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CharlesDickensunwittingly described our current political situationwhen writingA Tale of Two Cities:It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness.

United States citizens live in an age of unprecedented rights. Our Supreme Court in 2015upheld the right for gay people to get married.Recently,civil asset forfeitureis being reconsidered, and theapparatuses supporting the war on drugs arebeginning to be dismantled.The currentgenerationhas upheldtheimportance of Miranda Rightsin Florida v. Powelland more broadly questioned the importance of the police state. Thecourts agree that speech includes the right to spend money onadvertising ideasand that corporationsalso are entitled tospeechprotection.This generation realizes that patriotism should not stifle dissent. In fact,the United States Supreme Court recognizes in Snyder v. Phelps that one isevenable tolegallypicket a service members funeral.More charter schoolsare becoming another school choicefor poorer Americansand,as a result,are producing better-educated students.The death penalty is illegal in 21 states,andthe First Step Act is a good start to sentencing reform. In many ways, were living in the best of times.

On the other hand,all is not well in theUnited States. Thecurrent president workedvigorouslyto deport millions of undocumented immigrants, wanted to use extreme vetting of Muslim immigrants and tried toencouragea Muslim registry. His efforts todecry independent mediaandhis support for the death penalty andfor unconstitutionalstop-and-friskpoliciesaredisgustingremnants of a worse time.However, thedandyDemocratsare no lesser of a poison.Rather than condemn authoritarianism, the DemocraticParty has looked toward ways of making power polite.ElizabethWarrens specific brand of economic populism callsfor wealth taxes,which will increasegovernment intrusion into the lives of citizens ina way never before seen. Additionally, Warren calls for eliminating charter schools,which primarily benefit poorer children,while ironicallysending her son to a private school. OtherDemocratic darlingslikeBetoORourke claim that theyre forcibly going to be taking guns from the American populace.

Outside the larger political scene, First Amendment rights have been largely upheldby the Supreme Courtin the 2010s.Janus v. AFSCME successfully argued that labor unions collecting fees fromnon-union members violates the First Amendment provisions relating to free association and freedom of speech.In Masterpiece Cakeshop v. Colorado Civil Rights Commission, the court upheld the right of conscience relating to artistic and religious freedom. In 2017, Lee v. Tam upheld the right of trademarking an offensive name.In Trinity Lutheran Church of Columbia v. Pauley, the freedom to be associated with a religious group does not make one ineligible for government benefits and thus upholds free association.Another landmark win for free expression took place in 2017 whenPackinghamv. North Carolina struck down the statute that prohibited sex offenders from accessing social media. In Arizona Christian School Tuition Organization v. Winn, tax breaks and grants were further allowed to be given to churches and other religious organizations. Furthermore, Hosanna-Tabor Evangelical Lutheran Church and Schoolv. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission established that discrimination laws do not apply to organizations selections of religious leaders. In 2012 notably, United States v. Alvarez struck down exceptions to the First Amendment relating to stolen valor.

The trend through the 2010s showsan increasingly broad look on rights. By denying restrictions on churches, free assembly, artistic freedom, etc.,we strengthen the values of dissent and discourse that allow our country to thrive.

However, outsideof the Supreme Courtthe First Amendment has fared worse.Former PresidentBarackObama actively encouraged IRS action against conservative nonprofit organizations. In 2013, journalists protested the exclusion of press photographers from news events and criticized the first amendment case of Citizens United. Thats not to say that our current president has done any better.President Trump frequently bashes the mediaas fake news andwants to change libel laws. Also, our students are increasingly hostile to freedom of speech. According to a Brookings Institution poll, 40% of students believe the Constitution does not protecthate speech. Nineteen percentof students said that physical violence is an acceptable way to deal with offensive speech,and 50% of students said the appropriate response to speech they disagree with is to shut it down.

Overall, while the First Amendment is increasingly being upheld by higher courts, the cultureand political will upholding expressionhas weakenedand needs to be bolstered.

Disclaimer: The views and opinions expressed by individual writers in the opinion section do not reflect the views and opinions of The Daily Campus or other staff members. Only articles labeled Editorial are the official opinions of The Daily Campus.

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First Amendment rights in the 2010s - UConn Daily Campus

PLAINVILLE The state says justices should reject a petition by Michelle Carter to appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court, because there is no First Amendment issue to decide in the landmark texting-suicide case.

Lawyers for Michelle Carter, 23, who is currently in jail serving a 15-month sentence, argued that her text messages and calls were protected free speech and that she was not responsible for the suicide of Conrad Roy III.

