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- An Ohio man sued his local police department after they arrested him for mocking cops online.
- The Supreme Court declined to take up his case, effectively allowing the police officers to avoid the lawsuit.
- The Onion submitted a briefing defending Anthony Novak, who had created a Facebook page parodying police.
The Supreme Court has declined to take up the case of an Ohio man who said police officers violated his constitutional rights after they arrested him for making fun of the police department on Facebook.
Back in 2016, police arrested Anthony Novak for a satirical Facebook page he had created posing as his local police department in Parma, Ohio — his page had the same name, profile picture, and cover photo as the police department's official page, according to SCOTUSblog.
The posts on Novak's page, which was only live for 12 hours, mocked the police department. In one post, he announced a new hiring initiative "strongly encouraging minorities not to apply," according to SCOTUSblog.
Another post warned local residents not to offer food, shelter, or money to homeless people, NBC News reported.
The police department charged Novak under Ohio state law with disrupting police operations and jailed him for four days, though he was later acquitted at trial, according to NBC News.
Novak then sued the department and the officers who arrested him, arguing that they violated his constitutional rights to free speech and freedom from unreasonable searches and seizures, according to SCOTUSblog.
The U.S. Court of Appeals for the 6th Circuit ruled that Novak couldn't sue the police because they had qualified immunity — a legal concept that protects police from facing civil lawsuits over their actions while in uniform.
Novak appealed that decision to the Supreme Court, even getting the satirical news site The Onion to write an amicus brief.
"The Sixth Circuit's ruling imperils an ancient form of discourse. The court's decision suggests that parodists are in the clear only if they pop the balloon in advance by warning their audience that their parody is not true," lawyers for The Onion wrote in the outlet's amicus brief. "But some forms of comedy don't work unless the comedian is able to tell the joke with a straight face. Parody is the quintessential example. Parodists intentionally inhabit the rhetorical form of their target in order to exaggerate or implode it—and by doing so demonstrate the target's illogic or absurdity."
But the Supreme Court on Tuesday decided not to take up Novak's case. The Supreme Court regularly takes on less than 1% of the case petitions it receives every year, according to News 5 Cleveland.
"The Supreme Court's decision not to consider Mr. Novak's plight reinforces a trend effectively blessing local government officials' abuses of the Constitution," one of Novak's attorneys, Subodh Chandra, said in a statement to Insider on Tuesday. "Now, in our region of the country at least, we must all think twice before we mock government officials because they can use the excuse that a handful of people are complaining to seize our possessions, jail us, and prosecute us. Officials can then deploy qualified immunity as a defense to any accountability, and federal courts won't even send a message to officials to not abuse rights in the future."
"We must abolish qualified immunity before we have no enforceable rights at all," Chandra added
Monica Sansalone, an attorney representing the officers, told Insider that the Supreme Court "properly declined to review this case," holding up the lower courts ruling which "entirely vindicate the City of Parma and its police department and officers."
Representatives for The Onion did not immediately return Insider's request for comment on the Supreme Court's decision not to hear the case on Tuesday.
Suing police officers is nearly impossible
The case highlights just how hard it is to sue police officers who violate the Constitution in the line of duty.
In 1961, the Supreme Court ruled that people can sue police officers who violate their constitutional rights, a decision which set off concerns that no one would want to be a police officer anymore and that departments would be rendered useless.
In 1967, the Supreme Court came up with the idea of "qualified immunity," which protects officers from being sued for violating the Constitution if they were acting in "good faith." That decision was further strengthened by the Supreme Court in 1982, when the court ruled that "good faith" was too much of a burden for officers to prove and that they should be given immunity so long as they didn't violate "clearly established law."
In recent years, there has been an effort in the US to end qualified immunity protections for police officers. The George Floyd Justice in Police Act was passed by the House in 2020 and included a section restricting qualified immunity for police officers. But the bill failed in the Senate.