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by ajju 1546 days ago
I think such a law would clearly violate the first amendment.

https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/2020/1/23/21078810/kansas...

2 comments

Right. It won't survive a lawsuit.
But it will have a chilling effect while the court system works its way to the case, and even after it (hopefully) gets overturned.
And of course, they'll just put out a new law some time after the first one is overturned. Maybe they'll spend time rewording it a bit, but I suspect they'll eventually stop bothering with such tedious ceremony.

In effect, their desired law will be the law for the vast supermajority of time regardless of constitutionality.

I doubt it. You'll never stop people from making cell phone videos.
The chilling effect is reminding the victims of the police that they have no friends in the establishment, surely?
The law not surviving the court system would be contrary to that.
hey quick question when a law goes away what do you think happens to all the people in prison for violating that law
By then it has done its job.
It can still do a lot of damage. Arrest and exposure to the criminal legal system carries heavy costs and risks for very many people. Those things aren't undone when, years later, it gets declared unconstitutional because someone else's case finally made it through the process.
Yes, but in the meantime, the cops are allowed to beat, detain and arrest you. While your case rises to a right-wing packed SCOTUS, you will most likely lose your job, have issues with any kind of clearance (resisting arrest can be a felony depending on circumstances), face difficulties during any custody battle and possibly be incarcerated. Then if the courts rule in your favor, you receive nothing except your world reduced to ashes. In the US justice system, the process is the punishment.
This entire hypothetical assumes the law remains in place as the lawsuit works it's way through the system.
A longstanding political technique in the US is to pass patently unconstitutional laws and then ignore their enforcement. This accomplishes both goals: it scares citizens into changing their behavior (in this case, not recording police abuses), and it keeps the lawsuits away (the current standard for legal standing in the US requires demonstrable or imminent harm, which doesn't exist in the absence of enforcement).

That technique is unlikely to succeed in this particular case (since the 1A standard for harm is much lower), but it's worth noting.