Repeater
Regular Member
Huge victory: SCOTUS refused to accept challenge to 7th circuit ruling that Illinois law making it a FELONY to record cops without their permission is unconstitutional:
Chicago’s State Attorney doing all she can to keep Draconian State Eavesdropping Law Alive
See also:
Supreme Court Inaction Boosts Right To Record Police Officers
Chicago’s State Attorney doing all she can to keep Draconian State Eavesdropping Law Alive
For those of us with common sense and a basic understanding of Constitutional law, there is no question that Illinois’ Draconian eavesdropping law should be struck down as unconstitutional.
After all, it is the only state in the union that makes it a felony to openly record police in public, even when they don’t have an expectation of privacy; activity that is protected by the First Amendment anywhere else in the country (as much as police like to pretend otherwise).
Making the Illinois eavesdropping law even more Stalinist is the fact that police are exempt from the law, allowing them to record citizens while arresting those citizens for recording back.
Even Chicago’s top cop Garry McCarthy believes the law should be abolished.
But then you have Cook County State Attorney Anita Alvarez – an ambitious career prosecutor with a history of selective prosecution – who is doing everything she can to keep the law in place, even after the 7th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ruled in May that it “likely violates” the Constitution, sending it back down to the lower court to be tried.
Undeterred by that ruling, Alvarez halted the lower court’s proceedings to allow her to petition the 7th Circuit to review the case en banc; Latin Legalese meaning all ten appellate judges would have had to rule on it instead of the three that did.
When that was laughed down, she petitioned the U.S. Supreme Court in the hopes it would overrule the 7th Circuit’s decision.
I imagine the Supreme Court could have settled the issue once and for all and that would not have been such a bad thing considering it has never addressed the issue of citizens having the right to openly record cops in public.
But the Supreme Court on Monday refused to hear the case because it agreed with the 7th Circuit, which is even a bigger slap in the face to Alvarez, sending it back down to the lower court where the debate began in 2010 after the ACLU filed a preliminary injunction to stop these absurd arrests; fourteen which had been prosecuted during the previous eight years, including three by Alvarez.
See also:
Supreme Court Inaction Boosts Right To Record Police Officers
That decision also found a broad First Amendment right to record on-duty government officials in public: "Gathering information about government officials in a form that can readily be disseminated to others serves a cardinal First Amendment interest in protecting and promoting 'the free discussion of governmental affairs.'" And in fact, in that it strips police who make such arrests of their immunity from lawsuits, it's an even stronger opinion. Of course, the police themselves rarely pay damages in such suits -- taxpayers do.
The Supreme Court's refusal to grant certiorari in the case doesn't necessarily mean the justices endorse the lower court's ruling. But it does mean that at least six of the current justices weren't so opposed to the ruling that they felt the case needed to be heard.
The 1st and 7th circuit decisions mean that it is now technically legal to record on-duty police officers in every state in the country. Unfortunately, people are still being arrested for it. Police officers who want to make an arrest to intimidate would-be videographers can always use broadly written laws that prohibit public disorder, interfering with a police officer, or similar ordinances that give law enforcement wide discretion.