ikeboy

Thomas Alan Arthur is currently serving 40 years in a US prison. He was convicted of publishing fictional text stories and two cartoon style drawings. (Note that he was accused of assault decades ago, which apparently factored into his sentence, but he was not charged or convicted of that.)

In this case the statement they checked off said that there was an unlawful reproduction of a trademark. There was no reproduction at all, since the products were originally manufactured by the brand. Boggles my mind how that can be an opinion.

We got told by the 9th circuit that false claims submitted under penalty of perjury are actually just "opinions" not capable of being proven true or false.

https://law.justia.com/cases/federal/appellate-courts/ca9/22...

The case shouldn't have been brought, but even if brought he should have had a prompt bond hearing and been let out within 24 hours.

My concern is that new crimes will be weaponized.

In short, unlawful means different things in different contexts.

In the context of false imprisonment, it generally means without legal process, and legal process later overturned does not count.

See eg. https://caselaw.findlaw.com/court/us-supreme-court/549/384.h...

Reflective of the fact that false imprisonment consists of detention without legal process, a false imprisonment ends once the victim becomes held pursuant to such process--when, for example, he is bound over by a magistrate or arraigned on charges. Dobbs, supra, §39, at 74, n. 2; Keeton, supra, §119, at 888; H. Stephen, Actions for Malicious Prosecution 120-123 (1888). Thereafter, unlawful detention forms part of the damages for the "entirely distinct" tort of malicious prosecution, which remedies detention accompanied, not by absence of legal process, but by wrongful institution of legal process

What does that have to do with the elements of false imprisonment?

Magistrates are supposed to verify that the warrant contains probable cause and reject ones that don't.

You could make the system more adversarial at that point, although I think enforcing bail hearings where a public defender can argue would help in this and many other cases.

We need to tame the impulse to throw people in jail for doing things we dislike

And in comments I expanded on this and gave several specific reforms.

Not sure what your understanding was.

Look up the elements of false imprisonment.

When there's a warrant, even if wrongly granted, the arrest and imprisonment is considered lawful.

The magistrate judge should not have approved the warrant. They should have had a bail hearing within 24 hours, at which it would have been clear that they posed no threat.

Instead somehow bail was set at $2 million and the hearing to reduce bail was delayed.

Those are flaws in the system that should be fixed, and will continue harming people even without bad faith from sheriffs.

The warrant here was approved by a magistrate judge, and I would suggest making the process for approval more robust to reduce this kind of abuse.

Personal civil liability and firing can also help.

As I mentioned elsewhere, neither currently apply because due process of law was followed.

I would get rid of all forms of immunity and mandate body cameras. Probably also raise requirements for police officers. And part of it is reducing the scope of what the cops are meant to enforce.

I appreciate the massive harms done by incarceration, which I why I support vastly reducing it.

If you include the guy who was arrested for posting memes as participating in a coup, sure. "But the memes were misleading" (as someone else in this thread was arguing) I don't care.

What? My original comment says that we need to reform in a different way.

I haven't said those things.

Rape and murder are existing crimes, and they should be applied equally to police officers.

I think that the core problem with the system is not individual bad actors, but overcriminalization and the acceptance of that by judges and juries. To solve that you need actual reform, and adding a new crime that would inevitably be weaponized is not the way.

The whole concept of holding people "accountable" is the wrong frame. It's precisely that mindset that created this highly flawed system. I want to reduce bad things, not to feel good because people who did bad things are punished.

And when you think about how to prevent bad cases from being brought, you need to systematically reduce the power of those who can make such decisions.

Added: I do want strong civil liability for these cases, which we do have, which is why OP was able to get a good settlement. We should expand that to federal cases and lower the threshold.

We should indeed get rid of many laws because the benefit is outweighed by the abuse.

America has one of the highest rates of incarceration in the world (used to be #1) but suggest that maybe we're overcriminalized and you must be talking nonsense.

False imprisonment generally doesn't apply when due process is followed, like getting a warrant.

