Why banned from asking in law?

Question

I have been posting questions in law that generally are well structured and address a relevant political issue. But some get voted down because they are “politically charged”.

My last question was on the Cannon Hinnant case. Granted, I did structure it from the defendant’s position, when a rational third party would not consider any excuse for the murder legitimate. But is that enough for a ban (of unknown length) on asking questions?

Is there a requirement that questions not be controversial or that they not propose defenses that most consider unlikely to succeed either in court or in the court of public opinion?

Answer 1

The moderators will have to answer technical questions about your case, but this is basically a consequence of the SE model. You are supposed to ask good questions and give good answers, and the standard of judgment is the up-arrow / down-arrow at the hands of the community. Given that, the applicable question is, how to more up-arrow actions in this particular social media context. The question, as you posed it, depends on irrelevant political rhetoric that obscures the question. The unsupported presupposition that the victim had "white privilege" is needlessly inflammatory, and requires that a proper answer do the impossible, namely refute an arbitrary assertion. The general assumption here is that questioners have an honest interest in rationally understanding a legal issue, an assumption which is contradicted by such behavior. The shirt question was pointlessly obscured by your exemplars. A good question has generality, a bad question addresses a situation that never comes up in a million years. A terrible question additionally has a political agenda.

There are two plausible interpretations of the nature of those questions. One is deliberate trolling, the other is being acutely unaware of the nature of the problem in these questions. If the former is the case then you should be perma-banned. I assume the latter, for time being. This question does call my judgment into question, but a bit more analysis could clarify the problem. First, questions about "crimes against humanity" are really poor fodder for LSE, because they are at the political periphery of law. A bill was introduced a decade ago which would have added "Crimes against humanity" to the US Code. What bill did was group a bunch of existing crimes together (e.g. slavery, sex trafficking, taking hostages...) and impose a penalty. The Wikipedia characterization of "crimes against humanity" is simply wrong or hopelessly vague. In other words, there is no reasonable way to relate the question to actual law. There is not, and could not be (given the First Amendment) any law restricting speech that you find uncomfortable, just as the government cannot criminalize any speech that you make which makes others uncomfortable. There simply is no legal issue whatsoever, and no reasonable basis for thinking that the law could have anything to say about this, other than saying "read the First Amendment".

Answer 2

You triggered an automatic block

See What can I do when getting "We are no longer accepting questions/answers from this account"?

Relevantly:

An automatic filter is in place to ban questions or answers from IP addresses or accounts with a history of extremely poor posts.

To avoid bypassing the filter, its internal rules are a secret, but it is partly based on downvotes cast by other members of the communities. If other members of the site consistently give your posts a low ranking, you should try to identify the reason(s) for this.

To help prevent you from encountering a ban, the system will give you a warning if you are on the road to a ban, and may temporarily prevent you from posting questions or answers for a few days. If, despite these warnings and rate limits, you continue to post too many poorly-received questions or answers, you will be altogether banned from posting more, and you will see the error message.

For whatever arcane reasons of its own the SE system has triggered an automatic question block for 3 days. While we don't know the details, this is almost certainly related to your more recent posts (both questions and answers) attracting a lot of downvotes and flags.

Is there a requirement that questions not be controversial or that they not propose defenses that most consider unlikely to succeed either in court or in the court of public opinion?

Of itself - no. However, such posts are likely to attract downvotes and flags and trigger the machines.