The imprisonment of Roger Shuler was an event in United States jurisprudence in 2013–2014 which attracted some notice both nationally and internationally for its application of prior restraint and of imprisonment for defamation, both unusual under American law. Shuler was held for five months by the State of Alabama. Background Roger Shuler, an Alabama blogger, started the Legal Schnauzer blog in 2007 to document a property dispute with his neighbor. Shuler later expanded the blog to cover Alabama politics. Shuler, a critic of the Alabama Republican Party and former governor Bob Riley in particular, has made several controversial allegations, such as that federal judge William H. Pryor Jr. had appeared in a pornographic magazine as a youth and that several local deaths reported as suicides were actually political murders, although Shuler's wife has said that any characterization of Shuler as regularly engaging in salacious and defamatory writing about Alabama lawmakers and policymakers is false. Starting in January 2013, Shuler began writing a series of posts which quoted anonymous sources alleging that the son of former governor Bob Riley had impregnated a woman and secretly paid for an abortion. Riley's son and the woman denied the allegation, and the woman has sworn in an affidavit that they had never even been alone in the same room. Injunction and imprisonment In July 2013, Riley's son and the woman sued Shuler for defamation and asked for injunction against the publication of the material. In September 2013 a judge issued an order mandating that the offending material be removed from the website and barring Shuler from publishing any defamatory statement about Riley's son and the woman. Shuler refused to comply with the court orders or acknowledge their legitimacy – he did not appear at a number of hearings, and threw the original papers from his car window (Shuler maintains that the orders were improperly served and thus invalid). Shuler was arrested, charged with contempt of court (and also with resisting arrest; Shuler says he was beaten) and jailed on October 23, 2013. Shuler was convicted on a misdemeanor charge of resisting arrest on January 14, 2014, and given probation on that charge while remaining in jail on the contempt charge. International support The Committee to Protect Journalists included Shuler in its December 2013 list of imprisoned journalists, describing him as "independent blogger specializing in allegations of corruption and scandal in Republican circles in Alabama".