Tag: hit&run

A new report by the United Nations’ human rights watchdog paints an unpleasant picture of repression and economic collapse in Venezuela. President Nicolas Maduro’s government, it says, punishes dissidents with arbitrary arrests, torture, and even murder.

The report was written by Michelle Bachelet, the U.N.’s high commissioner for human rights. Bachelet served as Chile’s left-wing president from 2014 to 2018, and she generally declined to criticize the Venezuelan regime while in office.

Venezuelan security forces killed 5,287 people in 2018 for resisting arrest during raids, according to the government’s own numbers. Another 1,569 were killed from January to May of this year. Independent counts put the number of people killed by police even higher.

Hundreds of these killings were committed by the Special Action Forces (FAES). Created in 2017—in theory to target organized crime—this group was described by the U.N. investigators’ informants as a “death squad” and an “extermination group.”

U.N. officials spoke with 20 families of men killed by the FAES. According to the investigators, police would raid homes at night, kill the young men they encountered, and then plant guns and drugs at the scene to frame the victims. At least six people were killed by the FAES for their role in anti-government protests, U.N. investigators found.

The investigators expressed concern in their report that the FAES and other security forces were being used as “an instrument to instill fear in the population and to maintain social control.”

The New York Times reports that Bachele was given remarkable access to the country. She spent three days meeting with government officials, including Maduro himself. Her investigators visited the country for two weeks in March, collecting evidence and interviewing officials, witnesses, and victims.

In addition to extrajudicial killings, the U.N. report found that some 15,000 people have been arbitrarily arrested for political reasons since 2014, including around 2,000 in 2019 alone. Many of them were subjected to torture, including “electric shocks, suffocation with plastic bags, waterboarding, beatings, sexual violence, water and food deprivation, stress positions and exposure to extreme temperatures.”

The report also says that hyperinflation and food shortages have left millions of Venezuelans without access to sufficient nutrition, and that the government’s food aid is often withheld from opponents of the regime.

U.S. sanctions—first applied in March 2018—are worsening the situation, according to the report. But “the economy of Venezuela, particularly its oil industry and food production systems, were already in crisis before any sectoral sanctions were imposed.”

It is not news that Venezuela is a destitute country governed by an authoritarian socialist regime. But this latest report offers new details about just how much violence the Maduro government is willing to employ to stay in power.

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In a win for due process on college campuses, the Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals unanimously ruled that Purdue University violated the 14th Amendment rights of “John Doe,” a college student accused of sexual misconduct.

The accusation was levied by another student, “Jane Doe,” in April 2016, as Purdue has holding its Sexual Assault Awareness Month. Jane “alleged that in November 2015, she was sleeping with John in his room when she woke to him groping her over her clothes without her consent,” the appeals court notes. “Jane told the university that John had engaged in other misconduct as well.”

Jane never filed a formal complaint, but Purdue decided that it was going to investigate the claim. Katherine Sermersheim, Purdue’s dean of students, informed John of the allegations against him in a letter. While the investigation was still underway, John was suspended from participating in the Navy ROTC program and subsequently banned from all buildings where Jane had class, as well as “barred from eating in his usual dining hall because Jane also used it,” the court explains. 

“John steadfastly denied Jane’s allegations,” the court adds. But a three-person panel of Purdue’s Advisory Committee on Equity “falsely claimed that he had confessed to Jane’s allegations” and left out key elements of John’s version of events.

That panel decided that John was guilty and gave him a one-year suspension, which caused him to be expelled from ROTC, thereby losing his scholarship and a potential future in the Navy. 

John subsequently sued Purdue, saying his rights had been violated: He wasn’t told any of the specific evidence against him, he wasn’t given an opportunity to cross-examine witnesses or call his own, and the panel decided in Jane’s favor without ever speaking to her. He also alleged that Purdue has violated federal law by “discriminating against him on the basis of sex.”

A lower court ruled that John had not shown sufficient evidence that his rights were violated. But a June 28 decision at the Seventh Circuit—written by Judge Amy Coney Barrett, who has been floated as a potential Supreme Court pick in the past—overruled that decision. 

“Purdue’s process fell short of what even a high school must provide to a student facing a days-long suspension,” Barrett writes. 

The judge points out that “at John’s meeting with the Advisory Committee, two of the three panel members candidly admitted that they had not read the investigative report, which suggests that they decided that John was guilty based on the accusation rather than the evidence.” 

Another key factor for the court is that the committee neither met with Jane in person nor received a statement from her. “It is unclear, to say the least, how Sermerheim and the committee could have evaluated Jane’s credibility,” writes Barrett. 

As David French notes in National Review, “Judge Barrett’s opinion is a warning shot to campuses in her federal circuit—and, through persuasive authority, to campuses across the nation. Universities mix ideology and adjudication at their own peril.”

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President Donald Trump often tweets about the “patriot farmers” on the front lines of his trade war with China. Those farmers, meanwhile, have been conducting trade diplomacy.

“We must have this market,” Derek Haigwood, an Arkansas farmer and chairman of the U.S. Soybean Export Council, told The Wall Street Journal. “You can’t produce another China, at least not overnight.”

