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Supreme Court tosses lower court decision that shielded officers who arrested Texas citizen journalist
Washington — The Supreme Court on Tuesday tossed out a lower court decision that shielded from liability Texas law enforcement officers who arrested a local citizen journalist after she sought information from a police source.
The case of journalist Priscilla Villarreal, who is known to her readers in Laredo, Texas, as “Lagordiloca,” pits the First Amendment’s guarantee of a free press against the doctrine of qualified immunity, which provides legal protections for police and other government officials.
Villarreal’s challenge attracted interest from a range of reporters, major news organizations and journalism nonprofits who have argued that the right to seek information from public officials is fundamental to the practice of journalism.
In its brief order, the Supreme Court wiped away the lower court decision that protected the police officers involved in her arrest and ordered additional proceedings.
Villarreal has been described as the “most influential journalist” in Laredo, and publishes information about local crime, traffic and other news to her Facebook page, “Lagordiloca News.” Her reporting sometimes rankles local government officials, according to court papers, including the Laredo Police Department.
In 2017, their frustrations boiled over. Villarreal had published two news reports based on tips from local citizens, one that named a U.S. Border Patrol agent who died by suicide and a second relaying information about a fatal traffic crash and Houston family that was hurt in the accident. For both, she reached out to a Laredo police officer who confirmed the information before the stories were published to her Facebook page.
Months later, Villarreal was arrested for allegedly violating a state law that makes it a felony for a person to solicit or receive information from a government official that has not yet been made public if it’s with the intent to obtain a benefit.
In the 23 years that it’s been on the books, the statute has never been enforced, according to her lawyers.
Villarreal turned herself in, and the criminal charges were dismissed after a local judge ruled the law was unconstitutionally vague. She then sued the police and prosecutors behind her arrest, arguing her First, Fourth and 14th Amendment rights were violated.
The officials sought to toss out the case, claiming they had qualified immunity. The doctrine shields public officials from lawsuits stemming from conduct on the job unless they violate clearly established constitutional rights. A federal district court agreed, but the decision was reversed by a three-judge panel on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 5th Circuit.
“If the First Amendment means anything, it surely means that a citizen journalist has the right to ask a public official a question, without fear of being imprisoned,” Judge James Ho, appointed by former President Donald Trump, wrote for the judges. “Yet that is exactly what happened here: Priscilla Villarreal was put in jail for asking a police officer a question. If that is not an obvious violation of the Constitution, it’s hard to imagine what would be.”
But the full slate of judges from the 5th Circuit reheard Villarreal’s case and in January voted 9-7 to uphold the district court’s dismissal.
The divided 5th Circuit found that Laredo prosecutors and police have qualified immunity, concluding that they reasonably believed Villarreal broke state law when she asked an “unofficial” government source for information, instead of waiting for an official police report, and benefited from it. The nine judges also rejected the panel’s finding that Villarreal’s arrest violated the First Amendment.
Ho, in dissent, wrote the majority’s reasoning was “a recipe for public officials to combine forces with state or local legislators to do— whatever they want to do. It’s a level of blind deference and trust in government power our Founders would not recognize.”
In appealing the 5th Circuit’s decision to the Supreme Court, Villarreal’s lawyers wrote in a filing that its long-standing precedent “leaves no doubt that arresting Villarreal for asking the government for information and publishing the response violated the First Amendment — and every reasonable official would have known that.”
They warned that leaving the 5th Circuit’s decision in place entitles law enforcement to qualified immunity for using state laws as justification for First Amendment violations.
“Without reversal, the chill from the decision below will only spread wider, as ever-growing criminal codes provide a grab bag of statutes officials can wield against disfavored speech,” Villarreal’s legal team warned.
But Texas officials, led by Attorney General Ken Paxton, argued that they reasonably believed that Villarreal was seeking to solicit a leak of nonpublic information for her benefit.
Sydney — Hundreds of mysterious black tar-like balls have washed up on two popular Sydney area beaches, prompting lifeguards to close the strands to swimmers.
“Mysterious, black, ball-shaped debris” began appearing on Coogee Beach in the Randwick area on Tuesday afternoon, the local mayor said, leaving flummoxed Australian authorities scrambling to find out what they might be and where they came from.
