Letters to the Editor
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When is the last time an American citizens was prosecuted for a political opinion they've expressed?
The answer depends on whether or not you include cases where the prosecutors may be prosecuting the expression of a political opinion, but pretending otherwise.
http://progressive.org/mag_mc120607
Anti-Bush Protesters Prosecuted for “Unauthorized Display of Sign”
December 6, 2007
Jeff Zurawski and Sarah Hartfield [...] went out onto the bridge over the North-South Highway and held a banner that said, “IMPEACH Bush and Cheney—LIARS.” They also displayed a flag upside down.
[...] They were there for about an hour and a half when a state trooper pulled up.
“He said he understood our message, but he was concerned about traffic safety and asked us to take the sign and flag down,” says Hartfield, a medical assistant. “We respectfully did so.”
They started to leave when three deputy sheriffs showed up.
One was irate, they said.
“He was clenching his teeth, and his veins were bulging out, and he was red-faced,” recalls Zurawski. The deputy accused them of throwing things off the bridge.
“Almost simultaneously, Sarah and I said we didn’t throw anything,” Zurawski says. “Then he asked us what our sign said, and demanded to see it. And he was shaking his head back and forth.”
He also told them the upside down flag was “disrespectful to the troops,” adding: “I’m a vet, and I’ve got a kid fighting in Afghanistan,” he said, according to Zurawski and Hartfield, who tried to explain to him that they weren’t being disrespectful to the troops but that they were distressed that Bush was exploiting the troops.
“The cop didn’t hear us,” says Zurawski. “He said, ‘We can’t have this here. This is mayhem.’ ”
The other two deputies took down their personal information and checked it on the computers in their squad cars, but found nothing on them.
So the irate officer told them they could go but warned them that he would put a call into the state’s attorney, and he hoped to see us soon, says Zurawski.
Soon came in three weeks, when another DuPage County deputy walked up to Zurawski’s home with a warrant for his arrest.
“I’m just here doing my job,” he said, according to Zurawski. “A judge signed this warrant. You need to come with me. We can do this one or two ways: You can be a gentleman and come with me peacefully, or I’ll call for backup and we’ll take you in. So why don’t you come with me, Jeff?”
Zurawski spent several hours in jail before being released on $100 bail.
When he got out, he called Hartfield and warned her there might be a warrant out for her arrest, too.
“I waited after Memorial Day weekend to turn myself in,” she says. “I went and borrowed the money and drove to the Naperville police station. I told them I wanted to know what was wrong and why there was a warrant for my arrest. They were kind of evasive at the desk. They called in an officer. He handcuffed me and walked me out of the building and put me in a cruiser and drove me around to the back of the building and booked me. I asked, ‘For what?’ And he said, ‘It shows something about a May 6th war protest.’ ”
Hartfield says she was upset.
“I felt like a dog,” she says. “I was told to sit there on the bridge, and we did, and then just for the hell of it, they smacked us on the nose.”
At first, they were charged with “disorderly conduct.” Then the prosecutors added two others: “reckless conduct” and “unauthorized display of sign.” The latter two were each punishable by up to a year in jail and $2,500 in fines.
The prosecutors then offered them a plea bargain, dropping the two extra charges if they’d plead guilty to the first.
Zurawski and Hartfield declined.
“We had an opportunity to get out of it with a gentle wrist slap, with just 90 days court supervision, but it meant admitting to something that we didn’t do,” says Zurawski. ”And Sarah and I refused because of that.”
The prosecutors dropped the extra charges anyway, but then tacked on an additional disorderly conduct charge, alleging that Zurawski and Hartfield had made a throwing motion toward the vehicles.
“The content of the sign has no bearing whatsoever on the charges,” says Paul Darrah, spokesman for the State’s Attorney’s office. “It’s more of a public safety issue. We think people driving 55 mph should keep their eyes on the road, not above them. This is all we can say at this point. We stand behind the allegations and will let the court decide guilt or innocence.”
Zurawski, by the way, doesn’t buy the argument about the sign distracting motorists.
“If what we did is illegal, then all the signs on bridges or billboards anywhere along the highway are equally distracting and equally against the law,” he says. [...]
- - "The Progessive"
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Glenn Greenwald
Glenn, isn't it telling that so many Canadians have written that they have no concerns about their government doing anything really bad to them? I know that American cannot claim to have as high a percentage of trust in their government as Canadians do. It's because our government, imperfect as it may be, is still a government of the people and has not been taken over by fear or special interest groups. We have, by our standards, a right wing government and we have had, by American standards, far left governments and neither of them has seen fit to create anything as noxious as the Patriot Act.
And as far as expressing the views targeted under the anti-hate laws, you implied in your article that someone could be prosecuted for stating simply that Americans are "bloodthirsty, vengeful and calling for blood." You know as well as I do that I can say that, and much worse, all I want, about any group and its just opinion that would probably not even get a rise out of the most sensitive listener. Or maybe you don’t know that, which brings me to the first point of my original letter.
“I don't think that Glenn Greenwald or most Americans understand how Canada works.”
Americans do not know how our country works or our attitudes, and how could you? While Canadians are inundated with news and culture from the US, Americans would have to work hard to seek out any information about Canada. And why would you? As redsnapper pointed out, we are boring. Wonderfully, blissfully, (mostly) unhatefully boring.
Maybe the difference between Canadian and American views on our anti-hate laws lies not as much in our concern for personal liberty and more in the level of trust in our respective governments. We assume and expect that our laws are designed to protect the weak and not to limit discourse. And as in any nation we get the government we expect.
If you spent a few (boring) years in Canada you might understand that while hate speech could be punished, political speech is not.