Defamation, Slander, and Infowars I was reading an article today where one of the victims of the Los Vegas shooting was saying that he was being harassed and threatened by people who buy into the conspiracy theory that no one died in Vegas, that crisis actors were hired. This got me thinking, could such a victim (or all of the victims in a class actions suit) sue Alex Jones based on defamation or slander since he's the purveyor of this conspiracy (well, I suppose the most popular). This question could also be posed of the Sandy Hook Massacre or even the 9/11 terrorist attack as Alex has said the same about those events.
Alex Jones has been sued for defamation; see Alex Jones Retracts Chobani Claims to Resolve Lawsuit - The New York Times The basis of the lawsuit were the reports published on Infowars (the website and YouTube) that said the (Chobani) factory in Idaho, which employs refugees, was connected to the 2016 sexual assault of a child and a rise in tuberculosis cases. The reports were promoted on Twitter under the headline “Idaho Yogurt Maker Caught Importing Migrant Rapists” and were spread widely online. The suit was settled and Alex Jones retracted the stories because those "facts" about Chobani and its owner, Hamdi Ulukaya (Wikipedia) that were published by Jones - sexual assault of a child and a rise in tuberculosis cases - were provably false. There were no proven cases regarding sexual assault, or documented rises in tuberculosis cases in Idaho or caused by the yogurt. Such libel impacted Chobani's business and Ulukaya's reputation, so he sued Jones. Evidently the lawsuit was settled before going to trial, because Jones broadcast that “The tweets and video have now been retracted and will not be reposted. On behalf of InfoWars, I regret that we mischaracterized Chobani, its employees and the people of Twin Falls, Idaho, the way we did.” Those false reports were published - on a website, on Youtube and Twitter - and that satisfied the requirements of libel, which is the publication of provably false facts. Libel is a written or published defamatory statement, while slander is defamation that is spoken by the defendant. (Public figures have a higher threshold of proving libel; they must prove actual malice. Ulukaya may or may not be considered a public figure.) For a full outline of defamation, see Defamation, Slander and Libel | Nolo.com Unless Jones has retracted the provably false facts he has (allegedly) published about Sandy Hooks and 9/11, or somehow noted that they were his ideas or theories and not provable facts, or that he was simply retelling the facts he had been given, he could be sued. The lawsuit above cited Jones' previous contentions that the Sept. 11 attacks were orchestrated by the United States government and that the 2012 shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Conn., was a hoax concocted by those hostile to the Second Amendment. so he does have a record of commenting or reporting on those incidents. Jones has also Apologized for Promoting ‘Pizzagate’ Hoax (The New York Times), possibly because he was threatened with a lawsuit. And so he does appear to have a Modus operandi (Wikipedia) for this style of reporting and retracting stories. Jones or anyone else could be sued if they published what he called facts about the Las Vegas victims that were provably false. That would depend on the facts of the case: the victim(s) and the people or news sources that allegedly libeled the victim(s) by publishing the "facts."
In this specific case and location, the precise location of the incident was explicitly made a public space via state law not too long before this actual event. They therefore most certainly have no right to privacy. What is interesting to me though is the other side of this, does someone have the right to record others in public spaces, or is it simply not illegal? For instance if I non-destructively and non-violently "jam" your camera by shooting a low-power IR beam at your lens, have I abridged a legal right of yours? I don't think it would be illegal to do this. I am not even positive its against the 1st Amendment. The 1st Amendment relates only to the dissemination of information, not the collection of it. The Constitution doesn't seem to compel the gov't to make information available, or even to make things/events/spaces observable. The various "sunshine" laws after-all had to be enacted, it wasn't part of an interpretation of the 1st Amendment. To put a finer point on it, is recording events in public spaces legal or merely lawful?
It's impractical to say what the law of Guyana was in 1978, but we can substitute criminal law from 1998 and assume that there would be substantial overlap. Suicide is still a crime, as is murder and while many people committed suicide, many also died at at hands of others. Whether or not Jones committed any murders, he was an access before the fact, and can be treated as a principal (Title 3), and for conspiracy to commit a felony (murder). Under §96, conseling or aiding in suicide is a felony punishable by life imprisonment. The Heaven's Gate suicides took place in California, where suicide is not a crime. However, it is a felony to aid, advise, or encourage another to commit suicide. As a backup, following the model of Michelle Carter's conviction (appeal denied Mass Supreme Court, petition to SCOTUS, cert denied), he might be charged with involuntary manslaughter, although prosecutors would have had to think of that angle (encouraging suicide is not a crime in Massachussetts, thus the need to be creative in prosecution).