Haigwood was part of a group of American agricultural business leaders who visited China in April. The group’s goal was to keep up good relations with Chinese importers even as the two governments remain entrenched in a trade war. Despite some positive signs in recent weeks—Trump postponed plans to hit Chinese imports with more tariffs, and the two sides have agreed to restart talks—meetings between Trump and Chinese President Xi Jingpin at last week’s G-20 conference did not produce a deal, and China’s retaliatory tariffs on American agricultural goods remain in place.

Farmers planted more than 89 million acres of soybeans across the United States in 2018, narrowly edging out the 88 million acres of corn. The United States is the world’s largest exporter of soybeans, with nearly half the U.S. crop exported annually—and China has been the largest importer of those goods.

In 2016, China imported a record 36 million metric tons of soybeans from the U.S. Last year, it bought just 8.3 million metric tons of the crop. Before the trade war started, about 40 percent of all American-grown soybeans were exported to China. The loss of that export market has caused a glut of supply, leading prices to fall by as much as 25 percent.

The U.S.’s loss has largely been Brazil’s gain. The South American country’s portion of world soybean exports is expected to hit 52 percent this year, the Journal reports.

As I wrote last month, the biggest concern for soybean farmers across the country is the unknown long-term consequences of the trade war. Will the massive Chinese market for soybeans be there if and when the tariffs are lifted in a year, or two, or five? Or will China keep buying Brazilian soy instead?

“The soybean market in China took us more than 40 years to build,” Davie Stephens, a soybean farmer from Kentucky and president of the American Soy Association, said in a press release. “As this confrontation continues, it will become increasingly difficult to recover.”

Groups like the Soybean Export Council are now trying to open other foreign markets to American-grown soybeans to make up for the loss of sales in China. But it’s virtually impossible to do that. Even if European consumers were to double their soybean purchases from American growers, that would amount to less than half of the Chinese market. Clearly, restoring stable trade with China is critical for American farmers.

The fact that trade associations are continuing to talk with Chinese importers is instructive. Trump often tries to portray global trade on the most macro of levels, as if America and China were each a singular corporate entity. But the reality is that trade happens on a smaller scale, with soybeans passing from farmers to wholesalers to exporters to importers because each exchange is mutually beneficial to the individuals involved. Keeping those channels of communication open, as Haigwood and the others know, is essential if there’s ever to be a return to normalcy.

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Please enjoy the latest edition of Short Circuit, a weekly feature from the Institute for Justice.

Veggie burgers, vegan chorizo, meatless meatballs. Illegal! Thanks to a new law passed at the behest of the meat industry that went into effect this week, Mississippi can now impose fines and even criminal sanctions on plant-based food producers that accurately label their products based on what foods they are meant to be a substitute for. Which violates the First Amendment. Read more at Bloomberg.

