On Monday, the Supreme Court decided that a Black Lives Matter activist could be sued because a cop got hurt during a protest he organized, and the NAACP is calling unconstitutional shenanigans on the decision.
The storied organization believes that the ruling “invites harassment and silencing of today’s civil-rights activists and leaders,” and violates their First Amendment rights.
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According to the Associated Press, the Supreme Court upheld a lower court’s ruling, which allowed a lawsuit to go forward against BLM organizer DeRay Mckesson, who led a protest in Louisiana in 2016 over the police killing of Alton Sterling in Baton Rouge, during which a police officer was hit by a “rock-like” object by an unidentified protestor. The lower court’s ruling effectively eliminated the right to organize a mass protest in the states of Louisiana, Mississippi, and Texas.
The court acknowledged in its ruling that the case against Mckesson is “fraught with implications for First Amendment rights,”
and Justice Sonia Sotomayor wrote in a brief opinion that the court’s “denial today expresses no view about the merits of Mckesson’s claim.” Sotomayor also wrote that the appeals court in Louisiana should consider a different case, Counterman v. Colorado, and how the ruling in that case could impact Mckesson’s case.
USA Today reports that in that First Amendment case, a man named Billy Counterman was sentenced to more than four years in prison in Colorado for sending threatening Facebook messages. The court ruled that prosecutors” used too tough a standard to convict” Counterman and said in a 7-2 decision, the preosctution must show a defendant acted recklessly, meaning the person “disregarded a substantial risk that his communications would be viewed as threatening.”
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So, the Supreme Court justices, or at least Sotomayor, don’t appear to believe definitively that it’s right Mckesson should have to answer for what another protestor did just because he organized the protest, but they still couldn’t help DeRay out by overturning the lower court’s ruling.
“Because this Court may deny certiorari for many reasons, including that the law is not in need of further clarification, its denial today expresses no view about the merits in Mckesson’s claim,” She wrote. “Although the Fifth Circuit did not have the benefit of this Court’s recent decision in Counterman when it issued its opinion, the lower courts now do.”
Mckesson is being represented by lawyers for the American Civil Liberties Union, who “argued the appeals court’s decision violates the First Amendment and a 1982 Supreme Court decision about damages caused during boycotts of white merchants led by the NAACP,” USA Today reported.
It’s wild how the same American legal system that refuses to hold Donald Trump responsible for inspiring and arguably directly causing the Jan. 6 riot at the U.S. Capitol—during which multiple police officers were viciously attacked—is also letting a Black activist be sued over far less.
Wild.
