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- Hacker News
- It is a little weird that the government is allowed to distribute for sale a poisonous product without warning consumers, but private industry is not.by beej71
- A pretty bad article. In the American system we constantly test the boundaries of legal definition and it makes sense to test whether "how a water system is managed by a town" and "the right to bodily integrity are overlapping or not, and which way the decision falls is not aprioi obvious.
So it's normal for a judge to have decided this way. Doesn't mean "Americans don't like clear water"
The other thing annoying about the article is the racial angle. The author goes out of her way to mention that the affected town is heavily African American. She doesn't mention that the list of officials that are named as the defendants (including the mayor) are also African American. I am not sure either fact is actually significant, but it's annoying to only have half the story mentioned.
by xyzelement - I think there is a difference between a right to safe drinking water and a right to provided water which is safe.
The government cannot have a responsibility to provide every person with water, since some people will choose to live in places which are incompatible with that mandate.
But if the government does provide water, it must be clean.
It’s just the government holding itself to its own standard —— if my bottle of Pepsi turned out to have lead in it, the EPA would go to the ends of the earth to pull every bottle from the shelf until the company fixes it. We should expect nothing less from the water in our pipes.
by iambateman - I'm not sure what a right to water really means.
A lot of rural cities don't even provide water. People have wells and you pay for them yourself.
by randyrand - Could we please not? In the first sentence of the article:
> (…) alleged the city knowingly let residents drink lead-contaminated water.
Knowingly let residents drink unsafe water. Surely you can see an issue there? Can we please make a collected effort to comment beyond the title?
If you don’t know what “a right to safe water” means, then could you please do a web search to try to be minimally informed about the matter before commenting? Took me two seconds to find a UN page.
https://www.unwater.org/water-facts/human-rights-water-and-s...
Again, on the first sentence, in bold:
> Access to water and sanitation are recognized by the United Nations as human rights – fundamental to everyone’s health, dignity and prosperity.
And on the second paragraph:
> Governments must take a human rights-based approach (HRBA) to water and sanitation improvements
There’s your right to water. It means that because it’s something fundamental to human life, nations have an (at a minimum moral, often legal) obligation to provide it or protect access to it to everyone under them that lacks it.
Just for good measure, here’s the Wikipedia page on Human Rights too.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_rights
Again, the first sentence already explains a lot.
by latexr - > I'm not sure what a right to water really means.
Right to safe water. It means that the water in your kitchen faucet is expected/guaranteed to be safe to drink.
It must not have: noxious bacteria causing diarrhea, or liver parasite eggs, or mud, or mercury/heavy metals, or remains of faeces, or fracking methane, or pesticides, or medicines, or obesogens [1].
It must had been professionally filtered and treated to assure that none of those reach your home.
If you pay for water classified as "drinking water", you should not receive grey water, soapy bubbles, oily mud or anything else. This is the standard in all first country nations and I assume that it should be the same in US.
[1] And if in your small town everybody is obese, before to blame everybody for eating too much, or being lazy couch potatos, look for chemicals in the drinking water, leading to a broken satiety system, causing people to eat huge amounts of food. This is why the right to have safe drinking water is so important.
by pvaldes - If the ground water is contaminated with industrial waste ?by bamboozled
- The first paragraph of tfa:
> lawsuit against the city of Jackson, Mississippi, which alleged the city knowingly let residents drink lead-contaminated water.
The "right" here is about other people not contaminating your well for their profit. You don't have that right. They can contaminate your well for their profit and you have to find another source of water at your own cost.
by exe34 - Imagine your well becomes contaminated. That might be natural, or it might be caused by eg fracking. If the latter, do you have any rights and recourse and does it make a difference if the poisoner is state, federal or private?
(I’m curious of my own situation as a European with my own well and also not so far from a well documented case against the government because their airbase fire fighting had contaminated groundwater with PFAS.)
by wood_spirit - I think it's covered under that "right to life" section of the Constitution. Deliberately poisoning people through their water supply seems like a sure-fire way to deny the right to life of your citizens.
- I suppose it means that has to be available to you somehow, the easiest example perhaps being that if you're renting in such a place, the landlord is obligated to ensure access.by OJFord
- The article makes it sound like this was a ruling from one judge. In fact it was a 15 judge panel. The article is talking about the majority ruling, which was joined by 10 judges. The judge they name is the judge the chief judge assigned to write the majority opinion.
The other 5 judges wrote a separate opinion dissenting in part and concurring in part.
The article did do something quite well that way too many articles on court rulings fail to do. That is link to the actual ruling [1].
It is probably best to just read that directly if you want to actually understand what is going on.
[1] https://www.ca5.uscourts.gov/opinions/pub/24/24-60370-CV1.pd...
by tzs - Crazy that the comments are about the title and the how the legal system should work or does not work but no one cares if the water they need to survive is drinkable or not.
