Blogging Can Be Dangerous to Your Freedom

[frazzled]

1. “You’ve got a situation where sometimes there’s no good guys”

He never should have been imprisoned (a civil suit for monetary damages would have been the correct course of action; ignoring him might have been the best route), but the guy is pretty nutty, exasperating, and annoying. Being nutty, exasperating, and annoying, however, are not crimes:

“You’ve got a situation where sometimes there’s no good guys,” said Ken White, a former federal prosecutor in Los Angeles who writes about and practices First Amendment law.

Mr. Shuler is no stranger to defamation suits, as one might surmise from reading his blog. He started it in 2007 to document a property dispute with his neighbor that blew up into a legal war and ended with the neighbor’s lawyer becoming a part-owner of Mr. Shuler’s house, which is in Birmingham. Later, the blog branched out to expose what he alleged were the corrupt machinations of powerful figures, mostly Republicans, and with a particular animus toward former Gov. Bob Riley.

His allegations are frequently salacious, including a recent assertion that a federal judge had appeared in a gay pornographic magazine and a theory that several suicides were actually a string of politically motivated murders. Starting in January 2013, Mr. Shuler, citing unidentified sources, began writing that Robert Riley Jr., the son of the former governor, had impregnated a lobbyist named Liberty Duke and secretly paid for an abortion. Both denied it, and Ms. Duke swore in an affidavit that they had never even been alone in the same room.

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/01/12/us/bloggers-incarceration-raises-first-amendment-questions.html

Let it be said, however, that this kind of wrongful imprisonment is not rampant, even in this crazy country of ours. As the Times article (written when he was still in jail) says:

But even those who longed for his muzzling, and there are many, did not see it coming like this: with Mr. Shuler sitting in jail indefinitely, and now on the list of imprisoned journalists worldwide kept by the Committee to Protect Journalists. There, in the company of jailed reporters in China, Iran and Egypt, is Mr. Shuler, the only person on the list in the Western Hemisphere.