• By law, the feds must publish a privacy impact statement before “initiating a collection of new information” involving personally identifiable data that will be stored electronically. Nonprofit: Which the feds didn’t do before deciding to add a citizenship question to the 2020 census. D.C. Circuit: The nonprofit hasn’t been injured, so the case is dismissed for lack of standing.
• Boston city hall occasionally flies a guest flag. That could be the flag of another country, the LGBT rainbow flag, a flag commemorating Juneteenth, what have you. But a request to fly a Christian flag is rejected. First Circuit: And that’s ok. This is government speech, and the government is free to steer clear of religion.
• Victims of billionaire financier and sex offender Jeffrey Epstein seek to nullify his plea agreement (which strikes some as being too lenient). One victim accuses the financier’s friend of recruiting victims, which the friend denies. The victim then sues the friend for defamation. The defamation case eventually settles after much of it, including the entire summary judgment record, is litigated under seal. Did the district court err by not allowing the public access to more material? Alan Dershowitz, Miami Herald, and Michael Cernovich: Yes! Second Circuit: In large part, yes. But we “urge the media to exercise restraint in covering potentially defamatory allegations, and we caution the public to read such accounts with discernment.”
• Fairview Township, Penn. police officer steals drug proceeds from arrestees, is himself arrested. Officer: I was entrapped! Third Circuit: No. Although the FBI enlisted a fellow cop to keep an ear to the ground, the now-former officer was not induced to steal.
• Are immigration detainees entitled to the constitutional protections afforded by the Due Process Clause? The Third Circuit says yes and rejects qualified immunity for a Berks County, Penn. guard who repeatedly raped a detainee (of which he was later convicted) and officials who allegedly ignored it.
• Allegation: Iberville Parish, La. inmate reports extortion scheme involving prison guard to warden. In retaliation, three guards encourage another inmate to beat up the whistleblower and stand by while his jaw and teeth are broken. Fifth Circuit: There are some procedural hurdles standing in the way of the whistleblower’s lawsuit. But he’s since been released from prison, so he can sue again without some of the procedural hurdles.
• Tennessee police show up at house to serve a civil levy. The target of the levy exits the house, claims he doesn’t live there and that he has no keys to get back in. Police let him leave (after taking his pocket change in partial satisfaction of the levy), but then circle the house looking for other property that could be taken. Uh oh! They smell marijuana and see what they believe to be partially smoked joints. They get a search warrant, come back, and discover a load of marijuana in the house. Sixth Circuit (over a dissent): No qualified immunity for the police, who should have known they couldn’t search the curtilage (immediate surroundings) of the house without a warrant.
• Mentally ill inmate begins to improve while in prison treatment program. But after raising complaints about Lenox, Mich. prison officials, he is abruptly transferred out of the program. His mental health rapidly declines, to the point where he attempts suicide, after which he is kept restrained and left to lie in his own waste for six to seven hours. Sixth Circuit:  Nobody gets qualified immunity in this “parade of horribles.” (Also, don’t write any emails you wouldn’t want to see appear in a published judicial opinion, such as suggesting that a mentally ill inmate be transferred “to Mars.”)
• After being roughed up by a Providence, Ky. police officer during a traffic stop, man tries to file a complaint. So the officer goes to his house, tasers him, maces him, breaks his nose, and beats him with his baton (all of which is caught on a body camera). After man is taken to hospital, the officer cites him for “(1) harassing communications, (2) resisting arrest, (3) assaulting a police officer, and (4) criminal mischief” for allowing his broken nose to bleed on the officer’s uniform. Sixth Circuit: Qualified immun…no, just kidding. The officer is going to jail for 42 months.
• Purdue University student accused of sexual assault is suspended after allegedly Kafkaesque disciplinary hearing. The investigative report falsely says he confessed; two of the adjudicators don’t read the report at all; he’s not allowed to see the evidence against him; he can’t call an eye witness; and the complainant presents her story only through a hearsay summary offered by a Purdue employee. Seventh Circuit: Could be fundamentally unfair, in violation of the Due Process clause, and sex discrimination against a man, in violation of Title IX. (But the due process claim has lots of technical problems.)
• Allegation: Suicidal teen puts a gun to his temple. A Benton, Ark. officer orders him to drop it. The teen begins to move the gun away from his head. The officer shoots, kills him. District court: It would have been “nearly impossible” for the officer to tell if the teen was complying with the order or if instead he was about to point the gun at officers. Eighth Circuit: No qualified immunity.
• Ninth Circuit (2017, over a dissent): There’s nothing wrong with Berkeley forcing cell phone retailers to post a warning that suggests cell phones may expose users to unsafe levels of RF radiation. Supreme Court: Why don’t you double-check that. Ninth Circuit (2019, over the same dissent): There. Is. Nothing. Wrong. With. Berkeley . . .
• The “act of wearing almost no clothing while serving coffee in a retail establishment” is not protected First Amendment expression, says the Ninth Circuit. So no need to enjoin a pair of Everett, Wash. ordinances that require bikini baristas to dress more demurely.
• Infirm inmate serving lengthy prison term sues guards after they allegedly injure him on walk across prison yard. At trial on his Eighth Amendment claims, the inmate is visibly shackled. Which was plain error, says the Ninth Circuit. The inmate’s dangerousness was a merits issue at trial, so the trial court erred by ordering the inmate’s shackling without first determining whether shackling was necessary.
• Allegation: Pretrial detainee has psychotic break, defecates on himself during transport to hospital. Denver sheriff’s deputies remove his soiled clothing, march him through hospital wearing naught but a pair of mittens. Tenth Circuit (over a dissent): There’s no prior case directly on point that put the deputies on notice that that violated clearly established law. But the detainee can still sue them because it’s so outrageous.
• Scott County, Ky. sheriff’s deputy initiates high speed chase of suspected drug dealer. Much goes wrong, and the fleeing drug dealer crashes into another car, killing the driver. Driver’s estate sues the deputy. And to trial the case must go, says the Kentucky Supreme Court, overruling a prior decision holding that injuries caused by fleeing suspects can never be attributed to pursuing officers. H/t: TheNewspaper.com.
• And in en banc news, the Fifth Circuit will not reconsider its decision extending qualified immunity to Texas officials who searched a doctor’s records without first giving him a chance to challenge their subpoena. The search violated the Fourth Amendment, but the officials couldn’t have known that because there was no precedent on point saying so. Judge Willett takes the opportunity to edit his separate opinion; what had been a concurring dubitante is now a partial dissent that directly—and sharply—calls for a reevaluation of the qualified immunity doctrine.

In nearly every state (45 states plus D.C.), it is perfectly legal for doctors to dispense prescribed medication from their office during an in-person visit with a patient. But not in Texas. In Texas, of the state’s nearly 65,000 physicians, only eight—who work in rural areas—are eligible to dispense medication. There is no good reason for the ban; pharmacies lobbied for it, and they got it. “The state trusts me to perform complex eye surgery, but doesn’t trust me to give routine eye drops to my patients as they walk out the door,” says IJ client Dr. Kristin Held. “The ban on doctor dispensing raises drugs costs, endangers my patients, and hinders my ability to practice medicine. The only ones who benefit are the pharmacies.” In June, Dr. Held and Dr. Michael Garrett partnered with IJ to file a lawsuit challenging the ban. Read more here.

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No, says the Nebraska Supreme Court in today’s unanimous Gomez v. Gomez opinion (written by Justice Jonathan Papik), relying at least in part on the impropriety of secular courts’ “deciding what a person must do to be a faithful Catholic”:

In the course of their divorce proceedings, Patrick W. Gomez and Elizabeth A. Gomez … agreed to a stipulated parenting plan. That plan, which was later incorporated in the decree dissolving their marriage, gave Patrick and Elizabeth joint legal and physical custody of their two children and set forth a schedule in which the parents would exercise parenting time. The parenting plan also included a provision that the children “will be enrolled and be participants in the Catholic religion” and set forth several specific Catholic religious activities in which the children would participate. Attendance at Catholic Mass was not mentioned.

