A Trump-appointed judge also said Americans have no “constitutional right to truthful information” during a public health crisis.
On Friday, the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals affirmed the dismissal of a lawsuit against the city of Jackson, Mississippi, which alleged the city knowingly let residents drink lead-contaminated water.
The lawsuit, first filed in 2022, says the contamination violated Jacksonians’ constitutional right to bodily integrity. Donald Trump-appointed judge Kurt Engelhardt disagreed. “The Constitution does not provide redress for every governmental wrongdoing,” Engelhardt said.
“Defendants’ actions allegedly deprived Plaintiffs of clean water and guileless information. These deprivations, while grievous, do not infringe upon any deeply rooted constitutional right.”
That depends if you agree with the Declaration of Independence. Do you think that all men are entitled to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness? If you do, then you think that they are entitled to non-poisoned water, or at least for the government to make a reasonable effort to provide said water.
But look, this is something that’s hard for American court systems to grasp. In the United States when people talk about rights, they typically only think about the Bill of Rights. And that’s a subset of our rights.
Yeah this is total bullshit and all, but The Declaration of Independence is not a legally binding document. It’s irrelevant to the situation, unfortunately. You can’t walk into a court and cite the Declaration of Independence as law or precedent.
I mean, I guess you could, but no judge would take you seriously because that’s not how jurisprudence works in the US.
Entitled to does not me provided. It means not blocked, or not taken away. You could argue that by not telling the people, that they blocked their right, but that’s a bit of a stretch. Essentially the peolle where always free to buy clean water from the store, or go to some other source.
If it meant provide… healthcare would be free, as that is part of the pursuit of life.
What this may be, is fraud. They charged the people for the water. I am sure somewhere in various publications they call it safe. If the levels were higher than some publication with reasonable authority on the subject calls safe, that would be fraud. The article however didn’t go into those details. I suspect that while the levels were considered by many to be unsafe, there probably lacks an authority on the exact levels that are safe. We ran into this with pur school district. They tested and found some levels were higher than typical guidance, but that “official” unsafe levels weren’t present. So they called it safe. Only people who dug into the data realized they were sugar coating it. But they weren’t legally lieing.