{"id":628304,"date":"2023-04-12T09:50:15","date_gmt":"2023-04-12T14:50:15","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/news.sellorbuyhomefast.com\/index.php\/2023\/04\/12\/its-time-to-stop-arresting-people-for-trolling-the-government\/"},"modified":"2023-04-12T09:50:15","modified_gmt":"2023-04-12T14:50:15","slug":"its-time-to-stop-arresting-people-for-trolling-the-government","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/newsycanuse.com\/index.php\/2023\/04\/12\/its-time-to-stop-arresting-people-for-trolling-the-government\/","title":{"rendered":"It\u2019s Time to Stop Arresting People for Trolling the Government"},"content":{"rendered":"
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After Robert Frese<\/span> posted a nasty Facebook comment about a police officer in 2018, police obtained a warrant to arrest him. This was the second time in six years that Frese was charged with \u201ccriminal defamation.\u201d<\/p>\n

Frese does not live in Russia, China, Iran, or another country notorious for oppressive speech laws. He lives in New Hampshire, which criminalizes the act of purposely making a false statement that exposes someone \u201cto public hatred, contempt, or ridicule.\u201d While Americans typically associate defamation with civil lawsuits, in which the alleged victim sues the speaker for money, many are unaware that, in some states, defamation is a crime that can lead to\u00a0fines or jail time.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Criminal defamation laws are a relic of England, the colonial era, and early America. The federal Sedition Act of 1798 levied fines and prison time on those who transmitted \u201cany false, scandalous, and malicious writing or writings\u201d against the government, and John Adams\u2019 administration used it to prosecute dozens of critics. The federal law expired in 1801 after a critic, Thomas Jefferson, became president, but many states continued to prosecute their own criminal defamation laws.<\/p>\n

Today, New Hampshire and 13 other states still have criminal defamation laws on the books. While prosecutions under these laws were rare as recently as a few years ago, we\u2019ve seen disturbing examples of\u00a0charges filed against citizens who criticize local government officials on social media. Worse, those officials often have unilateral authority to bring criminal defamation charges.<\/p>\n

Frese had his first brush with New Hampshire\u2019s criminal defamation law in 2012, after posting comments on Craigslist that accused a local life coach of distributing drugs and running a scam business. The local police arrested Frese and charged him with criminal defamation and harassment. He was fined $1,488, with most of it suspended.<\/p>\n

In the 2018 case, Frese pseudonymously posted on the local newspaper\u2019s Facebook page that a retiring police officer was \u201cthe dirtiest most corrupt cop that I have ever had the displeasure of knowing \u2026 and the coward Chief Shupe did nothing about it.\u201d The newspaper deleted that comment, but Frese posted a similar comment accusing the police chief of a cover-up. After the police chief denied a cover-up, a detective determined that no evidence supported Frese\u2019s allegations about the retiring officer and filed a criminal complaint that resulted in an arrest warrant.<\/p>\n

Although the police department dropped its complaint after state officials determined there was insufficient evidence that he had made the statements with actual malice, Frese asked a federal judge to find New Hampshire\u2019s criminal defamation law unconstitutional, arguing that the threat of a third prosecution under the statute chills his speech.<\/p>\n

Judge Joseph Laplante declined Frese\u2019s request\u2014not because he was particularly enthusiastic about the prospect of police arresting people for defamation, but because the US Supreme Court, in the 1964 case\u00a0Garrison v. Louisiana<\/em><\/a>, ruled that states can \u201cimpose criminal sanctions for criticism of the official conduct of public officials\u201d provided that the government establishes the speaker made the false statements with \u201cactual malice,\u201d which means they knew the statement was false, or at least entertained serious doubts about its truth. This is a high bar, but even if the case ultimately fails, the mere prospect of facing arrest or being forced through a criminal prosecution in a hostile jurisdiction can freeze speech.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Frese\u2019s lawyers recognized this chilling effect and appealed to the US Court of Appeals for the First Circuit, which reluctantly\u00a0wrote<\/a> that it did \u201cnot have the power to revisit Supreme Court decisions.\u201d One of the three judges on the panel, O. Rogeriee Thompson, wrote a separate concurrence in which she emphasized the \u201ctroubling\u201d historical roots of criminal defamation, and the potential for abuse of these laws by public officials today. \u201cBy my lights, criminal defamation laws\u2014even the ones that require knowledge of the falsity of the speech\u2014simply cannot be reconciled with our democratic ideals of robust debate and uninhibited free speech,\u201d Thompson wrote.<\/p>\n

Late last month, the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) filed a\u00a0petition<\/a> with the Supreme Court, asking it to use Frese\u2019s case to revisit its 1964 ruling. The ACLU argued that criminal defamation laws are particularly troubling in the age of online speech, pointing to many social-media-related prosecutions nationwide. \u201cSocial media platforms, in particular, offer law enforcement easily searchable databases of potentially offending statements,\u201d the group wrote.<\/p>\n

Indeed, since the earliest days of the modern internet, state and local officials have wielded criminal defamation laws against controversial online speech.\u00a0A Utah high school student, for instance,\u00a0spent<\/a> a week in juvenile detention in 2000 after posting negative online comments about his classmates and high school staff, including accusing his principal of being \u201cthe town drunk.\u201d The charges were eventually dropped after the Utah Supreme Court\u00a0declared<\/a> that Utah\u2019s law violated the First Amendment.<\/p>\n

In a 2020\u00a0article<\/a> reviewing criminal defamation prosecutions, Jane E. Kirtley and Casey Carmody documented many internet-related cases. \u201cTypically, public officials who do instigate criminal libel prosecutions are more likely to target outspoken individuals, many of whom operate blogs or act as citizen journalists, rather than the institutional press,\u201d they wrote. \u201cThose public officials are able to utilize criminal complaints as a means to empower law enforcement officials to search homes and seize property, which, in turn, is a way to intimidate and silence critics.\u201d<\/p>\n

Among the cases that Kirtley and Carmody highlighted was a pseudonymous Louisiana blog that alleged local business officials and politicians were corrupt. A subject of the reporting lodged a criminal defamation complaint, which law enforcement used to gather IP address records and obtain a warrant to search the blogger\u2019s home. An appellate court later found that the warrant was invalid.<\/p>\n

Although these cases often do not receive much public attention, they should concern all Americans. As Frese\u2019s lawyers wrote in his lawsuit challenging New Hampshire laws, as politicians increasingly bemoan \u201cfake news,\u201d criminal defamation laws \u201ccould become regular tools for policing online discourse.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n

There is no guarantee that the Supreme Court justices will hear Frese\u2019s case and decide the constitutionality of the New Hampshire law. The court receives thousands of requests to hear cases and usually grants fewer than 70. But it should take Frese\u2019s case to finally end our sad record of criminal defamation prosecutions.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

Read More<\/a>
\n Jeff Kosseff<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

After Robert Frese posted a nasty Facebook comment about a police officer in 2018, police obtained a warrant to arrest him. This was the second time in six years that Frese was charged with \u201ccriminal defamation.\u201dFrese does not live in Russia, China, Iran, or another country notorious for oppressive speech laws. He lives in New<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":628305,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[29038,84114,46],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-628304","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-its","8":"category-arresting","9":"category-technology"},"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/newsycanuse.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/628304","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/newsycanuse.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/newsycanuse.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/newsycanuse.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/newsycanuse.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=628304"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/newsycanuse.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/628304\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/newsycanuse.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/628305"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/newsycanuse.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=628304"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/newsycanuse.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=628304"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/newsycanuse.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=628304"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}