A federal appeals court has overturned the conviction of Douglass Mackey, the man prosecuted for posting satirical memes ahead of the 2016 presidential election.
The Second Circuit Court of Appeals ruled on July 9 that the government failed to prove Mackey knowingly participated in a conspiracy, a requirement under the statute used to charge him.
We obtained a copy of the ruling for you here.
Mackey had been found guilty in 2023 of violating 18 U.S.C. § 241, a law dating back to Reconstruction that punishes conspiracies to deprive individuals of their constitutional rights. Prosecutors claimed that Mackey’s memes, which joked that Hillary Clinton supporters could vote via text, were part of a coordinated scheme to suppress votes.
That case has now unraveled.
“The mere fact that Mackey posted the memes, even assuming that he did so with the intent to injure other citizens in the exercise of their right to vote, is not enough, standing alone, to prove a violation of Section 241,” wrote Chief Judge Debra Ann Livingston in the court’s opinion. Because Section 241 applies only to conspiracies involving “two or more persons,” the government had to prove that Mackey entered into an agreement with others, a threshold it did not meet.
Prosecutors attempted to tie Mackey to private Twitter message groups such as “War Room” and “Madman #2,” where users discussed political memes.
The court found no evidence that Mackey saw, let alone participated in, any of the conversations that allegedly formed the conspiracy. “This the government failed to do,” the panel wrote, noting that “Mackey did not send any messages in the War Room in the two weeks before he tweeted the text-to-vote memes.”
Hellbound and Down 