Onion's Brief Fails to Sway SCOTUS in Parody Case

The Supreme Court has rejected the case that led to it receiving a very unusual brief last year. The court has turned away an appeal from an Ohio man who was arrested, jailed for four days, and put on trial for creating a Facebook page that parodied his local police department in a Cleveland suburb, NBC reports. The decision leaves in place a lower court's ruling that threw out Anthony Novak's civil rights lawsuit against the city of Parma and two polilce officers, reports Bloomberg. In that ruling, the 6th US Circuit Court of Appeals said "the officers reasonably believed they were acting within the law" and were protected by the doctrine of "qualified immunity."

Novak set up a page in March 2016 to parody the Parma Police Department. Over 12 hours, he published six posts, including one claiming the department was holding a hiring event and was "strongly encouraging minorities to not apply." Another post advertised "free abortions in a police van." Novak was arrested for allegedly disrupting police operations but was acquitted after a trial. His lawsuit argued that his free speech rights were violated, along with his right to be free of unlawful searches and seizures. In the appeal, his lawyers argued that the case gave the Supreme Court an opportunity to reconsider qualified immunity or provide guidance on how it could be balanced with free speech, Cleveland.com reports.

In its court filing supporting Novak, the Onion said the ruling "threatens to disembowel a form of rhetoric that has existed for millennia, that is particularly potent in the realm of political debate, and that, purely incidentally, forms the basis of The Onion’s writers’ paychecks." The satirical site—which called the federal judiciary "Latin dorks" and claimed to have 4.3 trillion readers—argued that Novak was not obligated to post a disclaimer, saying "Put simply, for parody to work, it has to plausibly mimic the original." The brief also noted that "Ohio Police Officers Arrest, Prosecute Man Who Made Fun of Them on Facebook" sounds like "a headline ripped from the front pages of The Onion." (More US Supreme Court stories.)