Crossposted from https://lemmy.world/post/51603575
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.”
lmao that is exactly the type of bullshit that attorneys will try to push to get even the most unhinged things through.
really reminds me of how the US argued that it could abuse iraq war prisoners because while the universal human rights chart forbids abuse of “soldiers and civilians”, iraqis were neither because they were “unlawful combattants” (a bullshit category introduced specifically to circumvent the human rights chart).