I am out of words for this comment section.
by lampe3 - For a long time having non sick and stinky servants was a boon but I suppose that with AI and robots the American elites no longer need the poors?by TitaRusell
- Neckbeards arguing semantics of language, it’s like I never left Reddit.by jkahrs595
- I think this is a ruling that's hard to justify. There are many frameworks under which the judge could have chosen to rule, it could be treated as assault, or some type of aggravated assault/battery, if the lead can be measured in the people who consumed it, it could be treated as fraud, since the water is presumably sold, etc. and reasoning about that it would ordinarily be a punishable tort would make it clear that the government can't impose that sort of thing either, just as it can't send anyone out to punch people.
- The ruling expressly states that they are free to pursue whatever tort claims they want. This ruling is about violations of constitutional rights and standing to sue under 42 U.S. Code § 1983 - Civil action for deprivation of rights.by evancox100
- The argument is the choice of the plaintiff. It’s not the role of the judge to argue the plaintiff’s case and find the most compelling argument.by JackFr
- Misleadingly provocative headline, right? The actual ruling from the article is that the US Constitution does not by itself grant US citizens that right. As the article itself points out, there’s nothing stopping other agreements from granting the right, and indeed several states do so explicitly.by Smaug123
- The US Constitution, by itself, grants US citizens everything as a right, then enumerates the exceptions to those all-encompassing rights carved out as necessary for the operation of a government.
The correct question is: Where does the US Constitution grant governments the power to poison and lie to residents?
This isn’t some pedantry but fundamental American civics. The US Constitution explicitly does not enumerate rights. It’s default-allow, explicit-deny regarding human rights. It’s rather alarming that anyone would think it’s default-deny, explicit-allow. That’s not how the Constitution is written.
by kstrauser - The headline look pretty accurate to me. Under this ruling, being a US citizen does not guarantee you a constitutional right to safe drinking water; that right would depend on state legislation.
I think the bigger deal is that the people of Jackson were lied to and this sets the precedent that there is no recourse. It's not like someone in Flint knowingly drank contaminated water, the city withheld the fact that their water was contaminated with unsafe levels of lead.
by icedrift - On the other hand it means that states can just not do that and leave their citizens without clean drinking water.by IsTom
- > Defendants’ actions allegedly deprived Plaintiffs of clean water and guileless information. These deprivations, while grievous, do not infringe upon any deeply rooted constitutional right.”
Nah, headline is optimistic actually: no right to clean water, to water tests, or to the truth about the tests if they occur. No right to healthcare, schools, or even deliverable mail either. But surely some of these are just the kind of thing you might expect as an absolute minimum everywhere if you have to pay taxes.
by ianjbutler - Ok, so the article buries a lot of the context here. To clarify: plaintiffs can 100% sue the city for this under tort law (I believe the clean water act, but there’s probably other causes of action). This particular case was about suing the city officials in their personal capacity. So making those individuals pay, instead of/in addition to the city. Government officials are generally protected under qualified immunity. One exception to qualified immunity is 42 USC 1983: deprivation of rights under color of law. But that requires them to prove that these officials violated some constitutional right, beyond just some statute.
The victims can sue the city/state. They might already be doing so in parallel. And honestly that’s the only way to be made whole: these city officials don’t have the tens of millions that would be required to compensate victims. This is more about holding government officials individually accountable.
by openasocket - > This is more about holding government officials individually accountable.
The state can also file criminal charges against the officials, although given that the Flint water crisis didn't result in any criminal convictions despite the evidence, I'm not holding my breath. Not to mention that the state could choose _not_ to file charges. In which case, what avenue for justice is left? Financial compensation is only part of it.
by doom2 - This headline is not correct. The ruling was that a constitutional lawsuit was not successful, not that the the US government has carte blanche to poison its citizens drinking water…
So, the correct headline would be “safe drinking water ruled not to be covered by the US constitution”. There are other binding agreements and regulations than the constitution in the US.
by mbeavitt - No, that headline would still be wrong. It makes no sense to make water exempt from other forms of damage caused by treatment or contamination. By the same "logic" you apply here, you could reason that radiation is exempt from the constitution because back in 1796 something they did not specify that down via law. That makes no sense.by shevy-java
- Mother Jones skewing the narrative? Say it ain’t so!by talon8635
- Still not that simple:
> The Jackson plaintiffs alleged that their city government deliberately withheld information about the water’s toxicity, and exacerbated the problem through a series of boil-water notices - a practice that can eliminate some bacterial contamination, but also concentrates lead in water. Engelhardt stated there is no “constitutional right to truthful information from officials during a public health crisis”
The constitutional question (and note that state Constitutions, e.g. Massachusetts, may instead cover it) is just one piece of the mess.
by mdp2021 - Plaintiffs ... seek recognition of two new constitutional rights lacking any foundation in the history and tradition of our Nation—the right to be free from exposure to contaminated water and the right to accurate information from public officials.
This is like filing a bug report that the Linux kernel allowed your Thunderbird to receive SPAM email containing false information. It's just a fundamental misunderstanding of how the US government is designed to work. Closed by Fifth Circuit as WONTFIX, file request for constitutional amendment (RFC) if desired.
by themgt