In their response filed last month, the state Attorney Generals office says the courts verdict in Carters speech is consistent with previous decisions by the nations highest court regarding speech integral to criminal conduct.

Inasmuch as petitioners wanton or reckless conduct causing Roys death was carried out by speech, that speech was therefore un-protected because it was integral to the commission of involuntary manslaughter, according to the state attorneys generals response.

Carter filed what is called a certiorari petition. Experts say the court accepts about 1.2 percent of the petitions they receive.

Roy, 18, of Mattapoisett, killed himself in July 2014 by breathing in toxic carbon monoxide from a gas-powered water pump in placed in his pickup truck. Carter, then a 17-year-old at King Phillip Regional High School, was at her Plainville home at the time and spoke twice by phone to Roy in addition to text messages.

Before Roys suicide, prosecutors argued that Carter and Roy shared an intimate online relationship over several months and that she coerced him into killing himself.

Presiding over Carters jury-waived trial, Taunton Juvenile Judge Lawrence Moniz ruled that Carter caused Roys death when she instructed him to get back in his truck as it was filling with toxic gas after he changed his mind about killing himself.

Carter told friends she could hear the motor from the water pump and Roy moaning before he stopped responding to her calls.

The state Supreme Judicial Court unanimously upheld her conviction in a landmark decision criticized by free speech advocates and legal scholars.

In the state attorney generals 29-page response, it argued that the SJCs decision was correct.

The document was written by state Attorney General Maura Healey, state Solicitor Elizabeth Dewar and assistant attorney general Maria Granick, argues that the justices should deny Carters petition.

In the response, Healey also argued that Carters due process rights were not violated and that the states manslaughter statute is not unconstitutionally vague as applied to her conduct.

Carters lawyers also argued the state SJC created a conflict with at least three other state supreme courts about the application of the First Amendment in such circumstances. But the attorney generals office said there is no conflict. Carter was convicted in 2017 and sentenced in February. Earlier this year, a former Boston College student was indicted by a Suffolk County grand jury for involuntary manslaughter in a similar texting suicide case.

David Linton may be reached at 508-236-0338.

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State argues there is no First Amendment issue in Michelle Carter case - The Sun Chronicle

A pincer of police closes in on the front line camp, built on unceded Indian land north of the Standing Rock Indian Reservation and in the path of the Dakota Access Pipeline, on October 27, 2016. (Image: Law Enforcement Photo / The Intercept)

A recent pair of United Nations climate reports make at least one thing clear: It is critical that we stop constructing new fossil fuels infrastructure.

Unfortunately, some people seem to have misread the warnings: On Nov. 20, Wisconsins governor, Tony Evers, a Democrat, signed a law that, instead of penalizing oil pipelines, penalizes protesters who disrupt the construction of such critical infrastructure.

The new law makes it a felony, punishable by a fine of up to $10,000 and up to six years in prison, to trespass on the property of an oil pipeline or storage facility.

The Wisconsin law did not generate in a vacuum. The bill, which is similar to model critical infrastructure legislation promoted by the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), was a response to the Lakota-led uprising at Standing Rock, N.D., against the Dakota Access Pipeline, during which protesters built a sprawling camp in the pipelines path, chained themselves to construction equipment and marched onto the pipeline right-of-way to halt construction. After Standing Rock, industry groups such as Koch Industries, Marathon Petroleum Corporation and Energy Transfer Partners mounted a lobbying campaign in state legislatures across the country to advocate such anti-protest laws.

The effort has been successful. According to Greenpeace, Wisconsin is the 10th state to institute such a law, and at least 13 others are considering similar measures.

But thats not the only context that matters. The latest U.N. Emissions Gap report, issued Tuesday, made headlines with its bleak finding that because the Earths governments have failed to cut emissions in the last decade, steeper cuts are now required much more quickly if the world hopes to avoid catastrophic climate change. According to the New York Times, the report found that even if every country fulfills its current pledge under the Paris Agreement, average temperatures would be on track to rise by 3.2 Celsius above the baseline temperature at the start of the industrial age. Bleaker still, many countries, including the United States, which has begun to officially pull out of the agreement, are not on track to meet their modest pledges under the Paris Agreement.

Bizarrely, even as they pledge to reduce emissions, many signatories to the Paris climate accord continue to ramp up fossil fuel production. According to the U.N. Production Gap reportissued on Nov. 20, the same day that Gov. Evers signed the bill to squelch pipeline proteststhe Earths governments plan to extract 50% more fossil fuels by 2030 than would be consistent with a pathway to 2 C of warming and 120% more than would be consistent with a pathway to 1.5 C of warming. While the production gap is largest for coal, according to the report:

Oil and gas are also on track to exceed carbon budgets, as countries continue to invest in fossil fuel infrastructure that locks in oil and gas use. The effects of this lock-in widen the production gap over time, until countries are producing 43% (36 million barrels per day) more oil and 47% (1,800 billion cubic meters) more gas by 2040 than would be consistent with a 2C pathway.

