In a victory for fans of civil disobedience and four-letter words, an American man has been awarded $US 35,000 after he was arrested for swearing at a local police department on their Facebook page.
In 2012, Thomas Smith saw a post from the Village of Arena Police Department that he perceived to be racist, and so he got himself good and fired up and wrote back:
“Fuck ths fucking cops … fucking racist basturds an fucking all of y’all who is racist.”
Poor spelling itself is not a crime, but disorderly conduct and criminal use of a computer both very much are, and Smith was arrested for both of these a short time later.
Smith’s lawyers argued that this approach was heavy-handed, and that arresting him for cursing on Facebook was a violation of his First Amendment rights.
Earlier this week, a court agreed, awarding him $35k in damages against the police department. The man’s lawyers later wrote in post to their blog:
“Federal and state courts have routinely held that the right to free speech is not limited to polite speech alone. In our country, we are entitled to criticize our government with passion. The use of some four-letter words in the course of doing so is never a crime. We hope that the Arena Police Department, and other police departments across the state, have now learned this lesson.”
via Complex
