Thomas Alan Arthur is currently serving 40 years in a US prison. He was convicted of publishing fictional text stories and two cartoon style drawings. (Note that he was accused of assault decades ago, which apparently factored into his sentence, but he was not charged or convicted of that.)
In this case the statement they checked off said that there was an unlawful reproduction of a trademark. There was no reproduction at all, since the products were originally manufactured by the brand. Boggles my mind how that can be an opinion.
We got told by the 9th circuit that false claims submitted under penalty of perjury are actually just "opinions" not capable of being proven true or false.
>Reflective of the fact that false imprisonment consists of detention without legal process, a false imprisonment ends once the victim becomes held pursuant to such process--when, for example, he is bound over by a magistrate or arraigned on charges. Dobbs, supra, §39, at 74, n. 2; Keeton, supra, §119, at 888; H. Stephen, Actions for Malicious Prosecution 120-123 (1888). Thereafter, unlawful detention forms part of the damages for the "entirely distinct" tort of malicious prosecution, which remedies detention accompanied, not by absence of legal process, but by wrongful institution of legal process
Magistrates are supposed to verify that the warrant contains probable cause and reject ones that don't.
You could make the system more adversarial at that point, although I think enforcing bail hearings where a public defender can argue would help in this and many other cases.
The magistrate judge should not have approved the warrant. They should have had a bail hearing within 24 hours, at which it would have been clear that they posed no threat.
Instead somehow bail was set at $2 million and the hearing to reduce bail was delayed.
Those are flaws in the system that should be fixed, and will continue harming people even without bad faith from sheriffs.
I would get rid of all forms of immunity and mandate body cameras. Probably also raise requirements for police officers. And part of it is reducing the scope of what the cops are meant to enforce.
I appreciate the massive harms done by incarceration, which I why I support vastly reducing it.
If you include the guy who was arrested for posting memes as participating in a coup, sure. "But the memes were misleading" (as someone else in this thread was arguing) I don't care.
Rape and murder are existing crimes, and they should be applied equally to police officers.
I think that the core problem with the system is not individual bad actors, but overcriminalization and the acceptance of that by judges and juries. To solve that you need actual reform, and adding a new crime that would inevitably be weaponized is not the way.
The whole concept of holding people "accountable" is the wrong frame. It's precisely that mindset that created this highly flawed system. I want to reduce bad things, not to feel good because people who did bad things are punished.
And when you think about how to prevent bad cases from being brought, you need to systematically reduce the power of those who can make such decisions.
Added: I do want strong civil liability for these cases, which we do have, which is why OP was able to get a good settlement. We should expand that to federal cases and lower the threshold.
We should indeed get rid of many laws because the benefit is outweighed by the abuse.
America has one of the highest rates of incarceration in the world (used to be #1) but suggest that maybe we're overcriminalized and you must be talking nonsense.
I'm saying that for decades, people who were maliciously prosecuted by the federal government had effectively no recourse.
It's good to change that, and I'm hopeful that the new fund does some of that. I would prefer to change the system to vastly reduce the threshold for finding the federal government liable in such cases.