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’s ruling in place.
Qualified immunity is a legal defense that can shield government officials from liability in lawsuits over their actions. Villarreal had asked the Supreme Court to conclude that qualified immunity 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.
Liberal Justice Sonia Sotomayor dissented from the court’s decision not to hear Villarreal’s appeal. Sotomayor wrote that by turning away the appeal, the Supreme Court “leaves standing a clear attack on the First Amendment’s role in protecting our democracy.”
Sotomayor said Villarreal’s case, which garnered the support of prominent U.S. media outlets and free speech advocates, “implicates one of the most basic journalistic practices of them all: asking sources within the government for information.”
Yet Sotomayor said that under the view expressed by the New Orleans-based 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals when it ruled against Villarreal, “police officers may arrest journalists for core First Amendment activity so long as they can point to a statute that the activity violated and that no high state court had previously invalidated, whether facially or as applied.”
Villarreal’s lawyers at the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression in a statement expressed disappointment with Monday’s decision, which they said “only shines more light on the need for the court to revisit how qualified immunity applies in free speech cases, sooner rather than later.”
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 5th Circuit 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, 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 had urged the Supreme Court to take up Villarreal’s appeal.
(Reporting by Nate Raymond in Boston; Editing by Will Dunham)
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