Nonetheless “Mckesson’s negligent actions were the causes of Officer Doe’s injuries.” ![]() ![]() It said that the officer, if he proves his claims, could collect damages because “Mckesson breached his duty of reasonable care in the course of organizing and leading the Baton Rouge demonstration.” Because blocking a highway is against the law, “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 … and notwithstanding did so anyway.” Someone else threw the object there was no evidence that Mckesson urged anyone to throw anything. ![]() Press coverage was desultory the civil-liberties groups I reached out to last week had barely registered it.Ī panel of the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals held the case from late 2017 until last week, when, without allowing oral argument, the panel reinstated the lawsuit. Mckesson seemed like one of hundreds of nuisance lawsuits filed every year. Plaintiffs can’t sue an entire social movement, the judge noted (“#BlackLivesMatter”-a hashtag-lacks the capacity to be sued,” he wrote) as for Mckesson, “The only public speech to which Plaintiff cites in his Complaint is a one-sentence statement that Mckesson allegedly made to The New York Times: ‘The police want protestors to be too afraid to protest.’” Those words, the judge wrote, “do not advocate-or make any reference to-violence of any kind.”Īt that point, Doe v. DeRay Mckesson ratified all action taken during the Baton Rogue protest.”Ī federal district judge dismissed the lawsuit in September 2017. The closest it gets is: “Black Lives Matter leadership ratified all action taken during the protest. But nowhere does it allege a specific word or action taken by Mckesson that led to or caused the violence in Baton Rogue. Read: DeRay Mckesson talks about the hardest job he’s ever hadĭoe’s 17-page complaint portrays the Black Lives Matter movement as a violent nationwide conspiracy. The anonymous officer, referred to as John Doe, sued Mckesson and the entire Black Lives Matter movement, alleging that “Mckesson did nothing to prevent the violence or to calm the crowd” and that he “incited the violence.” Someone threw a hard object at police, injuring a Baton Rouge Police Department officer, who later reported “loss of teeth, a jaw injury, a brain injury, a head injury, lost wages, ‘and other compensable losses.’”ĭeRay Mckesson, a high-profile, Baltimore-based Black Lives Matter organizer, was arrested along with more than 100 others. On July 9, 2016, a group of Black Lives Matter activists blocked the highway in front of the Baton Rouge, Louisiana, police-department headquarters to protest the July 5 killing of Alton Sterling. ![]() But a three-judge panel of the Fifth Circuit, in a case decided last week, seemed to see things otherwise it made a mockery of Court precedent even as it reached back to revive an old segregation-era tactic: civil lawsuits to intimidate protesters. The decision was correct the Supreme Court has repeatedly held that public protest, and even advocacy of violence, is protected by the First Amendment unless clearly intended to cause immediate violence. The protesters later sued Trump for “incitement to riot” a panel of the Sixth Circuit dismissed the claim: “The mere tendency of speech to encourage unlawful acts” is not “sufficient reason for banning it.” Even if Trump had intended to encourage violence, the First Amendment still protected him, unless “the words used specifically advocated the use of violence, whether explicitly or implicitly.” On March 1, 2016, Donald Trump pointed to a group of protesters at a campaign rally in Louisville, Kentucky, and said “Get ‘em out of here,” piously adding, “Don’t hurt ‘em.” Supporters assaulted the protesters as they were led out.
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