Years later, Patrick filed a motion alleging that Elizabeth was not complying with the language in the parenting plan regarding the children’s religious participation. In response to Patrick’s motion, the district court entered an order requiring Elizabeth either to bring the children to Catholic Mass every weekend in which she was exercising parenting time or to allow Patrick to take the children during her parenting time. It also required the children to attend Catholic Mass on Catholic “Holy Days of Obligation” and required Patrick and Elizabeth to coordinate to ensure their attendance on those days…. [O]nce a court, as here, adopts such an agreement and sets it forth as a judgment of the court, “the contractual character of the … agreement is subsumed into the court-ordered judgment.” …

Patrick and Elizabeth agree that the parenting plan requires that the children take part in those Catholic religious programs explicitly listed therein: “First Communion and Confirmation” and “CCD” classes. The parties divide on whether the parenting plan imposed additional obligations on the parents related to the children’s attendance at Catholic Mass. On one side is the interpretation advanced by Elizabeth: The decree requires the children to take part in those Catholic activities specifically mentioned, but does not impose additional obligations such as Mass attendance. Patrick counters that the language requiring that the children “be enrolled and be participants in the Catholic religion” means that the parents are obligated to raise the children in the Catholic faith and are thus obligated to facilitate the children’s observance of all the tenets thereof.

Patrick’s interpretation was adopted by the district court, but we note that it … raises some difficult questions …. Patrick’s argument is essentially that the parenting plan requires the children to do all that the Catholic Church requires of its adherents. An inescapable consequence of this interpretation is that the task of deciding what a person must do to be a faithful Catholic is placed squarely before civil courts.

Patrick hardly runs away from the notion that his interpretation puts courts in the position of determining and enforcing religious doctrine. To the contrary, his brief is replete with citations to Canon Law and he argues not only that it requires Mass attendance but that a failure to comply with such requirements is a mortal sin.

While courts are regularly called upon to decide the extent of obligations imposed by earthly regimes, many courts have questioned whether they may just as readily determine what obligations are imposed by a religious faith. Language from opinions of the U.S. Supreme Court, at a minimum, raises questions about whether courts may pass on matters of religious doctrine.

Additionally, many other courts have declined to resolve disputes that would require the resolution of questions of religious doctrine. See, e.g., Wallace v. ConAgra Foods, Inc., 920 F. Supp. 2d 995, 996 (D. Minn. 2013) (dismissing case alleging that food manufacturer misrepresented that its food products were “‘100% Kosher'” because it would require court to decide questions of religious doctrine), vacated and remanded on other grounds 747 F.3d 1025 (8th Cir. 2014); Abdelhak v. Jewish Press Inc., 411 N.J. Super. 211, 985 A.2d 197 (2009) (affirming dismissal of defamation claim premised on alleged statements that plaintiff did not comply with religious requirements because resolution of claim would require court to pass on matters of religious doctrine); Pielech v. Massasoit Greyhound, Inc., 423 Mass. 534, 542, 668 N.E.2d 1298, 1304 (1996) (holding statute was unconstitutional because it would require courts “to determine what actions and beliefs are required of adherents to the Roman Catholic faith”); Zumno v. Zumno, 394 Pa. Super. 30, 574 A.2d 1130 (1990) (declining to enforce prenuptial agreement that children would be raised Jewish because, among other reasons, it would excessively entangle court in religious matters); Lynch v. Uhlenhopp, 248 Iowa 68, 78 N.W.2d 491 (1956) (declining to enforce language in divorce decree that children shall be raised in Roman Catholic religion as void for uncertainty).

As it turns out, we need not resolve the difficult questions raised by the interpretation advanced by Patrick and adopted by the district court. As we will explain, we conclude this interpretation is not consistent with the four corners of the decree itself. But while we need not address the questions discussed above, we note them for the consideration of practitioners or courts considering a parenting plan that would require judicial resolution of questions of religious doctrine….

As we have noted, it is Patrick’s position that Elizabeth was required by the decree to take the children to Mass on weekends and Catholic Holy Days of Obligation when she was exercising parenting time or to give up her parenting time and allow Patrick to take them. Patrick contends that this requirement flows from the language that the children are to “be enrolled and be participants in the Catholic religion.” We disagree with Patrick’s reading.

Initially, we note that we are not presented with any argument or evidence that the terms “enrolled” and “participants” are used as either legal or religious terms of art…. In its ordinary sense, the word “enrolled” suggests only that the children must be registered in some sense in the Catholic faith. We do not understand how the requirement that the children be registered as Catholics in some way also compels the Mass attendance ordered by the district court.

This leaves the word “participants.” It is Patrick’s position that the children will be “participants” in the Catholic religion only if they adhere to all its required observances. We certainly understand that if the children did so, they would qualify as “participants.” But our focus is on what the decree required. And the word “participant” on its own suggests only that a person take part in something to some degree. Indeed, it would not be uncommon for persons to be described as “participants” in a given activity even if they do not take part to the fullest. It is only with qualifying language not present here such as “full” that the word “participants” communicates the level of participation Patrick argues the decree required.

To be sure, the children must take part in the Catholic religion to some degree if they are to be fairly described as “participants.” But, as we have noted, the parenting plan explicitly requires the children to participate in “First Communion and Confirmation,” as well as “CCD” classes, and Elizabeth concedes that she is obligated to facilitate their involvement in those activities. We do not, however, understand the language of the parenting plan to require Elizabeth to also facilitate their attendance at Catholic Mass as ordered by the district court.