Hundreds of golf-to-baseball-sized spheres could be seen littering the coast, which is usually thronged with Sydneysiders and tourists.
SAEED KHAN/AFP/Getty
Instead, a few seagulls wandered among the spheres, pecking and examining.
The balls were also spotted at nearby Gordon’s Bay, an aquatic reserve popular for snorkeling and fishing, which was also closed.
“At this stage, it is unknown what the material is,” Mayor Dylan Parker of Randwick city said in a social media post. “However, they may be ‘tar balls’ which are formed when oil comes in to contact with debris and water, typically the result of oil spills or seepage.”
The balls on Sydney’s picturesque shores aren’t the only unidentified objects to appear on beaches lately. Officials in Canada confirmed to CBS News on Tuesday that they were investigating blobs of a white “mystery substance” that have washed up since September on beaches in the far northeast Newfoundland and Labrador province.
Canada’s environmental agency told CBS News’ Ahmad Mukhtar that samples of the hundreds of white blobs littering beaches had been taken, but that both the substance and its origins remained a mystery.
Legendary Antarctic explorer Ernest Shackleton’s ship Endurance sank more than a century ago and its wreck lay undiscovered at the bottom of the Weddell Sea until March 2022.
Now, the team behind its discovery has joined forces with an Oscar-winning film crew for a new National Geographic documentary showcasing how they located the storied vessel’s last resting place.
“Endurance” features thousands of 3D scans shot by a 4K camera deployed to a depth of nearly 10,000 feet. It premiered at the London Film Festival last weekend before its release in cinemas and then on Disney+.
The never-before-seen footage captures everything from a flare gun and man’s boot to dinnerware used by the crew and identifiable parts of the vessel.
Falklands Maritime Heritage Trust / National Geographic
“We were absolutely blown away,” Mensun Bound, the 2022 discovery team’s director of exploration, told AFP. “We didn’t expect to see the ship’s wheel — the most emblematic part of the ship — just standing there, upright.”
History broadcaster Dan Snow, an executive producer on “Endurance”, called finding it in such a “stunning state” an “astonishing achievement”.
“No one’s ever found a wooden shipwreck 3,000 metres down in one of the most remote places on earth underneath the ice,” he said.
“It’s important because it is connected with this story of Shackleton and the 1914-16 expedition, which is one of the greatest stories ever told — a story of leadership and survival like nothing else.”
The flare gun that was discovered was fired by Frank Hurley, the expedition’s photographer, as the ship was lost to the ice, the BBC reported.
“Hurley gets this flare gun, and he fires the flare gun into the air with a massive detonator as a tribute to the ship,” expedition leader John Shears said. “And then in the diary, he talks about putting it down on the deck. And there we are. We come back over 100 years later, and there’s that flare gun, incredible.”
Anglo-Irish explorer Shackleton’s Imperial Trans-Antarctic Expedition was meant to make the first land crossing of the frozen continent.
But its three-masted timber sailing ship Endurance fell victim to the treacherous Weddell Sea, becoming ensnared in pack ice in January 1915. It was progressively crushed and sank 10 months later.
Shackleton, who died in 1922, described the site of the sinking as “the worst portion of the worst sea in the world.”
Falklands Maritime Heritage Trust / National Geographic
He cemented his status as a legend of exploration by leading an epic escape for himself and his 27 companions, on foot over the ice and then in boats to the British overseas territory of South Georgia, some 870 miles east of the Falklands.
“I do believe of all the great survival stories I’ve ever heard of, this one takes the cake because it involves so many people,” said Jimmy Chin, who directed and produced the new film jointly with Elizabeth Chai Vasarhelyi.
The husband-and-wife team behind Oscar-winning movie “Free Solo” saw the expedition organized by the Falklands Maritime Heritage Trust as a chance to “bring the story to a new generation.”
“The ultimate polar challenge”
The documentary alternates between accounts of the original and the 2022 missions, as the modern-day explorers conduct dozens of fruitless deep-sea dives using a state-of-the-art submersible as a deadline nears to leave before winter sets in.
A trailer for the film shows footage from the original 1914 expedition combined with video from the modern-day search.
Bound recounted the various challenges the latter-day team faced, including technology, research and climate, with one thing reminiscent of what Shackleton’s men confronted.
“Ice, ice and ice,” he said, adding that the documentary clearly highlights “the brutality” of the conditions they faced.
