge Edith Jones, an appointee of Republican former President Ronald Reagan, said law enforcement officers were not required to predict whether the Texas law at issue was constitutional before arresting her.
Looking at the case narrowly, it's usually reasonable for police to assume laws are constitutional unless a court has ruled otherwise. In this case, however the totality of the circumstances makes it clear that the police were trying to misuse the law to persecute a journalist who was annoying them.
The police should get sued for that, and like nearly half the fifth circuit judges, I disagree with the court's ruling.
Something's going to have to give and soon. Police need to carry individual malpractice insurance, where gross negligence results in personal liability, and blanket qualified immunity as a whole needs to go.
No other institution has built a self-licking ice cream cone like law enforcement. The US health care system certainly tries, but at least it doesn't have a monopoly on the use of force. Until the incentives change, there's no future where civil relations recover. You just can't remove liability for bad faith abuse of power and expect an organization to self-police its behavior.
Crushingly ironic that the "don't tread on me" crowd are the loudest proponents of the wholesale gutting of freedom of the press/speech..