On 24 Feb 2022, Steve from Colorado <SteveFromColorado@cocks.net> posted
some news:sv86ng$oc0$1@dont-email.me:

> Randell Iles has good reason to be wearing a "bullet proof" vest. Got
> news for ya Randell. Those won't stop a .257 or .270. Be mindful of
> pissing off your own kind. Just sayin'.

This is hillbilly moron Detective Randell Iles.

https://www.thetowntalk.com/gcdn/-mm-/cc4e61417b9717770cbdbc330220d76ea50
41e10/c=0-256-3072-4352/local/-/media/2016/09/21/LAGroup/Alexandria/63610
0731578757816-DSC-0111.JPG?width=300&height=400&fit=crop&format=pjpg&auto
=webp

On a Friday in March 2020, a dozen or so sheriff's deputies wearing
bulletproof vests descended upon Waylon Bailey's garage at his home in
Forest Hill, Louisiana, with their guns drawn, ordered him onto his
knees with his hands "on your fucking head," and arrested him for a
felony punishable by up to 15 years in prison. The SWAT-style raid was
provoked by a Facebook post in which Bailey had made a zombie-themed
joke about COVID-19. Recognizing the harm inflicted by that flagrantly
unconstitutional arrest, a federal jury last week awarded Bailey
$205,000 in compensatory and punitive damages.

"I feel vindicated that the jury agreed that my post was satire and that
no reasonable police officer should have arrested me for my speech,"
Bailey said in a press release from the Institute for Justice, which
helped represent him in his lawsuit against the Rapides Parish Sheriff's
Office and Detective Randell Iles, who led the investigation that tarred
Bailey as a terrorist based on constitutionally protected speech. "This
verdict is a clear signal that the government can't just arrest someone
because the officers didn't like what they said."

On March 20, 2020, four days after several California counties issued
the nation's first "stay-at-home" orders in response to an emerging
pandemic, Bailey let off some steam with a Facebook post that alluded to
the Brad Pitt movie World War Z. "RAPIDES PARISH SHERIFFS OFFICE HAVE
ISSUED THE ORDER," he wrote, that "IF DEPUTIES COME INTO CONTACT WITH
'THE INFECTED,'" they should "SHOOT ON SIGHT." He added: "Lord have
mercy on us all. #Covid9teen #weneedyoubradpitt."

The Rapides Parish Sheriff's Office snapped into action, assigning Iles
to investigate what he perceived as "an attempt to get someone hurt."
According to a local press report, the authorities were alarmed by "a
social media post that promoted false information related to the ongoing
COVID-19 pandemic." In response, "detectives immediately initiated an
investigation," and as a result, Bailey, then 27, was "arrested for
terrorism."

Another news story reported that Bailey "was booked into the Rapides
Parish Detention Center on one count of terrorizing." William Earl
Hilton, the sheriff at the time, explained why, saying he wanted to
"impress upon everyone that we are all in this together, as well as
remind everyone that communicating false information to alarm or cause
other serious disruptions to the general public will not be tolerated."

Bailey's joke was deemed to pose such a grave and imminent threat that
Iles did not bother to obtain an arrest warrant before nabbing him, just
a few hours after Bailey's facetious appeal to Brad Pitt. But in a
probable cause affidavit that Iles completed after the arrest, the
detective claimed that Bailey had violated a state law against
"terrorizing," defined as "the intentional communication of information
that the commission of a crime of violence is imminent or in progress or
that a circumstance dangerous to human life exists or is about to exist,
with the intent of causing members of the general public to be in
sustained fear for their safety; or causing evacuation of a building, a
public structure, or a facility of transportation; or causing other
serious disruption to the general public."

Bailey was apologetic when the sheriff's deputies confronted him, saying
he had "no ill will towards the Sheriff's Office" and "only meant it as
a joke." He agreed to delete the offending post after Iles said he
otherwise would ask Facebook to take it down. But that was not good
enough for Iles, who hauled Bailey off to jail anyway.

