If you are charging black people with a law meant to fight the KKK, you are almost certainly in the wrong. No way white students would have caught a felony over the same thing.
It's not a felony, it's a misdemeanor according to the article.
Hmm, I thought I read it was a felony in the paper today
I did too, so went back to find it..
The Class A misdemeanor charges, the highest level short of a felony,
So, not a felony.
for theft of advertising services.
What did they take?
It's phrased as “unauthorized advertisement in a newspaper or periodical."
They had a parody ad for Israel birthright travel services and I think that's what they're being charged for - absurd.
They wrapped the real newspaper with their parody version and left them in the newsstands. The law, as I understand, was created for the purposes of preventing the Klan from doing the same thing with recruiting flyers back in the day.
Now, to charge these students - black students, apparently? - using that same law for this situation is obviously absurd and gross; but that’s what is allowing them to do it since the “problem” isn’t the content, it’s the distribution method.
We all know they were just pissed about the content, but they found a loophole to bring charges outside of content objections (which are 1st amendment protected). Here’s hoping whoever hears their case has some sense.
It’s not an advertisement actually.
Now we're cooking with Goodman, I like this angle.
For anyone wondering there was no money changing hands. No commerce no ability for the government to regulate it. It’s protected under the first amendment.
The law in question bans you from acquiring a paper, putting info you made inside it (literally, like putting a brochure physically inside), and then dispensing the bundle to someone else. The law is framed to claim the newspaper company is the victim when you do this, because you are benefiting from advertising "with" the paper without the paper's consent. This was done to try and stop the KKK from doing this with recruitment paperwork, although it's unclear to me why the law doesn't frame itself as having consumers be the victim of fraud.
So they didn't take anything, they just didn't pay for something they allegedly should have.
Jesus fuck.
with the tagline “One man’s home is another man’s former home!”
Keeping in mind these are students happily living in the USA, they should've been charged with 1st degree Irony
They’re Black, and Black folks didn’t exactly have much choice in the matter of coming to America.
Do you think most people living in America made a choice to come there?
Neither did I.
Oh, you mean our ancestors. You're over-generalizing. Many black people did not voluntarily come to the US, but many have, both since collonial times through today. Things got worse in the US for blacks throughout the 1700's and after, but by no means is every black person in the US descended from involuntary (enslaved) immigrants. Voluntary immigration of black people has continued since emancipation through today in healthy numbers. Most of us did not choose to be born here.
Request a jury trial. It'll be fine.
Welcome to the News community!
Rules:
1. Be civil
Attack the argument, not the person. No racism/sexism/bigotry. Good faith argumentation only. This includes accusing another user of being a bot or paid actor. Trolling is uncivil and is grounds for removal and/or a community ban.
2. All posts should contain a source (url) that is as reliable and unbiased as possible and must only contain one link.
Obvious right or left wing sources will be removed at the mods discretion. We have an actively updated blocklist, which you can see here: https://lemmy.world/post/2246130 if you feel like any website is missing, contact the mods. Supporting links can be added in comments or posted seperately but not to the post body.
3. No bots, spam or self-promotion.
Only approved bots, which follow the guidelines for bots set by the instance, are allowed.
4. Post titles should be the same as the article used as source.
Posts which titles don’t match the source won’t be removed, but the autoMod will notify you, and if your title misrepresents the original article, the post will be deleted. If the site changed their headline, the bot might still contact you, just ignore it, we won’t delete your post.
5. Only recent news is allowed.
Posts must be news from the most recent 30 days.
6. All posts must be news articles.
No opinion pieces, Listicles, editorials or celebrity gossip is allowed. All posts will be judged on a case-by-case basis.
7. No duplicate posts.
If a source you used was already posted by someone else, the autoMod will leave a message. Please remove your post if the autoMod is correct. If the post that matches your post is very old, we refer you to rule 5.
8. Misinformation is prohibited.
Misinformation / propaganda is strictly prohibited. Any comment or post containing or linking to misinformation will be removed. If you feel that your post has been removed in error, credible sources must be provided.
9. No link shorteners.
The auto mod will contact you if a link shortener is detected, please delete your post if they are right.
10. Don't copy entire article in your post body
For copyright reasons, you are not allowed to copy an entire article into your post body. This is an instance wide rule, that is strictly enforced in this community.