Verdicts

A federal judge in Virginia’s Eastern district court has ruled that a Loudon County elected official censored a citizen by blocking them on Facebook in a First Amendment protected public forum.
Brian Davison is trying to keep the Loudoun County School Board accountable but has faced a prolonged campaign of censorship and retaliatory claims by Board Members with serious financial conflicts of interest in the charter school industry and who have voted on issues that impact pay for family members.

A Florida man won the right to surreptitiously record police officers while making internal affairs complaints without the threat of prosecution when he defeated the Miami-Dade State Attorney’s Office (SAO) in a federal appeals court ruling.
Prosecutors tried to censor the citizen, who published his incriminating recording of a police chief.

The New Mexico cops did not appreciate Jillian Beck walking away from them after they responded to a neighborhood dispute, prompting an officer to grab her arm, twist it behind her back and slam her to the ground, leaving her with a fractured arm as he planted his knee on her back.
When the woman lifted her head to console her four-year-old son who began crying, the Las Cruces police officer slammed her face on a bed of rocks, leaving her with a broken nose and a bruised and bloodied face.

A 55-year-old Oregon woman who pulled over to the side of the road to observe a police stop was found guilty of interfering with a police officer last week.
Keely Meagan was merely observing, not physically interfering nor verbally interfering, but the judge said she had pulled over in an unsafe area, which is why he handed down his guilty verdict Thursday.
However, Meagan had pulled up behind two cop cars and the car they were pulling over on the side of an interstate near an exit ramp on September 8, 2016.

A Texas man named Ray Rosas who shot three cops breaking into his home during a no-knock raid last year was found not guilty Tuesday.
Rosas said he did not know the armed intruders were cops because his sight and hearing was affected by the flash grenade they tossed into his bedroom window.
After two hours of deliberations, the jury found him not guilty, according to the Corpus Christi Caller-Times.

Former Paradise police officer Patrick Feaster was found guilty of manslaughter today for the shooting death of a DUI suspect last November in an incident captured on his own dash cam.
Feaster, who won numerous awards for the number of DUI arrests he made, faces five years in prison. He has not yet been sentenced.

“Do not fucking reach!” an enraged Los Angeles sheriff’s deputy shouted after pulling out his gun on a licensed private investigator sitting in his car in a residential neighborhood working on a case.
But all Ken Sheppard was doing was reaching towards his ear to remove his cell phone ear piece in order to better hear the deputy.
However, that was enough to make deputy Tai Plunkett fear for his life where he kept the gun pointed at Sheppard’s head with trembling hands in a surreal scene seemingly out of a movie.

One South Florida cop forced a woman to perform oral sex on him before raping her on the hood of his car under threat of arrest.
The second cop ordered the woman’s female friend to punch him in the genitals, which is what got him off.
Now Franklin Hartley and Thomas Merenda, who have since by fired from the Lauderhill Police Department, have to pay the women $6.2 million after a federal judge ruled against them in a civil trial last week.

An Ohio man facing criminal charges for making a satire Facebook page mocking the Parma Police Department got the last laugh last week after he was acquitted by a jury that unanimously decided the page did not violate the state’s felony disrupting public services law.

A Pennsylvania cop arrested for ripping a phone out of a woman’s hand because she was recording, then slamming it on a sidewalk and punching her in the face was acquitted of all charges Wednesday.
This despite video evidence proving Reading police officer Jesus Santiago-DeJesus violating the woman’s First Amendment right to record as well as proving he lied about why he had pulled her over in the first place.