Jophiel wrote:
gbaji wrote:
What's unheard of is charging the journalists with a felony.
Probably because the felony level charge is unique to Texas. Hence my saying "Find me a case in Texas". Of course you're not going to find a case in Alabama where the law doesn't exist. Saying "OMG No one gets arrested for this!!" when it's not illegal there is pretty pointless.
Irrelevant. The law in question was never intended to apply to harm from investigative journalism, but was written to deal with identity theft. That it's being so grossly misused is a huge problem. Are you sure that Texas is unique in this? Or that it will always be unique? Isn't it kind of important that we nip this particular misinterpretation in the bud right now before dozens of other states pass similar statues, also with no intent to affect journalism?
The precedent is not just set with regard to this one statue. I think you're missing the forest for the threes. The concept of "harm" is not defined in that one statute, but is presumably used in many statutes, not just in Texas, but all over this country. The precedent is about applying a legal definition of "harm" to harm caused by providing truth about someones activities. So, by this new definition you've invented, if I reveal that my next door neighbor is a child molester, I can potentially suffer legal repercussions under any of a number of civil and criminal actions because by doing so I have clearly caused "harm" to that person. This standard appears to be regardless of the truth or falseness of the claim itself. Note that nowhere in there was the claim that the videos were faked or false had any bearing on the charges being filed. The jury didn't state that it was harm because the claims made were untrue. They merely decided that the facts did not constitute a crime on the part of PP, not that anything in the video was false.
And that's a problematic precedent to set. There are presumably an uncountable number of uses of the word "harm" in various statutes scattered through our legal system. So now, journalists have to navigate a minefield of such statues, hoping that they don't happen to inadvertently violate some law because they "caused harm" while doing something? Oh no, I caused harm to another driver on the road while driving myself, which constitutes felony reckless driving. But the "harm" I did was film him drinking a beer while driving down the street. Tomorrow, I'll accidentally commit a federal crime by filming someone threatening voters to vote for a specific candidate in an election, because by doing so I've "harmed" that person within a polling place during a federal election. Surely you can see how this interpretation could be incredibly problematic. There's no end to the possible ways this could bite us.
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I didn't see anything in that article addressing the creation and use of fraudulent government IDs (which is, you know, what the charge is about not just "lying"). I'll accept that I just missed it and wait for you to quote the relevant sections.
You weren't reading hard enough then. One section made a point to make a distinction between someone who gave accurate identification when applying for a job, and just hoped the business wouldn't check up on what he wrote, with another who provided fraudulent information. Several other examples strongly suggest that false ID had to be used to obtain the access they did. You're free to pretend that no one ever uses a false ID for this sort of stuff, but that seems inanely naive.
Edited, Feb 19th 2016 7:07pm by gbaji