A federal appeals court ruled Wednesday to overturn the 2023 conviction of Douglass Mackey, known online as Ricky Vaughn, for social media posts made during the 2016 election regarding then-candidate Hillary Clinton.
Following a one-week trial in a Brooklyn federal court, Mackey was convicted of conspiracy for posting what have been characterized as memes suggesting that citizens could vote for Clinton by text message.
Mackey, now age 36, was sentenced to serve seven months in federal prison as a result of his conviction.
The 2nd Circuit Court of Appeals acquitted Mackey on the grounds that the evidence presented failed to prove the government’s claim that he conspired with others to influence the 2016 election.
“HALLELUJAH!” Mackey wrote on X Wednesday morning after the 2nd Circuit’s ruling was released, announcing that the lower court’s decision had been reversed.
Source: 2nd Circuit Ruling
Although Mackey did not dispute having posted the memes in question, the government agreed that doing so independently would not be a crime under the statute used to charge him.
“As a result, 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 [this law],” Wednesday’s ruling said.
Source: 2nd Circuit Ruling
Despite having made the posts in 2016, the government did not pursue charges against Mackey until January 21, 2021, the day after former President Joe Biden (D) was inaugurated.
In bringing their case against Mackey, the government argued that his membership in several private direct messaging groups on Twitter where plans were made to “make [the posts] more believable” for Clinton supporters.
At the time these plans were discussed, Mackey was only a member of one of the three relevant groups. Referred to as the War Room, the one group to which Mackey remained a member at the time the plans were being discussed saw hundreds of messages sent back and forth between members every day.
According to Wednesday’s ruling, only a dozen of these messages pertained to the text-to-vote scheme, a fact that the circuit court argued makes it impossible to reasonably prove whether or not Mackey actually saw the plans before sharing the memes in question.
Source: 2nd Circuit Ruling
Mackey also did not send any messages himself in the War Room chat during this time.
The circuit court’s ruling goes on to point out that Mackey’s posts did not actually contain key elements that had been recommended by other War Room members to make the posts “believable,” including the suggestion that the text-to-vote option was only available for those interested in voting for Clinton.
Mackey testified in his own defense during his 2023 trial, explaining that he felt the memes were “sort of a s**t post.” He had thought that “anyone who saw this would know that you can’t vote from home.”
He went on to say that he had hoped the posts would go viral, “get under their skin” of the Clinton campaign, and “get them off the message that they wanted to push.”
Although some may have found the content Mackey posted on his page to be offensive — as it was described in the circuit court’s opinion as “false or misleading, or derogatory toward women, racial minorities, or immigrants” — it was protected by his First Amendment rights.
Even the government acknowledged at trial that while his posts may have been “outrageous, silly, [or] somewhere in between…almost all of it was not illegal.”
The circuit court explained in their ruling that despite around 5,000 people following the instructions in the text-to-vote memes, about 98 percent of them received a warning that the text code was not associated with the Clinton campaign. The government did not provide any evidence at trial indicating that “Mackey’s tweets tricked anyone into failing to properly vote.”
It is noted in the circuit court’s opinion that as a defendant challenging the sufficiency of evidence, Mackey “shoulder[ed] a heavy burden,” since the evidence must be viewed “in a light that is most favorable to the government.”
Under this type of review, an individual’s conviction must be upheld if “any rational trier of fact could have found the essential elements of the crime beyond a reasonable doubt.”
“A conviction cannot stand where the ‘evidence is nonexistent or so meager as to preclude the inferences necessary to a finding favorable to the government,'” the circuit court explained.
After reviewing the evidence presented in the case, the circuit court reversed Mackey’s conviction and remanded the case to the district court that originally heard it with instruction to enter a judgement of acquittal.
As a result of this, Mackey will be cleared of all charges, effectively turning back the clock so that it will be as though he was found not guilty when the case first went to trial.
