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New Jersey prosecutors drop charges over tweeting a cop's photo [Updated]:
Update (~4pm ET): Mid-afternoon on Friday, August 7, the Essex County Prosecutor's Office dropped its cyber harassment charges against all five defendants, the Asbury Park Press reports. These charges stemmed from an incident involving a Tweet attempting to identify a New Jersey police officer. Our original story on the situation appears unchanged below.
A New Jersey man is facing felony charges for a tweet seeking to identify a police officer. Four others are facing felony charges for retweeting the tweet, the Washington Post reports.
[...] The complaint against Sziszak claims that the tweet caused the officer to "fear that harm will come to himself, family, and property."
"As a 20 year old that simply retweeted a tweet to help my friend, I am now at risk of giving up my career, serving time, and having a record," Sziszak wrote.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by Thexalon on Monday August 10 2020, @01:11PM
Exactly: An arrest is a punishment, one cops can currently dole out completely arbitrarily without any consequences whatsoever. It amounts to cops being able to give somebody a bit of jail time without them being guilty of anything. And, as an added bonus, if the person they're arresting for no reason does anything remotely interpreted as "resisting", that's an additional legitimate criminal charge that even a judge will go along with.
And yes, a judge will come along and dismiss the charges later on, potentially with some very stern remarks to the cop if the charges are really unjustified. And yes, the person who was arrested can try suing the department for false arrest, if they can afford the time and legal fees, but if there's a judgment in their favor it will be the taxpayers paying out, not the cop.
That's assuming, of course, that the person they arrested doesn't end up dead in jail awaiting arraignment with all the surveillance footage mysteriously missing.
The only thing that stops a bad guy with a compiler is a good guy with a compiler.