On Monday, the Supreme Court granted the continuation of a police officer’s case against a prominent member of Black Lives Matter.
The court denied activist DeRay Mckesson’s First Amendment appeal in a brief ruling, forcing him to defend himself against the lawsuit filed by the unnamed officer who was hurt during a protest in 2016.
A few days after Alton Sterling was shot and killed by police in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, Mckesson led a protest in which participants stopped a highway in front of a nearby police station.
According to court documents, John Doe, the cop, was struck by a “rock-like object” while police cleared the street, resulting in several injuries, including brain trauma.
It is undeniable that Mckesson never gave the go-ahead for the violence, even though he did not hurl the object. However, the officer argues that Mckesson is still accountable for the actions of the unidentified offender because of his leadership during the event.
The matter has been presented before the court before. The Supreme Court deemed the First Amendment dispute “undeniably important” in an unsigned ruling in 2020, but the justices remanded the case to obtain further clarification on whether state law would let the officer to pursue damages in the first place.
After a long period of time, the highest court in Louisiana said that it would, and the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals subsequently ruled against Mckesson’s First Amendment argument and permitted the case to move on toward trial.
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Then, Mckesson returned to the top court with his First Amendment petition. However, in a characteristically succinct and unsigned judgment, the Supreme Court declined to consider that 5th Circuit decision.
The American Civil Liberties Union, Mckesson’s legal representative, wrote in their petition that it is “unfathomable under this Court’s First Amendment jurisprudence that a State would hold a protest leader liable in damages for a third party’s independent conduct that the leader himself neither incited, directed, authorized, nor ratified.”
The case mostly focused on the applicability of a 1982 Supreme Court ruling holding that the NAACP could not be held liable for encouraging a local boycott of white businesses during the Civil Rights Movement, which occasionally descended into violence.
Mckesson contends that the litigation against him is barred by the precedent.
But the anonymous cop sets himself apart in his case by claiming that, in contrast to the NAACP, Mckesson committed a crime by planning a protest to block a road. The officer asserts that the injuries were a predictable result of that purportedly unlawful behavior.
The lawyer for the anonymous police officer wrote in court documents, “There is nothing un-American or unconstitutional about chilling speech designed specifically and effectively to engage police officers, where time and time the time, the place and manner of the speech has resulted in looting, property destruction, business closures, personal injury, economic loss, bystander and police injury.”
“The time, place and manner of delivering First Amended protected speech matters.”