We find additional support for our interpretation in the decree’s complete silence as to the children’s attendance at Catholic Mass. The decree specifically sets forth a detailed 2-week rotation regarding the regular exercise of parenting time. It also sets forth a holiday parenting time arrangement, covering various enumerated holidays. Additionally, the decree has specific language requiring Elizabeth to take the children to CCD classes on her parenting time.

Nowhere, however, is there any mention of a requirement that the parties either have the children attend Catholic Mass on each parent’s parenting time or give up that time to the other parent for the other parent to do so. And despite specific allocation of parenting time on a number of holidays, there is no reference to Catholic Holy Days of Obligation as such or a requirement that the parent exercising parenting time on those days bring the children to Mass on those days. In our view, given its silence on these points, the decree is most reasonably interpreted as not addressing attendance at Catholic Mass….

[We thus] conclude that by requiring Elizabeth to either bring the children to Catholic Mass or give up her parenting time, the district court imposed obligations that were not present in the original decree. The district court’s order thus constituted a modification of the decree as opposed to a proper order interpreting it. The party seeking to modify visitation has the burden to show a material change in circumstances affecting the best interests of the child. There is no such evidence here. Accordingly, the portions of the district court’s order regarding Mass attendance must be vacated….

Thanks to Jim Creigh for the pointer.

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In 2004, John Doe sued his employer, claiming that the employer allowed Doe to be harassed based on Doe’s religion (Islam). The lawsuit was covered by the Chicago Tribune, the Chicago Sun-Times, and the Kankakee (Illinois) Daily Journal; the Council on American-Islamic Relations also published an article about the lawsuit. The Chicago Tribune article accurately reported that, according to the Complaint, after Doe

was written up for threatening behavior, another allegation he denied, a general manager questioned him about his national origin and his views on the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks.

Because this was an accurate report of a court filing, it couldn’t be treated as libelous or as putting Doe in a false light. (Accurately reporting others’ accusations may often be libelous, but generally not when you’re reporting accusations filed in court; that’s an aspect of the so-called “fair report” privilege, and Illinois recognizes a broad version of that privilege.)

This 2004 lawsuit was not anonymous, and the newspaper articles mentioned Doe’s name, which seems fairly uncommon. I’m calling him Doe now because the new lawsuit that I’m writing about was indeed filed anonymously.

Then in 2016, when Doe was looking for a new job—and not doing as well in the search as he thought he would—he Googled himself, and saw the Tribune and Sun-Times articles. He thought that the articles might make him look bad to employers, because they might make him seem either litigious or physically threatening. He then asked the newspapers to remove the articles; the Sun-Times did, but the Tribune didn’t. According to the complaint, “At that time, the Chicago Tribune Article appeared on the seventh or eighth page of Internet search results for the Plaintiff’s name on Google.com.”

Then Doe (again, according to the Complaint), “contacted a reputation management company to minimize the appearance of the Chicago Tribune Article in Internet search results for his name.” Doe thought the company’s price was too high, so he didn’t hire them. But then,

Sometime later, the Plaintiff noticed the Chicago Tribune Article rapidly rising in rank in Internet search results for his name [to #1 in the search results].

The Plaintiff also noticed that Kankakee Daily Journal Article newly appeared in Internet search results for his name [on the first page of the search results].

The Plaintiff also noticed that CAIR Article newly appeared in Internet search results for his name [also on the first page].

The Plaintiff also noticed other, new webpages containing exact excerpts from the Chicago Tribune Article appear in Internet search results for his name …. [T]he websites on which the New Webpages appeared did not relate to news at all. For example, a blog for an auto body repair shop [with whom Doe was completely unconnected] appeared in Internet search results for his name … [and] contained language copied from the Chicago Tribune Article.

No organic or natural renewed public interest in the Plaintiff, the Lawsuit, or the Lawsuit Articles had occurred. Yet, new websites appeared harvesting content from the Chicago Tribune Article. Indeed, search results for the Plaintiff’s name rapidly changed in an unnatural and dramatic manner to emphasize the Chicago Tribune Article and other webpages referencing the Lawsuit and embarrassing content about the Plaintiff.

So, in 2018, Doe sued the unknown person who had orchestrated this, seeking damages and an injunction ordering plaintiff to undue the search engine optimization. (The reputation management company had “denied any involvement in affecting the search results.”) The theories were:

1. False light invasion of privacy. “[T]he Defendant sought to emphasize Internet content that falsely portrays the Plaintiff as engaging in threatening behavior” and “that also falsely portrays the Plaintiff as an undue litigation risk to potential “
2. Intrusion upon seclusion. “Given the age of the article and events from 2004, as well as its placement in search results, the Lawsuit Articles and content associated therewith fell within near-obscurity in the context of Internet use. [T]he Defendant brought forth obscure articles and content securing their placement on the first page of search results for the Plaintiff’s name.”
3. Tortious interference with prospective economic advantage. “The Defendant … [intended] to harm the Plaintiff,” by “direct[ing] third parties away from doing business with the Plaintiff and … dissuad[ing] potential employers from hiring the “

This, I think, can’t be right: The newspaper articles accurately reported court filings, and even if the employer’s allegations discussed in the filings (that Doe “was written up for threatening behavior, another allegation he denied”) were false, the fair report privilege—which usually arises in libel cases, but also applies to false light cases—protects accurate summaries of court documents, including complaints. (Even independently of that, accurately quoting plaintiff’s own statement cannot be defamatory.   “[A] party’s accurate quoting of another’s statement cannot defame the speaker’s reputation since the speaker is himself responsible for whatever harm the words might cause…. The fact that a statement is true, or in this case accurately quoted, is an absolute defense to a defamation action.” And the same should apply quoting plaintiff’s lawyer’s words in the complaint filed on plaintiff’s behalf.)

