From the Union Leader’s Melanie Plenda:
A woman arrested while topless in downtown Keene last week was arrested again Tuesday, this time clothed, for protesting outside Keene District Court.
Heika Courser, 26, formerly of Richmond and currently listed as residing at 20 Forest St. in Keene, was charged with common law criminal contempt and obstructing government administration.
Courser was one of about 15 people standing on the sidewalk in front of the courthouse about 10:30 a.m. protesting a hearing for fellow Free Keene member Richard Paul.
Police Lt. Darryl Madden said Courser was arrested for “yelling” into a bullhorn, causing ruckus that led Keene District Court Judge Edward Burke to recess court.
Courser and Paul were two of seven people arrested last week in Central Square on charges of drinking in public. Courser was reportedly topless while an artist applied paint to her breasts. Courser was arrested, not for being topless, which is legal in Keene, but on charges of having an open container of alcohol and resisting arrest.
Paul, 41, of Manchester, was also arrested on charges of obstructing government administration and disorderly conduct in blocking a police cruiser from leaving the area.
After Tuesday’s incident, Courser was held overnight in the Cheshire County jail and arraigned at 9 a.m. yesterday, where she accepted a plea agreement. In exchange for pleading guilty to two open-container charges and resisting arrest from last week and the contempt and obstruction charge from Tuesday, she received 180 days of suspended jail time and two years probation.
“I accepted the plea because they would not allow me to communicate with my friends,” she wrote. “(My friends) were about to pay the $500 cash bail, but I had no way of knowing that, and after spending one night in (jail), I was not going back! It’s as bad as they say!”
In another e-mail she also said if she wasn’t free and at work today, she would lose her job.
The judge presiding yesterday was Howard B. Lane and not Burke.
Madden said Courser “can exercise her First Amendment right to free speech until it disrupts the peace of the business going on in the area.”
After Burke recessed court Tuesday, he asked police prosecutor Eliezer Rivera to call police to have the protestors moved.
Protestors at the scene and Courser said she was never asked to stop making noise; she was just arrested as soon as police arrived.
“When I was arrested for protesting outside of the court, the officer simply said I was breaking my bail conditions,” Courser wrote in an e-mail yesterday to the New Hampshire Union Leader.
This was not the only incident involving the Free Keene protestors this week.
On Monday, protesters were ejected from an arraignment hearing for Paul, said Free Keene activist Sam Dodson.
“They wouldn’t stand for the judge when he came in, but they stood up for Rich Paul,” Dodson said. “So they were kicked out of a public hearing.”
That night, Dodson said, the protestors held a candlelight vigil outside Judge Burke’s home. Dodson said it was a peaceful gathering.
Tuesday, the group gathered outside the courthouse.
In a video posted online by the protesters, Keene police, who can barely be heard over a lawn mower, appear to be asking protestors to leave. One officer also attempts to confiscate the bullhorn, which another woman, not Courser, holds.
She refuses to give him the bullhorn until Rivera threatens to charge her with a felony if she doesn’t turn it over. He can be heard telling her it is evidence.
Burke declined comment through a spokesman for New Hampshire Courts, Laura Kiernan, and referred reporters to the Keene Police Department.
John Greabe, a visiting law professor at Franklin Pierce Law School and constitutional law expert, said First Amendment law is a sticky area. In general, government can legally determine the reasonable time, place and manner of speech as long as a reasonable alternative for that speech exists. And police can ask protesters to quiet down if they are being disruptive.
“If she was in fact arrested without being told to stop (being disruptive),” Greabe said, “I’d have to say that’s pretty draconian.”
