Next month, the Supreme Court will consider whether to take up Villarreal v. Alaniz, a First Amendment case involving a Laredo, Texas, journalist who was arrested for asking questions. Although that is literally what happened to local crime vlogger Priscilla Villarreal in 2017, Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, echoing an appeals court ruling against her, calls that description "clever but misleading" in a brief opposing her petition for Supreme Court review.
"Priscilla Villarreal was supposedly arrested just for asking questions," the brief says. In reality, Paxton argues, she was arrested for soliciting the commission of a crime: the unauthorized release of information about a public suicide and a fatal car accident. Villarreal asked Laredo police officer Barbara Goodman to confirm information about those incidents, and Goodman willingly did so. According to Laredo police and local prosecutors, the text messages that Villarreal exchanged with Goodman constituted two felonies under an obscure and abstruse Texas statute addressing "misuse of official information."
