Legal Implications of a Tragic Jail Suicide

Two holiday delights this week: The right of a former president to say “Deranged prosecutor Jack Smith” and the proper standard when officials recklessly fail to keep a suicide watch. First it’s Paul Sherman with the D.C. Circuit’s analysis of how former President Trump’s speech can be curtailed while he’s being prosecuted in Washington, D.C. The First Amendment interest is high, but is it high enough? Even though the court applies strict scrutiny the answer is mostly no. Paul explains how it seems like a good precedent when it is applied to less exceptional cases in the future. Then Patrick Jaicomo brings us to the Fourth Circuit where a woman tragically killed herself while in a jail—and while the jail’s staff knew she had already tried to. To get there, though, the court needed to clean up some of its caselaw and square it with what the Supreme Court has said.

Click here for transcript.

U.S. v. Trump

Short v. Hartman

IJ page for Taylor v. LeBlanc