Detective Who Arrested Man for Satirical Facebook Post Denied Immunity by 5th C

techdirt.com

87 points·rntn··28 comments

His post looks like perfectly normal dumb internet shit you yourself would send in chat at 3:00 AM just a couple of years ago, if not today. Admit it.

Not only did this man DESERVE to be arrested, but Brad Pitt himself should be arrested for the MURDER of the World War Z source material by his boring movie. /s

This was an absolutely insane case, and I'm glad it at least ended with sanity. The fact this arrest happened at all is unbelievably dumb and also scary.

Sadly, this isn't over. The appeals court simply overturned a lower court decision and remanded the case back to the lower court.

Like the article states, this is likely to end in a settlement.

I would hope settlements for power abuses of this type would come out of this PD's pocket. Meaning: abuse power = less $ left for paying officers, obtaining gear, etc. So that in future, PDs would be more hesitant to stomp on things they don't like simply because they can.

But who am I kidding.. probably taxpayers on the hook as usual (same with court costs).

Btw: too bad victim deleted his post. No deletion (or even apology) needed.

It's good to see common sense upheld by jurists applying case law to hold the line against arbitrary arrest by LEAs over-stepping their authorities.

Now, if police-involved firearms incident data reporting were mandatory because we only know some details of most cases, but there's no national standard. 1055 people were shot by police in 2021 that we know of. How can the public health crisis of violent deaths be addressed if we're unable to scrutinize the data of each incident? Overall, there were 48k firearm deaths in 2021, or 13 / 100k. (variance by state from Massachusetts 3.4 / 100k to Mississippi 33 / 100k)

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