This case isn't about free speech and rights suppression much the same way that he lost at the Supreme Court. The reality is he didn't lose at the Supreme Court... the Supreme Court didn't hear the case, they simply declined to hear the case. So he lost in a lower court and that ruling isn't being revisited.
> the case was NOT about criticizing/parodying the police, it was about police conduct if they think something is illegal.
Actually, this isn't correct either. The rejected case wasn't a free speech case nor even about what the police actually believed about something being legal/illegal. It was about whether or not he could sue the police department for their act. So the question you suggest the case is about hasn't been tested, though presumably it would have done so had he been able to sue. The question here was if your rights have been violated can you pursue a civil case where such questions as if the police acted in good faith (and that mattering) could be raised. Here the courts have said the question itself is out of order because there's no prior precedent of such a reasonably similar case having been pursued.
This is why people that care about the individual rights implications are concerned about this case. If the precedent held by the courts says that you can't even raise the challenge because there's no previous precedent of such a challenge having been raised before, you prematurely answer all the questions without so much as a hearing. If that's true, then an agency that might violate your rights either out of malice or ignorance, will never have to do better. They are immune from challenges presumptively regardless of the legitimacy of the challenge relative to what the law says the rights are. To simplify the "right" becomes endangered of carrying any actual weight.
Here the courts have said the question itself is out of order because there's no prior precedent of such a reasonably similar case having been pursued.
How is that possible? Police have harassed people in every conceivable way since time immemorial, and people must have tried to sue over it.
What made this case so utterly unprecedented that they couldn't even imagine hearing it?
I don't know what made this particular case utterly unprecedented. However, one criticism of qualified immunity is that it protects law enforcement on the basis of otherwise irrelevant facts.
https://www.cato.org/policy-analysis/qualified-immunity-lega...
> In practice, this legal standard is a huge hurdle for civil rights plaintiffs because it generally requires them to identify not just a clear legal rule but a prior case with functionally identical facts.
Whether prior precedent is possible or not really shouldn't be the issue. Such a standard itself is the problem: if your rights are violated in a legally novel way, why do courts pre-judge such a case against the victim? Sure, precedent matters, but when a legally new situation arises (a distinction which might be different than what a reasonable layperson would consider "new"), it seems the more morally correct approach is to hear the case and set precedent. Courts do that all the time in other matters so this distinction in judging government agent's actions is particularly absurd.
If you aren't allowed to sue the police without precedent, precedent will never be created, so you can never sue the police. There's a bootstrapping problem.
It's just another way that the justice systems infatuation with "precedent", as if that's any way to democratically decide things, fucks each and every one of us constantly.
This case isn't about free speech and rights suppression much the same way that he lost at the Supreme Court. The reality is he didn't lose at the Supreme Court... the Supreme Court didn't hear the case, they simply declined to hear the case. So he lost in a lower court and that ruling isn't being revisited.
> the case was NOT about criticizing/parodying the police, it was about police conduct if they think something is illegal.
Actually, this isn't correct either. The rejected case wasn't a free speech case nor even about what the police actually believed about something being legal/illegal. It was about whether or not he could sue the police department for their act. So the question you suggest the case is about hasn't been tested, though presumably it would have done so had he been able to sue. The question here was if your rights have been violated can you pursue a civil case where such questions as if the police acted in good faith (and that mattering) could be raised. Here the courts have said the question itself is out of order because there's no prior precedent of such a reasonably similar case having been pursued.
This is why people that care about the individual rights implications are concerned about this case. If the precedent held by the courts says that you can't even raise the challenge because there's no previous precedent of such a challenge having been raised before, you prematurely answer all the questions without so much as a hearing. If that's true, then an agency that might violate your rights either out of malice or ignorance, will never have to do better. They are immune from challenges presumptively regardless of the legitimacy of the challenge relative to what the law says the rights are. To simplify the "right" becomes endangered of carrying any actual weight.