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"the worst first amendment case I've ever seen" just had a good ending! You can read his summary (CEO of FIRE who lead the case) or mine.
A while back, a retired police officer Larry Bushart posted a political meme on Facebook mocking conservatives over the concept of not caring about kids who get shot in schools while cancelling people for not caring about Charlie Kirk's death.
In response, Perry County officials where he lived had him arrested and held in jail for 37 days, setting his bond at 2 million dollars. He lost his job from this disruption and missed his granddaughter's birth and his wedding anniversary.
This arrest was obvious bullshit, another case where corrupt abusive officials utilize the legal system itself as punishment. No one would have seriously expected this case to go through, but the process itself is often meant as the attack.
It ends with good news though, as part of the settlement Bushart is getting almost a million dollars. Bad news, like most abuse by officials it gets paid for by the taxpayers and nothing is likely to happen to the corrupt scumbags who were in charge.
But this is a great lesson at least. In the US, you can just be a random guy, upset the most powerful government organizations and draw their ire, and win against them. America is a country where David can take down Goliath, whether it be your local officials or federal ones. Bushart refused to accept the abuse, he stood up to the bullies, and he won.
This seems to be one of the cases where 'moar dakka' might be applicable. Just scale the punitive damages to the point where Perry county's law enforcement will face unemployment simply because Perry county will be too bankrupt to afford any law enforcement. Less than a million is just a slap on the wrist.
The thing which is confusing me is that in civilized countries, there is generally a narrow limit on how long police can hold you in some cell before a judge has to a-ok it. So the blame for the first two days would lie with the sheriff, and the blame for the other 35 days would lie with a judge who was willing to sign off on him staying in prison. We have judges overlooking the decisions of police because we know very well that cops can not be trusted on whom should be in prison (at least when they are not making a sworn statement which could land themselves in prison). Nor do I buy that whoever rubber-stamped that was so overworked that they could not spend five minutes reading to the case file -- how many people does Perry county hold on a 2M$ bail because they are supposedly an imminent threat to public safety, and how many of these are former cops?
I get that there are good reasons to prohibit suing judges for their legal decisions, but my preferable outcome would be for the judge to decide to change their name and move to Alaska in the hope of no longer being The Official Whose Decision Bankrupted Perry County.
I have also very little sympathy for the taxpayer here. At the end of the day, the buck stops with them -- they elected the sheriff, possibly the judge, or other officials who employed the perpetrators. As a German, let me tell you that "we made a bad decision in the voting booth and now a few years later our county is bankrupt" is far from the worst of what bad electoral decisions can cost an electorate.
OK. What about the taxpayers who didn't vote for any of these people? What about their children? What about Larry Bushart himself? Are these people also no longer entitled to equal protection under the law? And yes, the 14th amendment has been held to apply to failure to police abuses against certain groups -- this is in fact the plainest reading of the text, even if others are much more popular -- see Thurman v. City of Torrington.
And even if it weren't unconstitutional to deny a county law enforcement, it would still be a bad idea. Not only is collective punishment odious, it's less effective than the obvious, correct move: directly punishing the officials that abused their authority.
There's a principle in tort law: that liability should fall on the least-cost avoider, the party that could most cheaply have prevented the harm. How were voters to have prevented this? They could question candidates under polygraph, pose them dozens of hypotheticals, do an incredibly invasive investigation of their entire lives... and still not be 100% certain they won't act inappropriately. And then, when they do, they just bashfully shrug and move somewhere that isn't bankrupt; that is a slap on the wrist.
Meanwhile, the individuals in question could easily be 100% certain of their good behavior by just deciding not to misbehave.
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The county isn't paying these settlements out of the treasury; they have insurance for that. I don't know the exact dynamics between the carriers and the government regarding how much caution they can make them exercise, but if they keep engaging in similar behavior rates will go up. These settlements are rare though even in the worst municipalities, so I don't see it being that much of an issue.
Personally, I think those insurances are clearly immoral, just like offering insurance to companies for fines due to health and safety violations.