Now it turns out that, in some states, a showing of “motive to harm another” may indeed overcome the fair report privilege. Indeed, this historically was the general rule, though the modern cases depart from it. That theory might actually fit well a lawsuit such as Doe’s (at least when the SEO-promoted newspaper article quoted a court document other than Doe’s own complaint). But in Illinois, the privilege applies without regard to the speaker’s motive (or to whether the speaker knew that the statements in the court documents were false or likely false).

Generally speaking, the various libel privileges also apply to interference with prospective economic advantage claims based on allegedly false or reputation-harming statements. “[W]here claims such as tortious interference and disparagement are based on statements that are qualifiedly privileged under defamation law, the protection afforded those statements … must also apply in the derivative claims.” “As with defamation actions, where the conduct allegedly causing the business interference is a defendant’s utterance of negative statements concerning a plaintiff, privileged speech is a defense.” Illinois precedents are not entirely clear on this (compare Zdeb v. Baxter Int’l (Ill. App. Ct. 1998) with Turner v. Fletcher (Ill. App. Ct. 1999)); but Illinois law also sharply limits the interference tort to situations where the plaintiff can point to specific prospective business partners who “contemplate[ed] prospective contractual arrangements with the plaintiff” but then declined because of the interference—and it doesn’t seem that Doe can point to such specific prospective employers. (Libel law doesn’t require such evidence of specific prospective business partners, because it rests on the theory that defamatory statements will often damage reputation and business prospects in ways that are hard to pin down; but libel law, as I mentioned, is definitely limited by the fair report privilege.)

Finally, the intrusion upon seclusion claim is also a loser: It requires that “the matter upon which the intrusion occurs is private,” and court filings aren’t private. Classic “examples forming the basis for the tort include invading an individual’s home; an illegal search of his or her shopping bag in a store; eavesdropping by wiretapping; peering into the windows of a private home; and persistent and unwanted telephone calls.” But highlighting published accounts containing information from public court filings wouldn’t qualify. Indeed, the intrusion tort is generally focused on intrusive techniques of gathering information about a person, as well as on access to the person’s private space; the disclosure of information about a person is generally the province of another of the “invasion of privacy” torts, disclosure of private facts—but that tort also can’t be applied to public record information.

But at least so far, we haven’t gotten a substantive ruling on these theories. Doe first sued in federal court, on the theory that the defendant and Doe were citizens of different states. But Magistrate Judge Eric Long ordered Doe to explain why the court has jurisdiction:

“Because the existence of diversity jurisdiction cannot be determined without knowledge of every defendant’s place of citizenship, ‘John Doe’ defendants are not permitted in federal diversity suits.” Howell by Goerdt v. Tribune Entertainment Co., 106 F.3d 215, 218 (7th Cir. 1997). While there are exceptions to this rule, none apply here. It is not an exception that Plaintiff does not know the defendant’s name.

Doe then dropped the federal lawsuit, sued in Illinois state court, and sought discovery of the defendant’s identity. Just last month, he dropped the case, though I can’t be sure whether it’s because he gave up, because he found the defendant and got the defendant to settle the case, or because he found the defendant and plans on suing the defendant elsewhere. If Doe does refile the lawsuit, though, we may here more on the underlying tort law (and First Amendment) questions.

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I Love You, Now Die. HBO. Tuesday, July 9, 8 p.m.

When Massachusetts police announced in 2014 that they were charging a teenage girl with manslaughter for goading her boyfriend into suicide with a series of bullying texts—some of them as he sat in his pickup truck, debating whether to switch on the motor that would poison him with carbon monoxide—there seemed little doubt of her guilt.

Not necessarily her legal guilt. Though 39 states have laws against assisting or encouraging suicide, Massachusetts wasn’t one of them. And Michelle Carter was not only miles away when her boyfriend, Conrad Roy III, turned on that motor, she was just 17—a year younger than Conrad and certainly not a parent, teacher, or custodial adult. Telling him to go ahead and kill himself seemed like a mordant and horribly reprehensible exercise of First Amendment rights. To turn on its head an ancient parental rebuttal to the my-friends-told-me-to-it defense: If your friends told you to jump off the Brooklyn Bridge, would you do it? And even if the answer is yes, is it their fault?

But there was a second charge against Carter, even if it was only filed in the court of public opinion: that she was a “heartless bitch,” as one reporter interviewed in the HBO documentary I Love You, Now Die called her, adding, “this coercive ice queen who killed a guy in order to become popular.”

On this, the case seemed open and shut. The texts from Carter that cops found in Roy’s phone, sent over a period of months, were colder than an Arctic night. When he said he wasn’t sure how to do it, Carter’s reply sounded like a macabre take on Paul Simon: “Drink bleach. Why don’t you just drink bleach? Hang yourself. Jump over a building, stab yourself, idk. There’s a lot of ways.”

