The Supreme Court on Monday declined to decide whether the leader of a protest demonstration can be sued for an injury to a police officer caused by another protester, rejecting the petition of Black Lives Matter activist DeRay Mckesson.
Mckesson is facing a lawsuit for his role in leading a protest from an officer who was hit in the head by a rock or piece of concrete thrown by an unidentified person in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, in July 2016 following the police killing of Alton Sterling, a black man.
The BLM activist is represented by the American Civil Liberties Union and argues his actions organizing the protest are protected by the First Amendment. While no justices dissented from the court’s decision not to hear the case, Democratic-appointed Justice Sonia Sotomayor wrote a statement explaining why the high court did not intervene.
Sotomayor said that a recent Supreme Court decision in the “true threats” case of Counterman v. Colorado raised a similar issue that could benefit Mckesson’s case as it proceeds in lower court.
The justice added that the high court’s refusal to hear the case “expresses no view about the merits of Mckesson’s claim.”
Mckesson’s case has already seen a tumultuous turn of events in lower court. In 2017, a lower federal judge initially found the BLM activist could not be sued, but the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 5th Circuit later overturned that finding.
The case was then appealed to the Supreme Court, prompting the justices to order further analysis on whether Louisiana law permitted such a claim as the one the officer was making. Then, Louisiana’s Supreme Court was asked to consider the issue on the state law question and found that the officer’s claim could be brought. The 5th Circuit in 2022 reaffirmed the officer’s ability to bring the lawsuit, prompting Mckesson to return to the Supreme Court for a second time.
Sotomayor indicated that Mckesson, a key figure in the BLM movement, could benefit from a decision the high court made in June 2023, when the justices ruled 7-2 in favor of Billy Counterman, who was convicted of stalking after sending repeated Facebook messages to female musician Coles Whalen that made her fear for her safety.
The only two justices to dissent from the Counterman majority were Republican-appointed Justices Clarence Thomas and Amy Coney Barrett, who issued two separate writings.
CLICK HERE TO READ MORE FROM THE WASHINGTON EXAMINER
The pair of dissenting justices took stiff aim at the majority, with Barrett saying, “It should be easy to choose between these positions” and that the majority was giving true threats “preferential treatment.”
“The Court holds that speakers must recklessly disregard the threatening nature of their speech to lose constitutional protection. Because this unjustifiably grants true threats preferential treatment, I respectfully dissent,” Barrett wrote at the time.