“This is probably the most difficult project I’ve ever been involved in… it wasn’t called the unreachable Endurance for nothing, was it?”
Shears also said there was a “real parallel” between the two endeavors and that like Shackleton he was drawn to “the ultimate polar challenge.”
“More people have been into space orbit than have ever walked on the surface sea ice where the Endurance sank,” said Shears, who previously led an unsuccessful attempt to find the wreck in 2019.
Chin and Vasarhelyi said combining the two stories was challenging but they were complementary.
“The two stories, even though they’re separated by 110 years, speak to each other,” said Vasarhelyi.
“They both chronicle this fundamental human condition of the audacity to dream big… have ambition, coupled with the diligence, determination, the grit and the ingenuity to see it through.”
To tell the original story, they opted to use AI to capture Shackleton and six crew members’ diary entries in their own voices, based on other recordings.
The filmmakers also used restored and colorized photographs and film expedition footage taken by Frank Hurley.
But audiences must wait until the closing stages of the documentary to see the new imagery of Endurance — a choice Vaserhelyi admitted felt “terrible” but necessary.
“This was a great story with a great payoff, but you have to earn it, right?” she explained.
“What’s nice is that the film really plays as this introduction… and it builds to this amazing moment.”
Delta Air Lines wants to elevate its passenger experience even before the plane leaves the ground.
The airline, which next year will celebrate it centennial anniversary, on Tuesday announced it is embarking on a “nose to tail” redesign of its interior cabins. The refresh includes new seat fabrics and materials, mood lighting throughout the plane, and memory-foam cushioning in some cabins.
The interior facelift comes as the carrier, which was badly hit by the global CrowdStrike outage in July, reported a third-quarter earnings decline of 26%.
The refresh is the result of extensive research on “customers’ changing expectations and lifestyles,” Delta said in its announcement, which emphasized the company’s dedication to “elevate the travel experience.” With passenger complaints surging in 2023, even low-cost carriers like Southwest Airlines are looking to provide consumers with a more premium flight experience.
“As we embark on our next century of flying, this refreshed cabin interior infuses utility with beauty to create an atmosphere that feels fresh, elevated and timeless while reflecting our customers’ evolving tastes and expectations,” Mauricio Parise, vice president of customer experience design at Delta, said in a statement.
Here’s a look at what Delta passengers can expect from the revamp.
Sleeker seating
Delta
Delta Comfort+ and main cabin passengers will enjoy seats made of engineered leather with updated colors and red accent stripes. On wide-body planes, Delta Comfort+ and main cabin seating will have the added luxury of memory-foam cushioning.
Delta
Premium passengers in the Delta One cabin will find seats upholstered in soft, breathable fabric seats made of a wool and nylon blend, according to the airline.
Despite differences in fabrics and materials among the different seating section, the redesign is meant to bring a premium look and feel for all cabins, making “everything consistent,” according to a promotional video, so that “no matter what, it looks brand new.”
Enhanced lighting
Delta’s new cabins will also feature what the company describes as “enhanced lighting programs” throughout the plane. “Every flight is different, so we’ve focused on creating warm, calming and atmospheric lighting options that create an environment for customers to rest and relax, or stay productive as they wish,” Parise said.
That include different lighting moods for different phases of the flight. For example, during boarding, “We’ve focused on the ‘moment of deceleration’ — warm and inviting lighting that makes the cabin appear spacious and open,” according to Delta.
Delta
At mealtimes: “We queue hues that feel like you’re at a candlelit dinner – making meals more natural and inviting.”
Sleeptime: “As the lights dim for sleep, we borrow from the sunset and slowly remove blue light while bringing in warm amber tones which are reminiscent of a sunset glow.”
Wake time: “When it’s time to wake up, the cabin slowly brightens into morning and daylight.”
Improved bathrooms
As part of the refresh, restrooms will feature bright walls and calming blue cabinets. New smooth flooring with specks of color will ensure “improved cleanliness and safe traction,” according to Delta.
Delta
The new cabin design will debut later this fall on narrow-body Boeing 757 aircraft flying domestic and short international routes, according to Delta. Renovated cabins on wide-body Airbus A35 aircraft will follow in 2025, with the rest of the airline’s fleet to follow over “the next few years.”