The Supreme Court has made it almost impossible to hold protests in three States

The Supreme Court on Monday decided not to intervene in a lawsuit that seeks to hold the organizer of a Black Lives Matter protest liable for injuries suffered by a police officer who was attacked by a protester. The ruling upholds an appeals court ruling that effectively makes organizers liable for any wrongdoing committed by protest participants in three states: Texas, Louisiana and Mississippi.

In June of last year, the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals, which oversees the three states, ruled in Doe v. McKesson that protest organizer DeRay Mckesson could be sued by an unnamed police officer who was struck in the face and seriously injured by a heavy object thrown at him during a 2016 protest in Baton Rouge, Louisiana — even though the court acknowledged there are no evidence Mckesson had any direct involvement in the incident.

Judge Jennifer Elrod wrote that Mckesson could be held responsible for creating “unreasonably dangerous conditions” by protesting in front of a police station and that the organizers did not have to intend to make a protest violent in order to establish responsibility.

Mckesson appealed in the Supreme Court in 2020, which ruled that the Fifth Circuit's decision must first be upheld by the Louisiana Supreme Court, which ruled that the officer's lawsuit could proceed. By once again refusing to take up the case, the Supreme Court is tacitly allowing the Fifth Circuit to rewrite decades of established First Amendment laws protecting the rights of protesters and opening the floodgates for bad actors who want to stifle protest movements to flood the promoters with possibly frivolous lawsuits.

Why not intervene? Well, according to the Supreme Court, they have already settled the matter. The court “made clear that the First Amendment prohibits the use of an objective standard such as negligence to punish speech, and read [NAACP v. Claiborne Hardware Co.] and other cases of incitement as requiring a showing of intent,” Associate Justice Sonia Sotomayor wrote in a statement on Doe v. McKesson, adding that the Fifth Circuit should “give full and fair consideration to arguments regarding the impact of Counterman in any future proceedings in this case.”

“The goal of lawsuits like these is to deter people from showing up at a protest out of fear that they might be held responsible if something happens,” Mckesson said. he said in October last year. “If this precedent holds, it could make organizers across the country responsible for all kinds of things they have no control over, like random people coming to a protest and causing trouble. We can't let that happen.”