‘The Onion’ Filed A Real Brief With Supreme Court Supporting Man Jailed For Making Fun Of Cops

Novak suggested in about a half-dozen posts within the first 12 hours that the cops were racist and lacking in compassion. Parma's police department claimed at the time that people were confusing its posts with actual law enforcement information.

How recently have you read an amicus brief? If you’re not in the legal profession, chances are you’ve never spent time reading one. This amicus brief (PDF) has the potential to change that.

The Onion submitted it, describing itself as “the world’s leading news publication” with “4.3 trillion” readers and “a towering standard of excellence to which the rest of the industry aspires.”

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The Onion claims that, in addition to running a highly successful news publication, it “owns and operates the majority of the world’s transoceanic shipping lanes, is at the forefront of the nation’s deforestation and strip mining efforts, and proudly conducts tests on millions of animals daily.” Oh, and it has the motto “Tu stultus es.” That translates to “you are stupid” in Latin.

Of course, The Onion is the popular parody website that once named Kim Jong-un the sexiest man alive.

Its team has filed a real amicus brief with the Supreme Court in support of Anthony Novak, who was arrested and jailed for four days in 2016 after briefly running a Facebook page parodying the Parma, Ohio police department.

According to The Washington Times, Novak suggested in about a half-dozen posts within the first 12 hours that the cops were racist and lacking in compassion. Parma’s police department claimed at the time that people were confusing its posts with actual law enforcement information.

Novak filed a civil suit against the officers who arrested him and the city of Parma, alleging violations of his constitutional rights. He took the case to the Supreme Court after a federal appeals court ruled that the officers were protected by what is known as “qualified immunity” for law enforcement.

Despite writing the brief in the same voice its publication uses, and despite filling it with outlandish claims and hilarious quips, The Onion made a very real argument defending the use of parody and explaining how it works:

“Put simply, for parody to work, it has to plausibly mimic the original. The Sixth Circuit’s decision, in this case, would condition the First Amendment’s protection for parody upon a requirement that parodists explicitly say, up-front, that their work is nothing more than an elaborate fiction.

“But that would strip parody of the very thing that makes it function.

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“The Onion cannot stand idly by in the face of a ruling that 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.”

According to Bloomberg, the Supreme Court Justices have yet to decide whether or not to hear the case.

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