The report goes on to explain the maniac logic countries use to justify increasing production:

Many countries appear to be banking on export markets to justify major increases in production (e.g., the United States, Russia, and Canada) while others are seeking to limit or largely end imports through scaled-up production (e.g., India and China). The net result could be significant over-investment, increasing the risk of stranded assets, workers, and communities, as well as locking in a higher emissions trajectory.

In short, if governments really did their jobs, they would criminalize pipelines, not protesters.

In response to the reports, Mitch Jones, climate and energy program director for Food and Water Action, says our most urgent task is to cut off the supply of fossil fuels at their source. He says, We have no time left to waste on neoliberal market tweaks.

Jones, however, holds out hope that the task may yet be accomplished by policy makers and political leaders. Others, especially people in frontline and indigenous communities who witness the destruction of fossil fuel extraction first hand, arent waiting on the government to act. Faced with the abdication by their elected leadership, as detailed in the U.N. reports, these communities are taking the matter into their own hands, and forging a decentralized global movementthat Naomi Klein dubs blockadiato resist, disrupt and defeat new fossil fuel infrastructure. The movement burst into international visibility on the Dakota plains, but it did not stop there. As it were a milkweed pod, the North Dakota authorities who crushed the Standing Rock camps in February 2017 succeeded only in spreading the seeds far and wide.

Given this context, the Wisconsin law and others like it should be seen for what they are: maneuvers in the climate war, made by mad men intent on strapping us all into their doomsday machine and sealing the exits.

These laws are evidence, also, of how afraid they are that the blockade-at-the-source tactics that have proliferated since Standing Rock just might work.

In These Times has been selected to participate in NewsMatchthe largest grassroots fundraising campaign for nonprofit news organizations.

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First Amendment Loses as Pipeline Industry Scores Another Win in Wisconsin - In These Times

WASHINGTON The lawsuit, a federal judge found, bordered on the delusional. A Louisiana police officer injured in a protest tried to sue the hashtag #BlackLivesMatter, which amounted, wrote Judge Brian A. Jackson of the Federal District Court in Baton Rouge, to picking a fight with an idea. A hashtag, Judge Jackson wrote, is patently incapable of being sued.

The officer also sued Black Lives Matter, which the judge said was also a nonstarter. It is, he wrote, a social movement rather than an organization or entity of any sort that could be a defendant in a lawsuit.

A third part of the lawsuit seeking to hold a leader of the movement liable for the officers injuries reached the Supreme Court on Friday. Judge Jackson had dismissed that part of the case on First Amendment grounds, but an appeals court revived it, alarming civil rights lawyers and experts on free speech.

The officer, according to a lawsuit in which he was identified as John Doe, was injured in Baton Rouge by a demonstrator who threw a rock that broke the officers teeth and left him with injuries to his jaw and brain. The demonstrator has not been found.

The protest, which occurred in the summer of 2016, concerned the fatal shooting of a black man, Alton B. Sterling, by two police officers. The demonstration started peacefully but turned violent.

The officer sued DeRay Mckesson, a Black Lives Matter activist, claiming, without providing details, that Mr. Mckesson had incited the violence that led to his injuries. Mr. Mckesson was present at the protest, which blocked the highway in front of the Police Departments headquarters, but he did not throw the rock that hit the officer in the head.

Judge Jackson ruled for Mr. Mckesson, saying he was protected by the First Amendment. Liability may not be imposed merely because an individual belonged to a group, some members of which committed acts of violence, he wrote, quoting a landmark 1982 Supreme Court decision, N.A.A.C.P. v. Claiborne Hardware Co.

Allowing such lawsuits, Justice John Paul Stevens wrote for the court, would chill free speech rights and hand government officials a powerful tool to suppress the rights of black citizens to challenge a political and economic system that had denied them the basic rights of dignity and equality that this country had fought a Civil War to secure.

The federal appeals court in New Orleans reversed the part of Judge Jacksons ruling concerning Mr. Mckesson, letting the officers lawsuit move forward.

Officer Doe alleges that Mckesson was negligent for organizing and leading the Baton Rouge demonstration because he knew or should have known that the demonstration would turn violent, Judge E. Grady Jolly wrote for a unanimous three-judge panel of the court, the United States Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit. That was enough to let the case proceed, Judge Jolly wrote.

