The Second Circuit will be hearing the appeal of the district court decision in Leroy v. Livingston Manor School Dist.; here's the summary of the facts from Leroy's opening brief (the image involved is included above):
On April 19, 2021, while still a Livingston Manor student, Leroy was socializing with three friends after school hours, away from school property. The four were in a dance studio parking lot to pick up Leroy's friend's sister. While there, one friend told Leroy that there had been a noise coming from his car on the drive over and Leroy laid on the ground in front of the car to investigate. While he was there, another friend knelt on Leroy's back and had the third friend take a picture.
The three friends each posted the picture to their personal Snapchat accounts, with Leroy adding the caption, "Cops got another."
Another posted the same image but with a "Black Lives Matter" logo overlayed. Upon receiving several disapproving private messages on the Snapchat platform, Leroy deleted his post and asked the others to do the same, which they did. All told, the images were accessible to others for around seven minutes….
Within the seven minutes that the posts were available, a fellow Livingston Manor student, Leroy's former girlfriend, "Grace" …, captured a screenshot Leroy's post, and reposted it on Facebook and other online platforms to "condemn" Leroy. Apparently to amplify any public response, Grace also jointly posted another, out-of-context photo of two other Livingston Manor students taken by Leroy in March of 2021. An activist, Gem Amber Sun Helper reposted the images with commentary asserting that Livingston Manor "surpassed its dark history of being a Sundown Town with its own KKK Chapter." Helper or a later commentator shared this post and the phone number for Livingston Manor Central school, telling viewers to "dm" direct or private message her for additional contact information.