And in another text to a friend after Roy’s body was found, Carter seemed to confess. “His death is my fault like honestly I could have stopped him,” she wrote. “I was on the phone with him and he got out of the car because it was working and he got scared and I fucking told him to get back in.” Small wonder that a local woman asked by a TV reporter what she thought of the case replied, “You little snot, how could you do that to a human being, you 90210 piece of crap?”

In fact, there was a lot more to the story, as the fascinating and often horrifying I Love You, Now Die—one of three two-part crime documentaries HBO will air this month—makes clear. Carter and Roy played out a fantasy that they were a millennial Romeo and Juliet, their passions fed by anti-depressants and a mutual fascination with suicide, wooing each other not with poetry but plagiarized texts.

Living in different but nearby towns in the southern leg of Massachusetts, they met in Florida, where their families were both vacationing and almost instantly bonded, in no small part over their social anxiety, clinical depression, suicide attempts (one for her, at least four for him) and disturbingly dark worldviews. When Roy confided he’d seen the devil—it’s not clear if he’s speaking metaphorically or literally—Carter quickly declares she does, too. “A lot, actually,” she adds.

But their relationship was almost entirely digital. After returning home, they met no more than five times over the next two years, yet bombarded one another with thousands of texts, many of their lines purloined from the teen-angst TV musical Glee. How much of their hellbound race was real and how much was fantasy—and whether they understood the difference—is an open question.

What is clear is that Carter didn’t plant the idea of killing himself in Roy’s head. If the texts themselves weren’t convincing enough that he was obsessed with the idea, the videos and notebooks full of suicide notes and bleak self-appraisals like “There’s something wrong with me,” surely are. But if Carter wasn’t the intellectual author of Roy’s death wish, neither did she report it to his parents or doctors or anybody else who might have helped him.

And in the final two weeks before his death, Carter seemed to actively encourage him, badgering him about where and when he planned to follow through on his threats: “The time is right and you’re ready, you just need to do it!”

She even seems to have staged a sort of dry run 48 hours before his suicide, texting other girls at her school that her out-of-town boyfriend had disappeared and she was afraid he had killed himself. “It’s all my fault,” she wrote. “I was supposed to save him he needed me. I let him down.”

Actually, as Carter was well aware, Roy was very much alive and deluging her with texts. Her attorney and expert psychiatric witnesses would later heap scorn on the prosecution’s theory that she was setting herself up as the “grieving girlfriend” who needed social support, but they didn’t have any alternative explanation.

That wasn’t the only weakness in their case. Carter’s most sensible defense—that words are not weapons, whatever she may have told Roy, he didn’t have to do it—had been obliterated before the trial when the Massachusetts Supreme Court refused to quash her indictment.

Instead, they argued that the single most damning piece of evidence against Carter—her texted confession to a friend that she ordered Roy back into the carbon-monoxide-filled car when his resolve wavered—was a lie to gain perverse sympathy (oddly mirroring, in a way, the prosecution’s “grieving girlfriend” scenario). And perhaps if Carter made that claim from the witness stand, it would have worked. But she didn’t testify.

That sealed her fate, legally; she was convicted of manslaughter. And in the court of public opinion, she fared even worse. “If you’re gonna do a last tweet,” Carter wrote to Roy, “can it be about me?” The rest was silence.

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Vegetables are ugly. Or at least that’s the view of the officials in Miami Shores, Florida, who implemented a ban on front-yard vegetable gardens at residential properties in 2013. The ordinance forced Hermine Ricketts and her husband, Laurence Carroll, to uproot the garden they’d maintained for nearly two decades.

Now they can start planting again: The Florida legislature has passed a bill shielding vegetable gardens from local prohibitions. “After nearly six years of fighting…I will once again be able to legally plant vegetables in my front yard,” Ricketts said in a statement. “I’m grateful to the Legislature and the governor for standing up to protect my freedom to grow healthy food on my own property.”

The Institute for Justice filed a lawsuit on Ricketts’ behalf in 2013. Florida’s Third District Court of Appeals upheld the ban, and the state’s Supreme Court declined to hear the case. So Ricketts and the institute lobbied the legislature, and it passed a law effectively invalidating the local ordinance. Gov. Ron DeSantis signed it last week.

How were city commissioners able to pass the rule in the first place, much less get it past an appeals court? It was billed as a zoning regulation, which cities have near-unlimited power in implementing. The Florida League of Cities opposed Ricketts’ efforts until the end, arguing that code enforcement is an essential tool for maintaining a town’s aesthetic. They also didn’t like the idea of a state government preempting measures adopted at the local level.

Ricketts now uses a wheelchair and has suffered from a litany of health issues in recent years, which she blames on stress induced by the legal battle. She’s hoping that a little gardening might be the medicine she needs.

“You’re down on the earth, touching the soil, kneeling on the ground….It’s a healing process,” she told the Miami Herald. “I’m hoping to get back in the garden and spend time outside doing things I love. The healing things in the sunshine.”

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New York City’s health department is implementing a ban on cannabidiol (CBD) additives in food and drinks, dismaying not just restaurant and café owners but even members of City Council.

