Federal Court Scraps Rule That Gagged Tennessee Civil Rights Attorney From Criticizing a Private Prison
After a nearly three-year legal battle, a Tennessee civil rights attorney will no longer be gagged from criticizing a private prison. The local federal court has scrapped a rule that restricted lawyers from publicly commenting on their cases.
The U.S. District Court for the Middle District of Tennessee amended the court’s local rules last week to remove a provision that assumed out-of-court statements by attorneys were prejudicial. The court proposed amending the rule last month following a federal lawsuit filed by the Nashville-area attorney Daniel Horwitz.
In 2022 a federal magistrate judge issued a gag order against Horwitz barring him from making public comments in a wrongful death lawsuit he was pursuing against CoreCivic, a private company that operates the state’s Trousdale Turner Correctional Center (TTCC). The judge also ordered Horwitz to delete dozens of past tweets about the company and threatened him with contempt.
Horwitz, represented by the Institute for Justice and the Southeastern Legal Foundation, sued the U.S. District Court for the Middle District of Tennessee and four district court judges last year, arguing that the gag order and rule violated his First Amendment rights and chilled his speech.
“I’m thrilled that my First Amendment rights have been vindicated, but more importantly, I’m thrilled that I can resume informing the public about civil rights abuses across Middle Tennessee,” Horwitz said in an Institute for Justice press release.
Horwitz is a prolific civil rights litigator in Tennessee. He has represented, among others, a software company illogically targeted by the state cosmetology board, a woman challenging the rejection of her personalized license plate on First Amendment grounds, and a family who was terrorized by a drunk, off-duty NYPD officer who called them racial slurs and threatened to shoot them.
CoreCivic is one of Horwitz’s most frequent courtroom opponents: He had represented plain
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