Newspaper in 1756, The Onion now enjoys a daily readership of 4.3 trillion and has grown into the single most Rising from its humble beginnings as a print Offering highly acclaimed, universally revered coverage of breaking national, international, and local newsĮvents. The Onion is the world’s leading news publication, You get a sense of where this is going right from the jump: The entire brief is a parody highlighting how parody is funny, even if some people don’t get the joke. Again, I would not recommend that anyone else ever try this, but in this case it works. With that as background, The Onion has stepped up to the plate and filed an amicus brief urging the Supreme Court to hear the case. It also asks the court to reconsider the entire doctrine of qualified immunity. Novak has asked the Supreme Court to weigh in on whether or not a police officer is entitled to qualified immunity for arresting someone solely for speech parodying the government. Unfortunately, this time the 6th Circuit upheld the lower court ruling, saying that “because the officers reasonably believed they were acting within the law” they get qualified immunity.
#Onion headline man does stupid thing code#
Code § 2909.04(B) with the following elements: 1)“knowingly ” 2) “using a computer ” and 3) “to disrupt, interrupt, or impair the functions of any police … operations.” And Connor’s investigation resulted in a finding of probable cause on each of those prima facie elements. When Connor consulted with Law Director Dobeck, they reasoned that Novak’s conduct may have violated Ohio Rev. Novak’s conduct also confused some members of the public, leading them to believe that his was the real Parma Police Facebook page. However, on remand, the lower court again decided that the cops get qualified immunity, saying that because some people didn’t get the joke, it violated the law. The 6th Circuit rolled that back in 2019 with what seemed like a good ruling at the time (with the court rightly noting “The First Amendment does not depend on whether everyone is in on the joke.”)
The district court granted qualified immunity to the police. That case has bounced around the courts, but the rulings have not been great.
Novak then sued the city of Parma for violating his civil rights. Novak spent four days in jail and then was tried but thankfully acquitted by a jury. In response, the Parma police arrested Novak, claiming the parody page disrupted public services. It also offered “free abortions” in a police van, and promoted a “pedophile reform event.” In short, it was a parody page mocking the Parma Police. It was pretty obviously a parody, talking about how the department “strongly discourages minorities” from applying for jobs at the police department. It goes back to 2016 when Parma, Ohio resident Anthony Novak (who enjoys writing comedy skits for fun) created a parody Facebook page for the Parma Police Department. The case is actually one that we’ve been covering at Techdirt, though I never expected The Onion to weigh in on it. It’s one that honestly is so good it should probably never be tried again (even though I fear that many others are now going to try, and fail). The ACLU’s Eat Shit, Bob filing, for example, was pretty good.īut now The Onion has truly filed the best amicus ever. In the world of the courts, the judges can be funny, but no one else should try. In most cases, judges will not be that amused (even if those same judges sometimes try to make jokey rulings). In most cases, it does not do you any good to try to be funny in legal filings.
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