The Onion and the Supreme Court. Not a parody
WASHINGTON (AP) — The Onion has some serious things to say in defense of parody.
The satirical site that manages to persuade people to believe the absurd has filed a Supreme Court brief in support of a man who was arrested and prosecuted for making fun of police on social media.
“As the globe’s premier parodists, The Onion’s writers also have a self-serving interest in preventing political authorities from imprisoning humorists,” lawyers for the Onion wrote in a brief filed Monday. “This brief is submitted in the interest of at least mitigating their future punishment.”
The court filing doesn’t entirely keep a straight face, calling the federal judiciary “total Latin dorks.”
The Onion said it employs 350,000 people, is read by 4.3 trillion people and “has grown into the single most powerful and influential organization in human history.”
The Supreme Court case involves Anthony Novak, who was arrested after he spoofed the Parma, Ohio, police force in Facebook posts.
The posts were published over 12 hours and included an announcement of new police hiring “strongly encouraging minorities to not apply.” Another post promoted a fake event in which child sex offenders could be “removed from the sex offender registry and accepted as an honorary police officer.”
After being acquitted of criminal charges, the man sued the police for violating his constitutional rights. But a federal appeals court ruled the officers have “qualified immunity” and threw out the lawsuit.
One issue is whether people might reasonably have believed that what they saw on Novak’s site was real.
But the Onion said Novak had no obligation to post a disclaimer. “Put simply, for parody to work, it has to plausibly mimic the original,” the Onion said, noting its own tendency to mimic “the dry tone of an Associated Press news story.”
More than once, people have republished the Onion’s claims as true, including when it reported in 2012 that North Korean leader Kim Jong-un was the sexiest man alive.
The brief concludes with a familiar call for the court to hear the case and a twist.
“The petition for certiorari should be granted, the rights of the people vindicated, and various historical wrongs remedied. The Onion would welcome any one of the three, particularly the first,” lawyers for the Onion wrote.
Justices won’t revive Oakland’s lawsuit over loss of Raiders
WASHINGTON (AP) — The Supreme Court on Monday rejected Oakland’s last-ditch effort to revive an antitrust lawsuit against the National Football League over the Raiders’ move to Las Vegas in 2020.
The city had been seeking hundreds of millions of dollars in its claim that the league violated federal antitrust law by acting like a “cartel” that sent the Raiders away when Oakland refused to meet the NFL’s “increasingly exorbitant” demand for public money to build a new stadium.
The federal appeals court in San Francisco rejected the lawsuit, and the justices said Monday they would not intervene.
The Raiders were involved in an earlier antitrust suit against the NFL, when owner Al Davis wanted to move the team from Oakland to Los Angeles.
Davis eventually won his lawsuit and the Raiders moved south in 1982, only to return to Oakland in 1995.
U.S. Supreme Court won’t hear troopers’ appeal in records case
HARTFORD, Conn. (AP) — The U.S. Supreme Court on Monday declined to hear an appeal by the Connecticut State Police Union in its challenge of a police accountability law that allows public disclosure of certain state trooper personnel files and internal investigation reports.
At issue were documents in internal probes that end with no finding of wrongdoing. The union argued the 2020 state law violated the 2018-2022 troopers’ contract by stripping away its exemptions from state freedom of information laws and allowing such documents to be publicly released.
Union officials say troopers oppose the law because it allows records involving unfounded allegations to become public, possibly tarnishing a trooper’s reputation despite no findings of wrongdoing.
The Supreme Court did not say anything about the case in rejecting it among a host of others, as is typical. The decision upholds rulings by lower federal courts that upheld the state law.
Andrew Matthews, executive director of the state police union, said the decision is going to have a chilling effect.
“Now you’ve got troopers that are reactive instead of proactive, for the most part, because they don’t want to get involved in things where people are going to make false, malicious allegations against them, and then the press is going to write about it, even if it’s unfounded or not sustained or they’re exonerated because it’s completely false,” he said.
Matthews added that troopers will continue to do their jobs but remain upset that state officials eliminated contract provisions they agreed to during contract negotiations.
State Attorney General William Tong’s office, which defended the accountability law, released a brief statement Monday saying it was pleased the Supreme Court left lower court rulings intact.
A message seeking comment was left for state police.
The union argued the law violated the contracts clause of the U.S. Constitution, which says states cannot pass laws impairing contracts. But there are exceptions, including if a law was passed for a good public purpose, which state officials argued.
Proponents of the 2020 law, which included many other reforms, said it answered the calls for reform, including accountability and transparency, after the police killings of George Floyd and other Black people.