Mckesson should have known that leading the demonstrators onto a busy highway was most nearly certain to provoke a confrontation between police and the mass of demonstrators, yet he ignored the foreseeable danger to officers, bystanders and demonstrators, and notwithstanding, did so anyway, the judge wrote.

Garrett Epps, a law professor at the University of Baltimore, called the ruling an affront.

The decision was not simply lawless, but insolently so, he wrote in The Atlantic.

On Friday, the American Civil Liberties Union asked the Supreme Court to hear Mr. Mckessons appeal. David Cole, the groups legal director, said the appeals court had made a grave and dangerous mistake.

If the law had allowed anyone to sue leaders of social justice movements over the violent actions of others, he said, there would have been no civil rights movement.

The officers lawsuit contended that Mr. Mckesson was liable for his injuries by failing to calm the crowd.

The one comment from Mr. Mckesson quoted in the officers lawsuit did not support the idea that he had incited the violence, Judge Jackson found.

The comment was part of an interview with The New York Times the day after the demonstration. The police want protesters to be too afraid to protest, Mr. Mckesson said.

Judge Jackson said the statement was protected by the First Amendment.

Mckessons statement does not advocate or make any reference to violence of any kind, and even if the statement did, mere advocacy of the use of force or violence does not remove speech from the protection of the First Amendment, Judge Jackson wrote, quoting from the Claiborne Hardware decision. This statement falls far short of being likely to incite lawless action, which plaintiff would have to prove to hold Mckesson liable based on his public speech.

In its petition seeking Supreme Court review, the A.C.L.U. said the principle announced in the Claiborne Hardware case was no relic.

Indeed, the petition said, the rule is of particular value to the rights of protesters be they same-sex marriage opponents in Berkeley, Calif., or gun control proponents in Boise, Idaho who take to the streets to persuade their fellow citizens to reconsider locally orthodox opinions.

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Violent Protests and Free Speech: Whos to Blame for an Officers Injuries? - The New York Times

Independent filmmaker Gordon Price was prosecuted for shooting parts of his feature 'Crawford Road' on public lands without a permit, and now he's taking the matter to civil court.

A Virginia-based independent filmmaker says it's unconstitutional for the government to charge fees for commercial shoots in national parks, according to a lawsuit filed Monday in D.C. federal court.

Gordon Price is suing U.S. Attorney General William Barr, Secretary of the Interior David Bernhardt and Deputy Director of the National Park Service David Vela. In late 2018, two NPS officers issued Price a violation notice for filming without a permit in public areas of the Yorktown Battlefield in Colonial National Historical Park in Virginia for Crawford Road, a feature about an area in York County that is home to unsolved murders and is rumored to be haunted. The government dropped its criminal case (more on that below), but now Price is moving his fight to civil court.

The statute says the Secretaries of Agriculture and the Interior shall require a permit and "establish a reasonable fee for commercial filming activities or similar projects on Federal lands" and, according to the complaint, violations are criminal offenses. Still, photos don't require fees if they're taken in areas the public is generally allowed, but can in other locations or if models or props are used. News-gathering generally doesn't require a permit. Price argues the statute is facially unconstitutional because it targets First Amendment activity and these distinctions amount to "content-based prior restraints."

"Its focus on the commercial nature of filming is not designed to serve any government interest in conservation or resource management, but to provide the government what it calls a 'fair return' for use of lands for commercial filming and certain still photography," writes attorney Robert Corn-Revere in the complaint, which is posted in full below.

Price argues the law is faulty for several reasons, including that Imposing a prior restraint on free speech is "the essence of censorship," the permit system is akin to press licensing and the First Amendment doesn't allow the government to make money by taxing "expressive activities."

In his case, Price claims the feds backed down to avoid an unfavorable finding. "When Mr. Price challenged the statute and rules (and the citation issued him) under the First Amendment, the government moved to dismiss to avoid a court ruling on the laws constitutionality," writes Corn-Revere. "Given the laws criminal enforceability, it has a speech-chilling effect on those to whom it may apply, and is operating to impede Mr. Prices future productions. As such, the government cannot be allowed to avoid review under the First Amendment."

Price argues the permitting and fee process is overbroad and restricts expressive activity that's deemed commercial even if it doesn't impact the federal lands any more than a news report or still photo shoot would. He is asserting a host of First Amendment-related claims and is asking the court for a declaration that the requirements are unconstitutional under the First and Fifth Amendments and an injunction barring the practices.

Link:
Filmmaker Sues Feds Over "Unconstitutional" Fees to Shoot in National Parks - Hollywood Reporter