There is no law in the US that says you must tell the truth on the internet. Some places where one must tell the truth are: When speaking to police, the FBI, and most government agencies When filing your taxes with the IRS In certain business contracts When testifying before Congress But on the internet, you can claim to be the first man on the moon with impunity. If someone is gullible enough to believe you and send you money, that is their fault and responsibility. As far as eating a Pangolin, why should she "admit" it, when it was documented on Instagram? There is no duty to officially apologize for it. You can try to report her to the US Fish and Wildlife Service, which enforces the Endangered Species Act, but as it occurred outside the USA, they will be powerless. Her claims are dubious, and possibly incorrect. Her treatment of an endangered animal is reprehensible. However, you posted this to a law site, asking about "reporting it" (to some sort of authority), and tagged it "criminal law". Her behavior is troubling, but I don't see anything that is remotely illegal or criminal.
If I understand your question, you're asking the difference between something like this: "You shouldn't do business with Bob; he's a child molester. Raped a whole bunch of kids. Everyone knows about it." and this: "You're thinking of doing business with Bob? Huh. That's your call, of course. I won't say anything against Bob. But Bill is in the same business, and I happen to know that Bill has never molested any kids." or this: "There are three people you could do business with. There's me. I've never molested any kids. There's Bill; he's a little expensive, but he's never molested any kids either. Then there's Bob. I don't have anything to say about Bob." I don't know the answer under German law, but under U.S. law, it's surprisingly complicated, and varies by jurisdiction. Here is a thorough but somewhat dated article on the subject. New York has recently established an explicit test for defamation by implication: To survive a motion to dismiss a claim for defamation by implication where the factual statements at issue are substantially true, the plaintiff must make a rigorous showing that the language of the communication as a whole can be reasonably read both to impart a defamatory inference and to affirmatively suggest that the author intended or endorsed that inference. Stepanov v Dow Jones &amp; Co., 2014 NY Slip Op 03940 (App. Div. May 29, 2014). That opinion also discusses the other approaches used in other U.S. states. Under that standard, it seems clear that my example statements would be defamatory; any juror would immediately understand both the factual implication and that it was 100% intentional. In practical terms, I doubt any court in the United States would not consider them defamatory. In general, defamation is harder to prove in the United States than in other jurisdictions, because of the strong protections afforded to speech under the First Amendment--but I don't know enough about German law to speak to that issue.
Yes, it's actally happened. Several outfits have filed cases by the hundreds, and they were even literally photocopies. And it works rather well, until one victim stands up for what's right - and then the house of cards comes tumbling down. Molski For instance, due to a minor ADA issue (toilet paper roll 2&quot; too low etc.) poor Jarek Molski was injured using the bathroom... in hundreds of restaurants, many on the same day, and hundreds in the same week. On one hand, hundreds of defendants simply paid Molski off, raising about a million dollars. On the other hand, the first defendant to actually fight back was able to uncover the hundreds of other cases, and the obvious fraud. The court swiftly ruled that Jarek Molski is a vexatious litigant and can file no more lawsuits, except by asking permission (presenting the facts to a judge and the judge deciding that there's really a worthy case there). The lawyers which represented Molski are likewise barred from representing anyone in an ADA case. Their law firm, likewise. Righthaven Another group of lawyers set up a law firm specifically to sue the owners of &quot;BBS's&quot; / internet forums / Q&amp;A sites such as StackExchange, whose public users had pasted up copies of newspaper articles into the BBS. They Bought the &quot;right to sue&quot; from copyright owners such as newspapers - Righthaven didn't own the content, just the &quot;hunting license&quot; to go after people who infringed on the content - with the content owners getting a cut of proceeds. They too filed hundreds of &quot;madlib&quot; lawsuits. In fact their lawsuit engine was so automated that they 'accidentally' sued journalists writing about Righthaven - (who quoted material from the entirely public lawsuit papers themselves - complaints are public by definition unless sealed by the courts.) Needless to say, Righthaven had never heard of DMCA Safe Harbor, or hoped the forum owners hadn't. Again it worked: hundreds &quot;paid up&quot;. Molski and Righthaven carefully chose &quot;settlement offer&quot; numbers ($5000-ish) that would be slightly cheaper than raising a legal defense ($6000-10,000). In the USA, each party pays their own legal bills - there's no concept of &quot;loser pays&quot; unless the other party's conduct is outrageous. It's so rare that when I had the pleasure of doing so, the court told us to take the standard garnishment forms, cross out &quot;defendant&quot; and hand-write &quot;plaintiff&quot; :) And