You'd have to change the law to allow for prosecutions in cases like this, and that change would likely be weaponized in other cases.

That's not at all what I said.

I'm saying that for decades, people who were maliciously prosecuted by the federal government had effectively no recourse.

It's good to change that, and I'm hopeful that the new fund does some of that. I would prefer to change the system to vastly reduce the threshold for finding the federal government liable in such cases.

I doubt that. The magistrate judge already granted an unconstitutional warrant, why assume the result would be different with more info?

When an appeals court rules on one issue that's enough to decide the case, they often don't rule on the remaining issues.

Anyway I don't see how you'd word a law that only applies to the cases you like and not the ones you don't.

Also, other people will like different cases than you, including the judge and jury in whatever case gets brought based on the statute you're proposing.

Public trust should be lost, because these institutions were never trustworthy.

I am not both sidesing. I'm saying that there are better reform options than adding additional criminal statutes that are likely to be abused.

Put simply, do you want the Trump administration to be able to bring criminal charges against any prosecutor or judge that they can argue brought a bad case?

OP says that they left out information (which cops do all the time) but that the warrant shouldn't have been granted either way because of SCOTUS precedent.

Would welcome reform that makes it harder to lie on warrant affidavits, although again, that should be civil in nature.

I've read the second circuit opinion and saying that it was legal is a fair takeaway. They didn't reach the 1st amendment grounds though because they didn't need to once determining that he didn't conspire as required (technically, they didn't prove he conspired.)

Of course any two cases are going to be different, and the guy posting memes on your side is going to be more sympathetic to you than the guy posting memes that you don't like.

That's part of my point. If you create a criminal statute that applies to OP, someone is going to try applying it in a case like Mackey's. If you don't think it should be applied in Mackey's case, how would you word it to cover just the cases you like and not those you don't?

The magistrate judge is supposed to be a check on that power. Unfortunately, they've become rubber stamps for the most part. In a functioning system, the judge would block the warrant and arrest.

I think there are ways to have a system where judges do that, without having to criminally prosecute either cops or judges.

The thing is, each side will think you're talking about the other side.

I view it differently. To me there's the pro incarceration side and the anti incarceration side. Both parties institutionally are pro prosecution and have failed to reign in abuses.

Both sides have abused the courts. Instead of arguing over which side has abused them worse (I may not even disagree with you on that!) I prefer to focus on reducing the potential for abuse.

This is another example of the kind of partisan thinking I'm criticizing.

It's nearly impossible to get paid for malicious prosecution by the federal government. Read up on https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyde_Amendment_(1997)

A 2010 investigation by USA Today "found the law has left innocent people... coping not only with ruined careers and reputations but with heavy legal costs. And it hasn't stopped federal prosecutors from committing misconduct or pursuing legally questionable cases."[5] The investigation "documented 201 cases in the years since the law's passage in which federal judges found that Justice Department prosecutors violated laws or ethics rules. Although those represent a tiny fraction of the tens of thousands of federal criminal cases filed each year, the problems were so grave that judges dismissed indictments, reversed convictions or rebuked prosecutors for misconduct. Still, USA Today found only 13 cases in which the government paid anything toward defendants' legal bills. Most people never seek compensation. Most who do end up emptyhanded."[5]

The case in OP would never have settled if it was against the federal government rather than a state. Also, the feds cap the amount paid for wrongful imprisonment at $50k/year, by statute.

We need a way to make the federal government pay out for malicious prosecution cases, just as OP got paid.

See e.g. Douglass Mackey. He posted some misleading memes on Twitter about the election, falsely claiming that people could vote by text, and got arrested and found guilty at trial until eventually the 2nd circuit said that what he did wasn't a crime. Should he be compensated? Should the prosecutor and judge in his case face their own criminal prosecutions?

See I don't view the guy getting out after 37 days as a success. It's a failure but it could have been worse.

I also think every party involved in that failure should be fired and rendered unemployable in the field.

We should start by removing the ability of prosecutors and police to bring such cases in the first place.