A man who was arrested for making a parody Facebook page of his local police department won’t have a case he filed heard before the Supreme Court.
Justices declined the case – Anthony Novak, Petitioner v. City of Parma, Ohio, et al. – Tuesday. The court did not provide a reason.
According to the Ohio branch of the American Civil Liberties Union, Novak published a parody of the Parma Police Department’s Facebook page on March 2, 2016. It was up for less than 12 hours.
He posted what the ACLU called “absurd content” that included announcement that “[w]e will be giving out free abortions to teens using an experimental teqhnique [sic] discovered by the Parma Police Department,” and a post that said the department was holding a “Pedophile Reform event” people could be removed from the sex offender registry by solving puzzles.
Another post cited by the ACLU said that there was a “new temporary law” forbidding residents from giving money to unhoused people “in an attempt to have the homeless population eventually leave our city due to starvation.”
Though the page was not up for long, nine people called the police department about it.
“The calls totaled less than ten minutes, and at most, one of the callers believed the page belonged to Parma,” said the ACLU. “The calls did not cause dispatch to miss a single emergency call.”
After the Parma police investigated the page, they arrested Novak and seized his computer. He was charged with a felony for “knowingly us[ing] … a computer so as to disrupt, interrupt, or impair the functions of … police operations.”
Novak was later tried and acquitted. He then filed his lawsuit against the police department “for retaliating against him for exercising his First Amendment rights,” in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Ohio.
Both the district court and appeals court entered judgements in favor of the police, “saying that qualified immunity shielded the city from civil liability,” according to Cleveland.com. With the Supreme Court’s rejection, the appeals court decision now stands.
According to the United States Courts, most requests for the court to grant writ of certiorari sending lower court cases up for review are denied.
“I’m disappointed the Supreme Court won’t consider my case both because I won’t be able to hold the officers accountable for their violation of my rights, but also because I worry about what will happen to others who poke fun at the powerful,” said Novak’s in a statement from his attorneys cited by Cleveland.com
The Onion, The Babylon Bee and others filed amicus briefs in support of Novak.
“The Onion files this brief to protect its continued ability to create fiction that may ultimately merge into reality. As the globe’s premier parodists, The Onion’s writers also have a self-serving interest in preventing political authorities from imprisoning humorists. This brief is submitted in the interest of at least mitigating their future punishment,” said the outlet’s brief.
“The city and its police have consistently maintained that Mr. Novak’s behavior was not for satirical purposes,” Richard Rezie, an outside an attorney for Parma, said in a statement also cited by Cleveland.com. “Several sites make fun of the police, and the city and Parma police have always worked with protestors to protect and ensure their First Amendment rights.”
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