For very good legal reasons, the Rapides Parish District Attorney's
Office declined to prosecute Bailey. But when Bailey sued Iles for
violating his constitutional rights and making a false arrest, U.S.
District Judge David C. Joseph dismissed his claims with prejudice,
concluding that his joke was not covered by the First Amendment, that
the arrest was based on probable cause, and that Iles was protected by
qualified immunity.

That doctrine allows civil rights claims against government officials
only when their alleged misconduct violated "clearly established" law.
Joseph thought arresting someone for a Facebook gag did not meet that
test. "Publishing misinformation during the very early stages of the
COVID-19 pandemic and [a] time of national crisis," he averred, "was
remarkably similar in nature to falsely shouting fire in a crowded
theatre."

That was a reference to Schenck v. United States, a 1919 case in which
the U.S. Supreme Court unanimously upheld the Espionage Act convictions
of two socialists who had distributed anti-draft leaflets during World
War I. Writing for the Court, Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. said,
"The most stringent protection of free speech would not protect a man in
falsely shouting fire in a theatre and causing a panic."

Holmes' much-abused analogy, which had nothing to do with the facts of
the case, was not legally binding. And in the 1969 case Brandenburg v.
Ohio, the Supreme Court modified the "clear and present danger" test it
had applied in Schenck�a point that Joseph somehow overlooked. Under
Brandenburg, even advocacy of criminal conduct is constitutionally
protected unless it is "directed" at inciting "imminent lawless action"
and "likely" to do so�an exception to the First Amendment that plainly
did not cover Bailey's joke.

With help from the Institute for Justice, Bailey asked the U.S. Court of
Appeals for the 5th Circuit to overrule Joseph, which it did last
August. Writing for a unanimous 5th Circuit panel, Judge Dana M. Douglas
said Joseph "applied the wrong legal standard," ignoring the Brandenburg
test in favor of the Supreme Court's earlier, less speech-friendly
approach.

"At most, Bailey 'advocated' that people share his post by writing
'SHARE SHARE SHARE,'" Douglas wrote. "But his post did not advocate
'lawless' and 'imminent' action, nor was it 'likely' to produce such
action. The post did not direct any person or group to take any unlawful
action immediately or in the near future, nobody took any such actions
because of the post, and no such actions were likely to result because
the post was clearly intended to be a joke. Nor did Bailey have the
requisite intent to incite; at worst, his post was a joke in poor taste,
but it cannot be read as intentionally directed to incitement."

Another possibly relevant exception to the First Amendment was the one
for "true threats," defined as "statements where the speaker means to
communicate a serious expression of an intent to commit an act of
unlawful violence to a particular individual or group of individuals."
In a deposition, Iles claimed to view Bailey's post as threatening
because it was "meant to get police officers hurt." The joke was
especially dangerous, he said, because there were "a lot of protests at
the time in reference to law enforcement."

As Douglas noted, that claim was patently implausible "because Bailey
was arrested in March 2020, while widespread protests concerning law
enforcement did not begin until after George Floyd's murder in May
2020." In any case, Bailey's joke clearly did not amount to a true
threat.

"On its face, Bailey's post is not a threat," Douglas writes. "But to
the extent it could possibly be considered a 'threat' directed to either
the public�that RPSO deputies would shoot them if they were
'infected'�or to RPSO deputies�that the 'infected' would shoot back�it
was not a 'true threat' based on context because it lacked believability
and was not serious, as evidenced clearly by calls for rescue by Brad
Pitt. For the same reason, Bailey did not have the requisite intent to
make a 'true threat.'"

Furthermore, the 5th Circuit held, Iles should have known that Bailey's
post was protected speech. "Based on decades of Supreme Court
precedent," Douglas said, "it was clearly established that Bailey's
Facebook post did not fit within one of the narrow categories of
unprotected speech, like incitement or true threats." Iles therefore
could not find refuge in qualified immunity.