Posted on 07/18/2013 7:08:41 PM PDT by Maelstorm
Two cases in Eugene Municipal Court this week revolved around protest, poop and constitutional free speech rights. Judge Karen Stenard heard testimony in a motion-to-dismiss hearing July 15 about two protests in the Wayne Morse Free Speech Plaza that involved the arrests of 21 people in one protest and activist Alley Valkyrie in another. Both were related to the group SLEEPS, which set up tents in the plaza to call attention to the plight of the homeless. The cases were heard on the same day as they subpoenaed the same witnesses.
Attorney Lauren Regan in her motion to dismiss the trespassing charges writes that closing the plaza and forcing the protesters to leave violates the U.S. Constitution’s First Amendment as well as Article I of the Oregon Constitution.
Lane County Administrator Liane Richardson ordered the free speech plaza to be closed and controversially called for “disinfection” of the plaza. At the hearing, Valkyrie says, Richardson testified that she smelled human feces in planter boxes in the plaza within 24 hours of the closure order and had several coversations about it with the sheriff’s sergeant in charge of the clean up. But Valkyrie says the sheriff’s sergeant testified that he didn’t actually find any feces and that he smelled the feces after the barricades went up, which Valkyrie says would be two days later.
Valkyrie, who calls the feces testimony “poop fiction,” says that either way, there were no feces to be smelled. Protesters used nearby city bathrooms and had peacekeepers and a clean-up crew. “This is protocol at every protest,” she says. “You leave the place better than you found it.”
She also says she takes issue with the way that county prosecutor Daniel Barcovic “tried to invoke George Zimmerman” in his questions about if the peacekeepers were trained or carried weapons.
The poop issue is key because a public health hazard could be seen as a reasonable legal basis for closing the plaza. Valkyrie and the SLEEPS protesters maintain that free speech has no curfew. The case resumes July 18 but a ruling is not expected until later.
These people are demented.
Proof that liberals DO talk out of their a$$es.
Alley Valkyrie (why yes, I'm sure that's her real name) must be having a transcendental experience where she's actually part of Tea Party rally. There is NO lefty group that doesn't sh!t all over place and leave it behind for some downtrodden minority to pick up (you know, those same minorities said lefties say they're protesting for).
That book has been around for at least 20 years. Check the copyright.
Smearing poop on a Bible or American flag is free speech to liberals, but hate speech if smeared on a Koran
No, Speech comes out of the other end.
In fact, historical material pertaining to James Madison, Thomas Jefferson, Justice John Marshall and John Bingham, the main author of Section 1 of 14th Amendment, all clearly indicate that the states had decided that general prohibitons of government power in the BoR applied only to the federal government unless expressly applied to the states.
For example, Jefferson had noted the following concerning the 1st and 10th Amendments. The Founding States had made the 10th Amendment to clarify that the states had reserved government power to regulate our basic 1st Amendment protected freedoms uniquely to themselves, regardless that they had made the 1st Amendment to prohibit such powers entirely to Congress.
"3. Resolved that it is true as a general principle and is also expressly declared by one of the amendments to the constitution that ‘the powers not delegated to the US. by the constitution, nor prohibited by it to the states, are reserved to the states respectively or to the people’: and that no power over the freedom of religion, freedom of speech, or freedom of the press being delegated to the US. by the constitution, nor prohibited by it to the states, all lawful powers respecting the same did of right remain, & were reserved, to the states or the people: that thus was manifested their determination to retain to themselves the right of judging how far the licentiousness of speech and of the press may be abridged without lessening their useful freedom, and how far those abuses which cannot be separated from their use should be tolerated rather than the use be destroyed; (emphasis added) …" --Thomas Jefferson, Kentucky Resolutions, 1798.
Although FDR's puppet justices later claimed that the 14th Amendment applied the BoR's limitations and prohibitions of certain government powers to the states, they wrongly ignored that John Bingham, mentioned above, had officially clarified in the congressional record that 14A did not take away state rights.
"The adoption of the proposed amendment will take from the States no rights (emphasis added) that belong to the States." --John Bingham, Appendix to the Congressional Globe. (see bottom half of first column)"No right (emphasis added) reserved by the Constitution to the States should be impaired…" --John Bingham, Appendix to the Congressional Globe. (see top half of first column)
"Do gentlemen say that by so legislating we would strike down the rights of the State? God forbid. I believe our dual system of government essential to our national existance." --John Bingham, Appendix to the Congressional Globe. (see bottom half of third column)
So what institutionally indoctrinated Attorney Lauren Regan evidently doesn't understand about the 1st and 10th Amendments is the following. Based on Jefferson's words about 10A-protected nanny state power to reasonably regulate our 1A-protected rights, and Bingham's clarifications that 14A did not take such powers away, both cities and states can make laws which reasonably protect the public from potentially unsanitary expressions of so-called free speech.
Is that some kind of spider in her hair?
pretty crappy way to protest. But, that may explain the jerks who don’t pick up their dog’s crap; they are protesting ... umm... well, I guess something.
Nowhere on earth has flinging fecal waste at others been considered free speech.
It is a health hazard and I would assume it to be a physical assault on me and my health. if those people have incurable infections of any kind that is potentially a death sentence.
I believe officers are allowed to shoot at people they believe have AIDS or other deadly diseases and are trying to infect others. I know courts give these people long sentences for deliberately doing this to people.
Yep...even in our dog-friendly apartment complex, with baggie stations every hundred yards and plenty of disposal facilities, there are some clowns who do not pick up their pup’s poop.
And possibly fermented.
Free speech means they can speak but we don’t have to listen.
Their rights end where they infringe on my rights.
Flinging words, I can get away from. Crap flung at me that hits me, infringes my rights to live peaceably without being accosted and assaulted by others.
It’s a health hazard.
People can get sick.
I hope they win this argument.
Because if they do, i’m going to exercise my free speech rights on the graves of people like Teddy Kennedy.
There is another called “The gas we pass”
Yup
You’re kidding!
Leftists have no problem living in 3rd World squalor. Look to Detriot and those hoarding shows. Almost every single one of them comes across as some liberal environmentalist wacko.
The means of production are in the hands of the lumpenproletariat and the ruling classes (i.e., OWS).
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