Way back in February, city health officials surprised a number of bakeries, restaurants, coffee shops, and food vendors by telling them that CBD derivatives—made from the non-psychoactive components of cannabis—were not permitted in food and drinks. At that point, many places had already begun selling food with the trendy infusions. After businesses expressed their surprise at the sudden announcement, the city’s health department agreed to delay enforcement until July.

Now the ban on CBD edibles is officially in effect, and fines of up to $600 per incident may start in October. The city’s justification, according to Gothamist, is that the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) says CBD food additives are illegal under federal law. But the Department of Health is a city agency, not an enforcement mechanism of the federal government. Many observers suspect that local law enforcement agencies and prosecutors are pointing to federal law as an excuse to keep enforcing cannabis bans as states and localities legalize marijuana use.

Some members of the New York City Council, including Speaker Corey Johnson, plan to put together legislation to stop the health department from imposing fines. That itself says a lot about the misbegotten way New York City sometimes operates. The City Council needs to pass a law to stop an administrative department from implementing fines that the council never authorized? Who exactly are the lawmakers here?

City Council member Mark Levine expressed his frustration to Gothamist. “I was very concerned about the impact and confusion it would cause on small businesses and their customers,” he said. And now that there’s a move on the state level to develop regulations for the legal use of CBD, he added, the “ban seems like it is even more premature.”

CBD products themselves are legal in New York City; they just become illegal by virtue of being added to food. It’s an absurd policy that has had economic consequences—one business owner stopped plans to open a café to sell CBD-infused treats. Another coffee shop will stop adding CBD-infused shots to their drinks, but will sell the CBD products on the side so customers can add them instead.

The Department of Health has said that part of the problem is the government has not deemed CBD to be safe. Over at The Cut, Amanda Arnold claims the “reasoning behind the policy does, admittedly, make sense: Despite being infused in everything from brownies to lavender lattes to gummies these days, the oil has not officially been deemed safe for human consumption.” But no, that reasoning does not make sense. We shouldn’t have to prove to the government that CBD is safe to consume. It should be up to the government to show that it is not safe in order to justify a ban.

Read more from Reason‘s Mike Riggs here about the current trendiness of CBD, the science behind what it does and does not do, and its confusing legal status.

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In late April, less than two weeks after officially announcing a primary challenge to President Donald Trump, Fox News asked former Massachusetts Gov. Bill Weld how he hoped to compete against the fundraising juggernaut of a power-consolidating incumbent. “I’ve just spent the last week in New York fundraising—in the millions, but not $25 million—but I just started,” Weld said. “And I’m confident based on the response we’re getting we will be adequately funded in New Hampshire and beyond.”

If Weld is being adequately funded, it’s not in the millions. ABC News reported Wednesday night on the presidential candidate’s second-quarter fundraising numbers, and they’re grim—just $688,000 from 7,000 donors, plus an additional $181,000 from Weld himself. That compares to a combined $105 million from the Trump re-election campaign and the Republican National Committee, which have undergone an unprecedented merger.

How paltry is $688,000? This paltry: Montana Gov. Steve Bullock—who entered the Democratic race one month after Weld, polls nationally at around 0.4 percent, and couldn’t even qualify to be one of 20 Democrats on the initial debate stage—raised $2 million this quarter. There will be plenty of other cruel-looking comparisons over the coming days as candidates prepare for the July 15 Federal Elections Committee reporting deadline.

Those 7,000 donors are a puny total too. In order to qualify for the second round of televised debates at the end of July, Democratic candidates have to report donations from 65,000 people, with the number doubling to 130,000 for round three. South Bend Mayor Pete Buttigieg, who is leading the pack so far in reported second quarter donations (as we await figures from Elizabeth Warren and Kamala Harris), saw 284,000 individuals contribute to his $24.8 million cash haul from April to June.

Weld senior adviser Stuart Stevens insisted to ABC that the campaign is “satisfied” with the fundraising. “[We’re] confident that we will have, from all sources, the resources necessary to communicate via both broadcast and digital means, in all key states, Gov. Weld’s message that America deserves better than it is getting today,” Stevens said. Maybe.

But the math looks bleak for Weld elsewhere, too. In the seven national head-to-head polls taken since he joined the race, the former Libertarian Party vice presidential nominee has trailed Trump by an average of 71.5 percentage points. Meanwhile, per Gallup, the president has enjoyed approval ratings among Republicans of between 87 percent and 91 percent all year.

To this, Weld fires back with a comparison of his own: Pat Buchanan vs. George H.W. Bush. The late former president in July 1991 was still enjoying approval ratings of above 70 percent. The former Nixon speechwriter, cable TV squabbler, and original paleoconservative jumped into the primary race in December 1991. His first two and a half months of fundraising, ABC reported, brought $875,000 ($2.3 million in today’s money) from just over 2,000 donors.

Weld, who campaigned for Bush in New Hampshire, is fond of pointing out that Buchanan dealt the incumbent an eventually fatal blow with his shocking 37 percent finish in that state in 1992. The campaign is eagerly squinting at Granite State polls in hopes of detecting momentum toward the “Buchanan benchmark.” And there are still seven months between now and the New Hampshire primary.

Still, there have been three head-to-head polls this year in that state, located practically in Weld’s back yard, and Trump so far is stomping his challenger, 75 percent to 16 percent. Unless the Boston Brahmin turns some of his fundraising and poll numbers around, he’ll be striking historians not as a reverse-angle Pat Buchanan but as the second coming of Pete McCloskey.

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