A Laredo social media personality and citizen journalist arrested for publishing information about a suicide and a car wreck is challenging the constitutionality of the Texas law under which she was charged.

Priscilla Villarreal, who is best known as her online personality, La Gordiloca, was arrested in December on a charges of misuse of official information after she published on Facebook the name of a suicide victim and the name of a person who died in a car wreck.

Media law experts said at the time the arrest likely violated her First Amendment rights.

On Wednesday, Villarreal’s lawyers filed a writ of habeas corpus in a Webb County district court alleging the law police used to charge their client, a third-degree felony punishable by up to 10 years in prison, is unconstitutional. Villarreal is free on bond.

The law punishes anyone who “solicits or receives from a public servant information that has not been made public” and does so “with intent to obtain a benefit.” Police say Villarreal benefited by receiving more Facebook followers after she published the names online before police released them publicly.

The law police used to arrest Villarreal makes it a crime to obtain government records potentially exempted from disclosure under the Texas Public Information Act, her lawyers said. However, the law doesn’t expressly prohibit the release of those documents, they said, and the statute making it a crime to obtain them is unconstitutionally vague and a violation of the First Amendment.

“There’s a specific section in (the Texas Public Information Act) that says when in doubt, release the information,” said Oscar O. Peña, one of the lawyers representing Villarreal. “But by criminalizing the release of information that doesn’t need to be released, it stifles free speech.”

Rather than arguing that Laredo police misapplied the law when they arrested Villarreal, the lawyers are challenging the law in its entirety. In their filing, Tellez and Peña argue that there are other statutes punishing the misuse of government information and there’s no need for a law making it a crime to ask for or obtain records.

“The offense itself is an over-reactive, disproportional, prophylactic measure that criminalizes people … for seeking information to benefit themselves,” they wrote. “After all that’s what we send our kids to college for — acquire knowledge, ask questions, benefit yourself.”

Peña added in an interview, “If you’re looking at the statute and it seems ridiculous, that’s because you understand it.”

The Webb County district attorney’s office declined comment, citing the pending case.

Their filing challenges the Texas Public Information Act as well, arguing that its list of more than 40 exemptions are vague and “very easy to weaponize.”

Daxton Stewart, an associate dean and associate professor of journalism at Texas Christian University, said the Supreme Court previously ruled that journalists can publish information obtained illegally by a third party as long as the journalists didn’t break any laws and what they publish is truthful and in the public interest. Under that ruling, Villarreal is likely to succeed in getting her charges thrown out, Stewart said. But it might be harder to get the entire law declared unconstitutional.

“I think they make a plausible argument here that, as drafted, this law is flawed, it has constitutional problems,” he said. “But in the alternative, a judge does not have to find the whole law invalid to find it invalid as applied to these circumstances. A judge could look at it and say, even if this law has flaws, it may be valid in some circumstances, but it’s not being used validly here — that police and prosecutors are violating her rights under the First Amendment.”

The challenge to the Texas Public Information Act is less likely to succeed, Stewart said.

“One of the things we open-records, open-meetings advocates would love is a constitutional right to know,” he said. “It’s not there. The only right to know we have has been passed by legislatures in public information acts.”