I think this is something which could also be solved by moar dakka. Simply award damages (or impose fines, in the case of companies) which are twice the maximum coverage limit of their insurance.
If the county has unlimited insurance, then the first order of business would be to punish their insurance company. This is not particularly hard, the judges will not require Knuth's arrow notation or anything, simple high school math skills will suffice. Big reinsurance companies like Munich Re or Swiss Re have assets worth a few hundreds of billion dollars, a judge could write down a number in 30 seconds which would reliably bankrupt them.
This is such an odd perspective on insurance and damages that I'm sort of at a loss for words
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The judge's job is not to second-guess the police. He or she is not examining how detailed and unbiased their investigation was, only how legally sound it is. "Deputy Jones observed the picture violating statute 12345 on the Facebook page belonging to the suspect and recorded the image of the page using Windows Snipping Tool (Exhibit A). Deputy Smith drove to the 321 Tree Lane, which is the registered address of the suspect. There Deputy Smith introduced himself to the suspect and asked him to confirm that he posted Exhibit A himself. When the suspect confirmed, Deputy Smith arrested him. Body cam footage is Exhibit B."
Yes, in this specific case the judge could've looked at Exhibit A and told the sheriff the case was bogus, but in a more general case the sheriff could have put "We have to march on DC and lynch our political enemies NOW" as Exhibit A and it's not the job of the American judge to independently verify every piece of evidence.
Surely it's their job to check whether the arrest has merit, which includes checking the evidence at least somewhat?
What if the case is entirely fabricated and exhibit A is just a picture of a cute cat? Should the judge rubberstamp that?
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Yes, if the sheriff is actively lying to the judge and fabricating evidence it's not reasonable to blame the judge, but I still expect them to look at the details of the exhibits, not just check that they exist.
Agreed. In that case, we would have another remedy: the officer deposits his affidavit under penalty of perjury, and the defense will shortly learn of what facts he has claimed. If he had just claimed "the accused posted on Facebook that he would destroy America for ISIS", and it later turns out that this was a fabrication, that is one particularly vile count of forswearing, the kind which has been punished harshly since the times of Mosaic law.
And yes, the job of the judge is very much to form a preliminary legal interpretation of the facts attested by the officer. If he just follows the officers interpretation of the law ("posting that, he threatened to shoot up a school"), there would be no reason for judicial oversight at all. In civilized countries, there will generally be a hearing of some sorts. Typically, police custody is limited to 24 or 48 hours, and if the cops want to keep you longer, they need you to drag you in front of a judge and convince them that you merit imprisonment. So the person in custody would have the chance to make their case that they merely posted a commonly used meme picture.
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I'd just like to see more personal consequences for abuse of power. If someone hits you on accident with their car and you end up in the hospital, you can sue them (and their insurance) for damages. If someone hits you on purpose then that happens + they can go to jail.
Now I get that proving a judge or prosecutor was acting with explicit foul intent will be difficult and maybe nothing would happen in this case, but I also wouldn't be surprised that if you subpoenad their communications you might find something rather usable considering how brazen this was!
I get the logic here, the issue is that because politicians and cops and etc don't really view it as their money (like even in this settlement would the Perry County police budget or prosecutors officer or whatever actually be lowered by the amount in response or would it just get diverted from something else? Likely the latter), something like this ain't really viewed too much as their punishment. The only thing that they might suffer is that they might lose office, and maybe they'll have to divert some funds away from another government program. Most likely something they don't even like with the excuse of triaging. Or of course a classic, just have the city borrow more money and make future citizens pay for it all. Oh whoops, looks like we had to divert money from that infrastructure project in order to pay for the corrupt cop, guess we'll do more bonds.
It's actually extremely lindy to have public officials abusing their positions face harsh personal consequences(often things we're not going to do today, like execution by torture or family enslavement).
Now, in our system, this rule would inevitably be abused by individuals who either have too much time on their hands or are dedicated to some variety of minor crime crankery to harass officials that are Just Doing Their Jobs, and we probably don't want to start punishing people making complaints about public servants. The solution would have to look more like internal affairs than like lawsuits. And Internal Affairs would inevitably also be biased.
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