Quote (Goomshill @ Jun 15 2024 03:04am)
Lets say you had a case where a black man committed an act of jaywalking. He gets sued by some pedestrians who happen to be overtly racist and hate him for his skin color, citing the danger he posed to them. A similarly racist judge puts on a show trial where he repeatedly makes racist remarks, allows the evidence in the case to be an indictment of the black race, bringing in phrenologists to testify about their inferiority. The jury finds the black guy liable for endangering the public at large and pedestrians in specific and orders him to pay $1.5 billion in restitution, because at this point in the story we're just making up wild shit numbers with absolutely no tether to reality anymore
The right to freedom of political speech is even more sacrosanct in the constitution than the prohibition against racial discrimination. What we got is what happens when you take the above example and replace all the racism with viewpoint discrimination. Just because someone committed a minor offense, be it civil or criminal, does not give courts leave to engage in discriminatory application of the law. Its clearly trampling over the first amendment, hiding it behind a fig leaf of pretense that an actual wrong has been committed and someone crossed the line of protected speech into defamation.
If you set the bar that speech you agree with is allowed to be defamatory and either not get punished at all or get a slight slap on the wrist at worst, but speech you disagree with is punishable by astronomical fines or holy fuck why stop there just draw and quarter the bastard- its just trampling all over both the first amendment protection of political speech and fifth amendment protection of due process.
What a wild story you've concocted to not make your point correctly and misinterpret the laws this man broke, lmao