By Nate Raymond
March 23 (Reuters) – The U.S. Supreme Court declined on Monday to hear a bid by an online citizen journalist to revive her lawsuit accusing authorities in the Texas city of Laredo of wrongful arrest after she asked for and obtained from police nonpublic information about cases.
The justices turned away Priscilla Villarreal’s appeal of a lower court’s ruling that the police officers and prosecutors she accused of retaliation were protected by a legal doctrine called qualified immunity and could not be sued for violating her free speech rights under the U.S. Constitution’s First Amendment. In doing so, the justices left the lower court ruling in place.
Liberal Justice Sonia Sotomayor dissented from the decision to deny the case.
Villarreal had garnered the support of prominent U.S. media outlets and free speech advocates.
Qualified immunity is a legal defense that can shield government officials from liability in lawsuits over their actions. Villarreal asked the Supreme Court to conclude that defense is unavailable to public officials who use a state statute in a way that clearly violates the First Amendment, as she contends it was when police arrested her.
Villarreal has become one of Laredo’s most popular news sources, with 200,000-plus people following the Facebook page she uses to regularly report on crime, events and government.
She was charged with two felony counts of misuse of information after she published the identities of suicide and car crash victims on Facebook in 2017, using information she verified by speaking to a police officer in Laredo.
The Texas statute under which she was charged makes it a crime to solicit nonpublic information from a government official with an intent to obtain a benefit. Prosecutors alleged she used the information to amass more Facebook followers.
The New Orleans-based 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals on a 10-5 vote last year held that the officers and prosecutors were entitled to qualified immunity and that law enforcement was not required to predict whether the Texas law at issue was constitutional before arresting her.
Judge Edith Jones wrote for the court that it was inappropriate to “portray her as a martyr for the sake of journalism,” adding that Villarreal had skirted the Texas law “to capitalize on others’ tragedies to propel her reputation and career.”
Villarreal’s lawyers at the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, in asking the Supreme Court to hear the case, had said the 5th Circuit’s ruling “doubled down on granting officials free rein to turn routine news reporting into a felony.”
Her appeal garnered the support of the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press. Major media outlets such as ABC, the New York Times and the Washington Post urged the Supreme Court to take up Villarreal’s appeal.
(Reporting by Nate Raymond in Boston; Editing by Will Dunham)
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