Ohio man wants to sue police over arrest over satirical Facebook page, and he's trying to take his case to the U.S. Supreme Court

Anthony Novak was arrested in 2016 for creating a satirical Facebook page that parodied his local police department in Parma, Ohio. He is now trying to sue the city for civil rights violations.

Institute for Justice Anthony Novak

To do so, he is taking his case to the U.S. Supreme Court after the suit was dismissed by a federal judge and the dismissal was upheld on appeal, according to the New York Times< /em>.

"They said, 'put your hands behind your back.' They said 'fake Parma Facebook page,'" Novak told ABC News about the time he was arrested.

Novak spent four days in jail and was later acquitted of the charge of using a computer that interfered with police duties, according to the Times.

But he didn't stop there. Novak previously filed an entirely separate lawsuit, accusing the police of violating his civil rights.

“I did something that was completely legal. I was allowed to do a police parody page,” Novak told ABC. "My image was in all the newspapers, and I did nothing wrong."

He also faced a search of his home after being arrested.

“Nearly a month after Novak deleted the parody account, police arrested him, searched his apartment, seized his phone and laptop, and jailed him for four days,” his appeal reads. to the Court.

But the legal argument in the most recent appeal is that, in this case, local police are not entitled to the legal protection known as "qualified immunity".

Qualified immunity protects state and local governments, and, by extension, police officers, from liability for constitutional violations in a doctrine that over the years has come to establish a very high legal hurdle for plaintiffs to overcome, especially in civil cases. rights cases, by Lawfare.

This case concerns the substantiation of qualified immunity when the reason for the original charge is based on parole, according to SCOTUSBlog. As the outlet notes, Novak's lawsuit says police attacked him based on his speech — parody is protected by the First Amendment — and that's a constitutional violation. /p>

The city argued that the page was too close to the page it was mimicking to qualify as a parody, and its fake page put up an identical disclaimer about a parody page the good one did , according to the Times.

Novak "went beyond mimicry," city attorney Richard Rezie said, according to the outlet.

However, satirists in general took an interest in the case. Comedy site The Onion filed its first-ever Supreme Court brief in favor of Novak, according to the Times, in October.

“The Onion cannot stand idly by in the face of a judgment that threatens to gut a form of rhetoric that has existed for millennia, which is particularly powerful in the realm of political debate and which, by pure coincidence, funds The Onion writers' paychecks," the filing reads.

The court will decide next month whether or not to take up the case, according to ABC.