The Freeze Peach Series, part 0: Preface and Scope.

Preface

Ten months ago, in the first weeks of this drama: a sympathetic reddit user asked if there was any way they could send me money.

This wasn’t the first such request, and the consistency with which I received these offers struck me as strange. Something bad happened to me, I wrote about it, and now apparently people wanted to give me money.

I felt there must have been some crucial error in their reasoning and so replied.

“No. Why do people keep trying to give me money? I went through a shitty thing, I didn’t get my car stolen.”

This was perhaps not a great response. No one took issue with it, but I didn’t think through the appropriateness. It was a hectic time, and it would be some number of months before I could spare the mental cycles to realize these offers came not from confused people who had succumb to some knee-jerk non-sequitur, but from genuinely kind people who found themselves in a situation with no viable outlet for their empathy.

When we observe someone suffering, we jump to comfort them. A hug, a beer, a heart-to-heart. But the information age makes these things difficult. We can observe someone suffering a thousand miles away, but can’t take them out for beer. So when we observe suffering online, barring proximity for a hug, or prior intimacy for a heart-to-heart, we jump to leverage the medium’s only other strong-suit: commerce.

I had no need for money, so for the first month, I thanked people for these offers, and, for exception to make jokes (because sometimes they’re just.worth.it) politely declined.

Eventually, parameters changed. And where I once declined by noting that I had not – for example – suffered the loss of a car; I have since raised enough money for maybe a mini-cooper (with the most recent drive pulling in about $18k).

But, instead of a mini-cooper, this money has gone to – by now – roughly 6 different lawyers passionate about First Amendment or Technology law; many of whom have agreed to work at discounted rates. And these are beside the four or five who to various degrees have helped or are helping for free. Two or three of whom are eye-poppingly infamous. And I don’t mean on twitter.

Their interest isn’t a simple function of how unjust they felt my particular case is. The justice system is sometimes unjust. Most lawyers will not get too concerned about the details of a particular injustice unless you pay them to care about it more than some other injustice.

There are greater underlying legal issues here. And they stem from a fairly recent, and – but for some implementation concerns – positive development in law, that has nevertheless been struggling for the past couple of decades to square itself against basic civil rights.

In an attempt to minimize the donations I’ve had to ask for, I’ve spent much of the past few months doing mind numbing amounts of legal research and legwork on my own behalf. And while I’m far from a legal expert on this (or any) matter, I can by this point explain at a high level some of the underlying issues involved.

Scope

This series of posts is going to explore the interplay of a small handful of legal concepts. They are: prior restraint, due process, and protected vs unprotected speech. And though they pop up in all sorts of places, this series will be limited in scope to a very specific class of court orders.

Different states have different names for them. In Massachusetts, they are called Prevention Orders. Georgia calls them Protective Orders. Hawaii calls them Injunction Orders. In Michigan, they go by the unassuming moniker of “Peace Orders” (there is some wisdom here, as we will soon see).

Colloquially, they are referred to as “Restraining Orders.”

Ultimately, what they are intended to prevent is activity which is already illegal. Assault, harassment, stalking, abuse, etc. In light of that, some might find their existence puzzling. After all, what good does it do to ban someone from doing something which is already illegal?

To answer that, imagine yourself in the following situation:

You’ve moved in to an apartment with your significant other a year or so ago. In the past few months, they have become increasingly abusive. A week ago, while drunk and angry, they threatened to stab you. You broke up and asked them to move out. Today, while they were packing, you get into a heated verbal argument, in the midst of which your significant other abruptly leaves the apartment to get something from their car. You don’t know what they are getting or what they intend to do when they come back, so you lock the door behind them, and you call the police. You explain that you are afraid of your significant other, who is now banging on the door trying to get in. The police may or may not come by to appraise the situation, but in either case the facts they will observe are as follows:

You are not physically injured.

You are not claiming that your partner just hit you.

Your partner’s name is (aside from yours) still on the apartment’s lease.

They inform you that they can’t force your partner off the premises, as your partner is not trespassing. And they can’t arrest him, because there isn’t anything to show a crime has been committed.

In this precise situation, if you had, after your partner threatened to stab you a week ago, taken a restraining order out on them (perhaps disallowing them from stepping foot in the apartment), the police would have arrested your partner for violating the order as soon as you called, and you would not be forced to spend the night in fear of your safety.

Essentially, restraining orders let you have the police on notice, and they let the police arrest someone because it has been deemed ahead of time by a judge that some set of parameters imply that person is likely to commit a crime. That’s basically how they work.

In the next part of the series, we’ll explore how they break. Sometimes spectacularly. Sometimes hilariously. Sometimes involving David Letterman. And usually in less than five minutes.

More importantly, we’ll explore the constitutional and civil rights issues that arise, including due process, censorship in the context of one-to-many vs many-to-many speech, and the ways these orders can and have been abused to silence legitimate criticism of public figures or groups. In the succeeding parts, we’ll explore the functions of hearings, trials, appellate, and supreme judicial courts. And by the end of it, we’ll hopefully all be in a better position to debate or reason about the issues with nuance.

Anyway, thanks for everything guys. I can’t talk about details for now, but I hope at least, with the coming posts, I can share some of what I’ve learned.