On Wednesday, a federal appeals court decided to overturn the conviction of a MAGA supporter/influencer who found himself a target of twice failed Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton. The charges Douglass Mackey was found guilty of initially was spreading falsehood on social media to try and suppress Democratic voter turnout during the 2016 presidential election.
I think it goes without saying, but you can probably see how dangerously close this gets to censoring political speech. The 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Manhattan made the right choice when it ordered a lower court to acquit Mackey of all charges. The federal court found the trial evidence did not successfully prove the claims made against the Florida man of attempting to influence the election.
Check out further details from The Telegraph:
Mackey, 36, was convicted in March 2023 in federal court in Brooklyn on a charge of conspiracy against rights after posting false memes that said supporters of Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton could vote for her by text message or social media post. He was sentenced to seven months in federal prison.
“HALLELUJAH!” Mackey wrote on X after the 2nd Circuit’s decision was posted Wednesday. In follow up messages, he thanked God, his family, wife, lawyers and supporters, and threatened legal action over his conviction. One of Mackey’s lawyers on his appeal was Yaakov Roth, who is now principal deputy assistant U.S. attorney general in charge of the Justice Department’s Civil Division.
In charging Mackey, prosecutors alleged that he conspired with others between September and November of 2016 to post memes, such as a photo of a woman standing in front of an “African Americans for Hillary” sign. “Avoid the Line. Vote from Home,” the tweet said. “Text ‘Hillary’ to 59925.”
A total of 5,000 people actually did what the meme instructed, according to testimony delivered during the trial. Almost all of them then received an automated text message explaining that the posts were not associated with the Clinton campaign. The court said there was no “evidence at the trial that Mackey’s tweets tricked anyone into failing properly to vote.”
Mackey, who had 58,000 followers at the time, posted under the alias Ricky Vaughn, the name of Charlie Sheen’s character in the movie “Major League.” In overturning Mackey’s conviction, a three-judge 2nd Circuit panel wrote, “the mere fact” that he “posted the memes, even assuming that he did so with the intent to injure other citizens in the exercise of their right to vote, is not enough, standing alone, to prove a violation” of the conspiracy law.
“The government was obligated to show that Mackey knowingly entered into an agreement with other people to pursue that objective,” Chief Judge Debra Ann Livingston and Judges Reena Raggi and Beth Robinson said in the opinion. “This the government failed to do.”
During his trial, Judge Ann M. Donnelly said Mackey was “one of the leading members” of some sort of conspiracy that was “nothing short of an assault on our democracy.”
For the last time, people. We are not a democracy. We’re a republic. Democracies are mob rule, the tyranny of the majority.
At Mackey’s trial, prosecutors showed messages exchanged in private Twitter groups that they said proved an intent to interfere with people exercising their right to vote. However, the three-judge panel ruled that prosecutors “failed to offer sufficient evidence that Mackey even viewed — let alone participated in — any of these exchanges.”
“In the absence of such evidence, the government’s remaining circumstantial evidence cannot alone establish Mackey’s knowing agreement,” the judges said.
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