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Online Parody Cartoon Targeted For Prosecution
SeattleGameboy writes "It seems that the Renton (suburb of Seattle) police need a remedial course on the U.S. Constitution," linking to a story at Seattle TV station KIRO which says "The Renton City Prosecutor wants to send a cartoonist to jail for mocking the police department in a series of animated Internet videos. The 'South-Park'-style animations parody everything from officers having sex on duty to certain personnel getting promoted without necessary qualifications. While the city wants to criminalize the cartoons, First Amendment rights advocates say the move is an 'extreme abuse of power.'"
"certain personnel getting promoted without necessary qualifications"
The prosecution may have merit, wouldn't the above qualify as obscene?
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It's not the police, it's the prosecutor. The police may have agitated for this, but the prosecutor is the person who should know better.
...you civil liberties are becomeing an endangered species if you question authority, impead the operations of businesses, or criticize your elected officials. I never thought it would come to this in this country. Isn't it sad that the pent up frustration and anti-establishment from the 60's generation (the people now in power) has morphed into this?
Yet another nugget I would not have known about were it not for someone out there trying to stop it!
It's going to be hard for the prosecuter to prove "intent to embarass", given that the Renton Police Department apparently has absolutely no sense of shame.
But these guys are:
http://volokh.com/2011/08/04/is-it-criminal-to-publish-parody-videos-that-use-lewd-language-meant-to-embarrass-and-emotionally-torment-police-officers/
Yes, the Renton (Wash.) city prosecutor’s office concludes, applying the Washington “cyberstalking” statute — an excellent example of the dangers of the broad “cyberbullying” and “harassment” statutes that I have often condemned. KIRO-TV reports:
The Renton City Prosecutor wants to send a cartoonist to jail for mocking the police department in a series of animated Internet videos.
The “South-Park”-style animations parody everything from officers having sex on duty to certain personnel getting promoted without necessary qualifications.... [Last week, the prosecutor filed] a search warrant accusing an anonymous cartoon creator, going by the name of Mr. Fiddlesticks, of cyberstalking (RCW 9.61.260). The Renton Police Department and the local prosecutor got a judge to sign off as a way to uncover the name of whoever is behind the parodies.... ...
Under the prosecutor’s view, any statement — including on a blog, in a YouTube video, in a newspaper article, on television, or whatever else — is a crime if it is made “with intent to harass, ... torment, or embarrass” the subject of the person “[u]sing any lewd, lascivious, indecent, or obscene words, images, or language.” A comedian’s joke that “lewd[ly]” or “lascivious[ly]” described President Clinton’s behavior with Monica Lewinsky, or for that matter Congressman Weiner’s behavior, would be a crime if it was made “with intent to ... embarrass” the President or the Congressman. The Hustler parody attacking Jerry Falwell, which the Supreme Court held to be protected against civil liability under the “intentional infliction of emotional distress tort,” would be a crime. Indeed, in this very case, the theory is that the videos are criminal because they described alleged police sexual misconduct using “lewd” or “indecent” words with the intent to torment or embarrass particular officers. (The theory expressed in the document — a search warrant application — is that the videos sufficiently identify the particular police officers who were involved in the incidents to which the video alludes.)
If the prosecutor is right that the statute should be interpreted this broadly, then it’s clearly unconstitutionally overbroad. Speech to the public doesn’t lose its constitutional protection because it’s intended to torment or embarrass. (It may lose such protection when it’s intended to be perceived as a true threat of criminal attack, but that’s not the issue here.) Nor does lose its constitutional protection because it uses “lewd” or “indecent” terms. And while one-to-one speech said to an unwilling listener may in some circumstances be restricted — which is the reason traditional telephone harassment laws, if properly crafted, may be constitutional — this rationale can’t be used to suppress speech said to the public, even if the people discussed in the speech are tormented or embarrassed by it.
Moreover, the statute would be clearly unconstitutional as applied to this video, and the prosecutor and the judge ought to know this. (The prosecutor is Renton Chief Prosecutor Shawn Arthur; the judge on an earlier warrant was James Cayce, but I don’t know what the affidavit said there, and I don’t know the name of the judge who apparently issued the warrant based on the affidavit included with the KIRO story.) A search warrant can onl
The judge should be removed from the bench and the prosecutor should be disbarred. This is blatant abuse of the judicial process, and both are either complicit or incompetent, and either one should warrant their removal from their respective offices.
Just because the founding fathers lived a couple of centuries ago, doesn't mean that people don't get equally upset now as they did in 1776.
Do not mock my vision of impractical footwear
Of course, NOT !
In America, the cops is always right !! No matter what the cops did, or still doing, there are always people who will scream their heads off telling you that the cops are right !
It has nothing to do with 1st Amendment or Free Speech or Bill of Rights or the Constitution.
The Cops are above them all !
Actually, the issue is a bit more complex, although this is certainly how many officers behave. (Others are significantly more professional, and even courteous.)
A huge problem we have is that, realistically, the prosecution gets to write the story. The vast majority of cases settle, which means that the formal record of any criminal event in this country is the prosecution's version of events. This version of events is frequently, at best, inaccurate. The function of the prosecution and of the police, on paper, is not to be a neutral arbiter but to make sure the case is strong. This is not to say that this version of events is a deliberate lie, but it nevertheless completely fails to be an accurate record of the event. So of the huge volume of data we have of criminality, most of it is incredibly biased. Only when a case actually goes to trial does the defense present a case, and there the assumption on the part of most people in the room is that the defendant is guilty.