again, the first defendant to actually stand up to Righthaven in court, asked the court to knock Righthaven to the moon, which the court gleefully did. RIAA / MPAA BitTorrent is a file-sharing network with no central hub. It breaks files into thousands of &quot;chunks&quot;. Users collect chunks from hundreds of other users until they have the whole thing. Part of the social contract of BitTorrent is that people who download also upload (seed) to share the chunks they have gotten so far. People who refuse to upload are called leeches. RIAA and MPAA are the trade associations of the music and movie industries, respectively. They searched for BitTorrent (pirated, they claim) copies of their members' music and movies. They then &quot;leeched&quot; those copies with modified BitTorrent software that recorded the IP address of the &quot;seeder&quot;. They took the IP address to the owning ISP, and demanded the customer identity. Then they sent out &quot;pay-us-or-else&quot; letters by the tens of thousands, and filed suits by the thousands. The argument was that the seeder had pirated the music, and that the ISP account holder was financially responsible for that activity, neither claim 100% reliable. This campaign has been supported by the courts, because RIAA/MPAA were very careful of their legal footing. But I only mention this because another gang of lawyers was paying attention, and they had their own ideas. Prenda &quot;Law&quot; This gang of lawyers correctly guessed that if users panicked at an RIAA/MPAA demand letter, they'd really panic if the topic was pornography. So they set up a law firm specifically to apply RIAA/MPAA's techniques to porn. (one wonders if they paid RIAA a royalty). But they were much more outrageous and careless. For instance, rather than partner or purchase legitimate porn content, they worked with porn stars like Sunny Leone to create shell companies who, unbelievably made original content specifically as bait to ensnare BitTorrent users. Again, this situation only works until someone stands up for what's right: then it all falls apart. This ended much, much worse than Righthaven or Molski. The civil judges were so offended they referred the matter out for criminal prosecution. The organizers got 19 years in prison between them.
There may be a purpose to have laws which are impossible to follow. (I'm neither a lawyer nor a politician, following points are what I like to call qualified hearsay - they come from qualified people I know personally but were given as a remark or during a chat over a cup of coffee and therefore are not easily substantiable with rigorous sources. You can treat them as a hypothetical ideas for your thought experiments.) Everybody is implicitly guilty Confident citizens and transparent law is the worst enemy of totalitarian regime. You learn to live with ingrained feeling that there surely is something you are guilty of. Merely being addressed by police makes you nervous and malleable; should you stand up against oppression, it is easy for the state apparat to detain or convict you of one or more default offenses. A good example would be the law present in many, if not all, socialist bloc countries saying that knowing of a comrade having commited an offense or merely planing to and not reporting it to authorities is an offense in itself. Whether you did or did not know would be determined by the authorities. Make your laws very strict with a hope thay they will be followed at least to a degree Not laws in themselves, but standards (technical norms) regarding nuclear power stations in the former Soviet Union were strict to the point where they were technically impossible to follow given the state of the art. For example the standards for manufacture of high pressure pipes would state very low level of material impurities that when the actual manufactured material contained twice the level of impurities the pipe will still be very safe to operate. In a centrally planned economy with ever more ambitious production projections and declared zero need for contingency this was one of several ways how to create a bit of a wiggle room. (Source: I once worked for a nuclear power research institute supporting Soviet technology and was told this by an expert on stainless steel.) So there you have a bit of an illustration what may happen if a law is intentionally impossible to follow. Since you labelled your question 'United States', I believe the follow-up question is why would anyone want to propose such a law.
They could be prosecuted in any state where there was evidence that part of the crime was committed. Realistically, either State A or State B could prosecute for conspiracy to murder as an additional charge, because the conspiracy clearly spanned more than one state, even if they can't prove where the crime was committed, although physical evidence (e.g. traces of camp sites, footprints, testimony about landmarks, evidence of poop with human DNA from the victim in it), would usually make it possible to show that some part of the crime was committed in the state. There is probably also a federal crime that could be implicated such as "murder involving flight across a state line" (hypothetical, but I'm sure that there is something similar on the books). I'm not going to address the further hypothetical as it is too bizzare and law is ultimately very context specific. Find a more plausible fact pattern, perhaps with a different crime, and ask a separate question if you want to really address the issue.