You have the right to free
Speech as long as you’re not
Dumb enough to actually try it.
This ( Jailed for Protesting Gitmo: 34 Convicted for Demonstrations Outside Supreme Court) was passed on to me by a friend this morning. According to the article the 34 were convicted of “unlawful free speech”. I was unable to independently verify that there is a crime in the DC or Federal code called “unlawful free speech”. I still find it hard to believe, if only because you would think any legislator or prosecutor would steer away from such an Orwellian statute name. Whatever the charge, this is yet another example of the not so slow erosion of our basic rights in this country. It has a local angle since at least one of the protestors is from New London, and another, Arthur Laffin, has a history of civil disobedience in this area. I don’t know if he still lives around here. Here’s the gist:
Thirty-four Americans arrested at the Supreme Court on January 11, 2008 were found guilty after a three-day trial which began on Tuesday, May 27th in D.C. Superior Court. The defendants represented themselves, mounting a spirited defense of their First Amendment rights to protest the gross injustice of abuse and indefinite detention of men at the U.S. Naval Base at Guantanamo Bay.
Charged with “unlawful free speech,” the defendants were part of a larger group that appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court on January 11—the day marking six years of indefinite detention and torture at Guantanamo. “I knelt and prayed on the steps of the Supreme Court wearing an orange jumpsuit and black hood to be present for Fnu Fazaldad,” said Tim Nolan, a nurse practitioner from Asheville, NC who provides health care for people with HIV.
Defendants and witnesses argued that they did not expect to be arrested at the Supreme Court, “an internationally known temple to free speech.” Ashley Casale, a student at Wellesley College in Massachusetts, told the court, “I am 19– the youngest person in this courtroom—and I come on behalf of all the prisoners at Guantanamo who were younger than I am now when they were detained. According to the U.S. Constitution we have a right to petition the government for a redress of grievances and Guantanamo Bay prison is beyond grievous.”
Historian Michael S. Foley, a professor at the City University of New York, teaches the U.S. Constitution to undergraduates. He testified that if “you told me that the defendants would be arrested for ‘unlawful free speech’ just twenty feet from where the Justices decide First Amendment cases, I’d say you were ‘crazy.’”
…
In the defendants’ first closing statement, Father Emmett Jarrett, an Episcopalian priest from New London, CT, told Judge Wendell Gardner, “we came to the Supreme Court on January 11th with one intention– to put dramatically before the court—both the Supreme Court and the higher court of public opinion and conscience—the plight of the men and boys detained at Guantanamo. We came to the Supreme Court on January 11th not to protest but to present a letter to the justices, asking them to act on behalf of detainees imprisoned at Guantanamo, to restore their human and legal rights—to give a voice to the voiceless.”
Arthur Laffin followed with a closing statement that touched on both legal and moral arguments for the defendants’ innocence, and pleaded with the court and the prosecution to join the defendants in “ending the horrors.” “The Nuremberg Accords,” he asserted, “state that individuals have a duty to prevent crimes against humanity and that if people don’t act to prevent such crimes, they are actually complicit in them.” He then concluded, “We, who are on trial today, along with many friends, refuse to be complicit in these crimes.”
Even 10 years ago my money would have been on this verdict being overturned some day, but I don’t see it happening now. Perhaps the protestors should have tried an equal protection claim, since anti-abortion protestors routinely demonstrate at the Supreme Court. Sorry, I forgot, nowadays the Equal Protection Clause only protects people whose last name is Bush. The future of the Bill of Rights (other than the 2nd Amendment, which will now be distorted to make us all unsafe) is one of those important issues that will be decided by the next election, about which we will hear almost nothing.