That being said, I also know several people who have been beaten by the cops without provocation. Those cops are not professionals, and they are not just something of an ass at times. They are fucking criminals who should be sent to jail.
-- IANAL, this isn't legal advice, and definitely isn't legal advice for you. Also, Squee!
http://www.xtranormal.com/watch/11622514/score-parody-3
http://www.xtranormal.com/watch/11599075/score-parody-part-deux
Also, the username(s) used by the uploader were "MrFuddlesticks" (not fiddlesticks) and "whothehellispenny". It looks like the rest of the videos have already been deleted (couldn't find any kind of search feature on xtranormal).
Caveat Emptor is not a business model.
I know you're being annoying, but the truth is that it is expected that police forces will try to overstep their authority.
That's the whole point of the Constitution: not that police forces and government officials will never overstep their authority but that when they do they get bitch-slapped to the ground and the overstepee gets a fat payday to punish the ones who violated someone's rights as well as their fat-fuck supervisors who got their position because they are the brother-in-law of the city council chairman.
It is the beauty of our Constitutional system in action, and it keeps me from getting overly outraged at the police assholes who actually believed that you can prosecute someone for simply expressing an opinion.
Now, the outrage would be warranted if somehow the prosecution stuck or said donut-eating side of pork and his department managed to somehow avoid the punishment they so richly deserve.
For the most part, I'm OK with police. I know several socially and teach a t'ai chi course that is attended by a few forty-something officers. For the most part they are decent and honorable people who don't fuck around with peoples' rights. They are of a generation that is sickened by the behavior of predecessors like a former Commander Jon Burge (here in Chicago) who is sitting in a Federal penitentiary for extracting confessions through the use of torture. But now he's got to be really careful when performing his daily ablutions and the men who were tortured to confess have received multi-million dollar awards, which is of course insufficient for having spent years, sometimes decades behind bars and in a couple of cases on Death Row. But the right people were punished and the right people were paid and the generation of cops that seem to be rising to supervisory positions at least here in Chicago appear to be more professional and more decent.
In other words, the system seems to work, but only if we constantly watch it. There needs to always be civilian oversight of all law enforcement (and military for that matter). There are still problems, but there's at least an expectation that they will be solved.
You are welcome on my lawn.
... I am a lawyer. Isn't there just a TINY problem with a judge in the State of WASHINGTON issuing a search warrant for premises located in the State of CALIFORNIA?
This isn't a civil subpoena - it is a SEARCH WARANT. Hello? Jurisdiction anyone?
Laws affecting technology will always be bad until enough techies become lawyers.
the renton police like to pretend they are all swat officers in a robocop movie. all of their patrol cars are kitted out with external roll cages, and the officers wear full body armor at all times. i used to work in the old city hall building, and they would use the floor below us for training exercises with flash bang grenades. we'd ride the same elevator up and i'd count the number of handguns strapped to their hips and chest (always more than their number of hands). parking in a lot full of brand new cop cars with shiny new powder-coated black rims didn't make me feel safer... it made me feel like the police had their priorities in an order that did not benefit the community... this story is more of the same.
Who the hell are you and what have you done with the MichaelKristopeit### Troll?
And thirty years ago, people were charged for being gay.
You have to take your progress where you find it, friend.
You are welcome on my lawn.
No, sorry, the system doesn't work. Many police are sadistic bullies, and even the "good cops" accept it, so the good cops in their No, sorry, the system doesn't work. Many police are sadistic bullies, and even the "good cops" accept it, so the good cops in their complicity are bad cops too.
People who are framed by the cops usually go to jail, sometimes to death row.
The cases where innocent people are acquitted are rare, usually the result of an unusual circumstance, like the person who actually did the crime feeling guilty and confessing, or a crime where a DNA test can resolve the facts.
The Innocence Project, which first started freeing people from jail with DNA evidence, said the significance of their acquittals was that they were rare and unusual and they demonstrated that many people were falsely convicted in cases where they *couldn't* be vindicated with DNA evidence -- and they're still in jail.
Worst of all, when cops get caught committing perjury, the prosecutors usually don't prosecute. For example, in New York City, during the Democratic convention, the police arrested demonstrators who were doing nothing illegal -- along with innocent bystanders who had nothing to do with the demonstration -- and gave sworn testimony, under oath, accused them of felony crimes.
One of the defense lawyers got the police's own videos, which clearly showed that the defendants were innocent, and that the cops were committing perjury. But the police department refused to prosecute them for perjury. If it wasn't for that accident of having the videos, these defendants would have had to choose between pleading guilty to a minor crime or (if they had the $50,000 or so for a criminal defense) going to trial and possibly getting convicted of a serious felony.
So the police have strong career (financial) incentives for framing people, and no penalty for lying. What do you think they're going to do?
If you look at Zimbardo's Stanford prison experiment you'll see that it's almost inevitable for the police to turn into sadistic bullies. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stanford_prison_experiment
In order to avoid it, the police managers and elected officials have to make strong efforts to overcome these natural tendencies, and most of them don't do it.