This Reporter Was Arrested for Asking Questions. The Supreme Court Just Revived Her Lawsuit.
The Supreme Court on Tuesday threw out a ruling against a Texas citizen journalist whom police arrested for asking the government questions, injecting new life into a free speech case that essentially asked if reporters working outside traditional media are entitled to a weaker version of the First Amendment.
Journalist Priscilla Villarreal’s lawsuit will now go back to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 5th Circuit. The judges there ruled 9–7 earlier this year that it was not clearly unconstitutional when law enforcement in Laredo, Texas, leveraged an obscure Texas statute to try to punish her for her reporting.
Known in Laredo as “Lagordiloca”—which translates roughly to “the fat, crazy lady”—Villarreal has built a large Facebook following over the years by livestreaming directly from crime scenes and traffic accidents. She is a celebrity around town, known for her colorful and profane commentary, as well as for her muckraking, which has zeroed in at times on law enforcement misconduct.
That’s why, she says, the police devised a way to retaliate against her. “They were just looking for something to arrest me,” Villarreal told me in Laredo last November. “Because I was exposing the corruption, I was exposing them being cruel to detainees….They were doing things they weren’t supposed to.”
In 2017, law enforcement zeroed in on her after she published a story about a family involved in a fatal traffic accident and another about a Border Patrol agent who’d committed suicide. Villarreal corroborated her information with a source within the Laredo Police Department, which then arrested her for doing so.
To set that in motion, the government invoked a statute that criminalizes soliciting nonpublic information if the person asking intended to “benefit” from it. Law enforcement said Villarreal personally gained from her reporting by getting attention on Facebook. Though it appears to have been written to discourage government corruption, the police used the law to make a crime out of standard journalism: seeking information not yet known an
Article from Reason.com
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