The US Supreme Court turned away an appeal from a man arrested for making fun of his local police department on Facebook in a case that inspired the parody site The Onion to file a brief saying its “highly acclaimed, universally revered coverage” was under threat.
(Bloomberg) — The US Supreme Court turned away an appeal from a man arrested for making fun of his local police department on Facebook in a case that inspired the parody site The Onion to file a brief saying its “highly acclaimed, universally revered coverage” was under threat.
The justices left in place a ruling that tossed out Anthony Novak’s lawsuit against the city of Parma and two police officers. The 6th US Circuit Court of Appeals said the officers were protected under a legal doctrine known as qualified immunity because they reasonably believed they were acting within the law.
It’s defeat for The Onion, which said in its highly unusual court filing that the ruling “threatens to disembowel a form of rhetoric that has existed for millennia, that is particularly potent in the realm of political debate, and that, purely incidentally, forms the basis of The Onion’s writers’ paychecks.”
Novak created a parody Facebook page for the police department, publishing six posts that included advertisements for free abortions in a police van and a ”Pedophile Reform event.” He was jailed for four days after his arrest, indicted for disrupting police functions and then acquitted after a jury trial.
In rejecting Novak’s lawsuit, the 6th Circuit pointed to Novak’s deletion of comments that had made clear his page was fake. The appeals court also said that, after the police department posted a warning about a fake site, Novak copied the message and posted it on his own page.
The Onion urged the Supreme Court to take up the appeal in a brief laced with hyperbole, jabs at the legal profession and intentionally outlandish assertions, including the publication’s claim to having a daily readership of 4.3 trillion people.
The case “should be granted, the rights of the people vindicated, and various historical wrongs remedied,” the parody site wrote. “The Onion would welcome any one of the three, particularly the first.”
The case is Novak v. City of Parma, 22-293.
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