NH Jury activists gathered this morning outside Cheshire superior court in Keene to perform jury outreach prior to jury selection for the trial of James Cleaveland which begins tomorrow morning (Tuesday 12/15) at 9am.
James is facing two “Class A” misdemeanor charges with a possibility of up to two years in prison for being arrested while recording video of police at the scene of a suicidal man in the summer of 2014. The charges are “disorderly conduct” (the state’s favorite catch-all charge) and “resisting arrest”.
James has already had a bench trial at Keene district court, the video of which can be seen here, and was found guilty. District court judge Edward J Burke sentenced him to 1.5 years in jail, suspended, plus a $625 fine. After sentencing, James opted for his right to a jury trial “de novo”, which means, “from the beginning”. So now, not quite a year later, he is being given that trial.
This morning was jury selection. Nearly all of the jury pool of about 58 people had received the NH Jury trifold last month. (In Cheshire county, petit juries are empaneled for two months.) Usually the jury outreach process involves handing out flyers and opening the door for folks, but in addition today it included activists holding signs featuring phrases like, “2 Years 4 Filming?”, and “Filming the police is not a crime!”
More activists are expected to be on-the-scene tomorrow morning at 8am for further sign-holding, with the trial starting at 9am and expected to last two days. If you can’t make it in person, live tweets will be available here at FreeKeene.com and later the full trial video will be posted.
As the Free State Project closes in on 90% of its goal of 20,000 people pledged to move to New Hampshire and get active to achieve liberty in our lifetime, Shia LaBeouf has some words of inspiration to help give a gentle nudge to those still sitting on the fence:
The Free State Project‘s yearly hotel convention, “NH Liberty Forum” is always a great event that attracts hundreds of attendees, including lots of prospective movers. Regardless of who is speaking, the event is worth attending simply to experience the amazing liberty activist community we have here in New Hampshire. However, having great speakers certainly makes the event more attractive and the FSP is going to have a tough time topping this year’s keynote speaker – Edward Snowden.
Yes, THE Edward Snowden, whose revelations about the NSA and their spy counterpart agencies worldwide like the British GCHQ, rocked the world. Of course, he can’t come in person due to the fact that the scumbag feds will arrest him on sight, so he’ll be appearing via remote video link from Moscow.
The 2016 event is happening in Manchester at the Radisson from Feb 18th through 21st. Tickets were supposed to go up in price yesterday, but they have yet to do so, so if you want to grab the earlybird basic level ticket, they are still just under $100 at NHLibertyForum.com. See you there.
For the second-annual HALLOWKEENE costume dance party, we moved to a new, better venue. The new venue allowed the party to go later than last year, had a super-nice staff, their drink prices were cheaper, and had plenty of power outlets, which made setting up Bill Domenico’s multiple AWESOME lasers possible.
Of course, you never know whether a new party is going to work until it happens, and thankfully, this one worked well – we had approximately 50 people attending at one time! That’s up significantly compared to last year’s approximately 30 attendees.
This year, Renee Kate of Anarchics was the winner of the costume contest as “Corpse Bride”, with Dan Gaudreau’s Ian Freeman costume, and Christopher David’s Satoshi Nakamoto costume as runners-up. Ann Leverette, your Rebel Mistress, MC’d the event, judged the costume contest, and did a great job – even buying drinks for the best dancers in a dance-off!
Big thanks to event organizers Danica, Renee, Johnson, and Derrick J! Please like the HALLOWKEENE facebook page and keep following the Keenevention blog for further news about HALLOWKEENE 2016.
It has been a long road, but thanks to free speech attorney Jon Meyer and judge John C Kissinger of the Cheshire superior court, Keene’s Robin Hooders are again victorious! Nearly two years ago, the same court dismissed the two cases brought against the charitable meter-feeders, alleging we were “threatening, intimidating, and harassing” their parking enforcement officers and demanding a 50ft floating, constitution-free buffer zone to protect them.
The city appealed to the NH supreme court which ultimately upheld the superior court’s dismissal except for one part. They affirmed the lower court’s ruling to dismiss based on free speech grounds, but said the superior court needed to look at the request for the “buffer zone” injunction separately from the allegations of “tortious interference”, “civil conspiracy”, “negligence”, and the demand for financial compensation, all of which the city failed to prove to the court’s satisfaction.
Thankfully, the superior court agreed with attorney Meyer’s arguments and denied the city’s request for any injunction against us whatsoever! This effectively kills their case, unless they decide to continue spending ridiculous amounts of taxpayer money to appeal this latest failure to the NH supreme court.
James Cleaveland, Attorney Jon Meyer, Ian Freeman
The city, which had originally wanted a 50 foot floating buffer zone around each enforcer that would prevent all speech and recording by the Robin Hooders, had whittled that down over the 2.5 years this has been in court to a 5-10ft zone that would only be temporary and only if the parking enforcer requested said distance from the Robin Hooder. Mind you, we generally do not wish to be so close to them – it’s best to fill meters at a greater distance, so as to have enough time to fill the meter and leave the Robin Hood calling card on the windshield, BEFORE the parking enforcer catches up to us and gets ahead. That would mean she could successfully write a ticket if she gets ahead, so having distance is my goal, but the enforcer is constantly trying to close that gap, so sometimes we do get within ten feet. That would mean that such an injunction (besides being unconstitutional) would also prevent us from Robin Hooding, as anytime the enforcer managed to close the gap, we’d be subject to arrest for “contempt of court”.
The Court cannot conceive of any more narrow or alternative relief that would provide any meaningful protection to the PEOs without running afoul of the Respondents’ First Amendment rights…the government interests here are not sufficient to warrant an infringement on the Respondents’ First Amendment rights. Any injunction requiring a buffer zone of any meaningful distance would require a significant change in the method used by the Respondents to disseminate their protected speech.
So, despite the city’s interests in their parking enforcement continuing unabated, their significantly-reduced proposal for injunction is still beyond what is constitutionally permissible, and further, the court could not think of any lesser restrictions that would pass constitutional muster.
Kissinger, in his conclusion, does remind the city that if Robin Hooders’ conduct is rising to the level of violating criminal statutes, that they can bring such charges. Of course, the reason they never have brought criminal harassment or assault charges is because Robin Hooders are peaceful. There is zero evidence of “harassment, threatening, or intimidating” – the claims the city has long libeled us with throughout this lawsuit.
The poor, innocent parking enforcers.
In a classic case of projection, the people in this who are actually harassing, threatening, and intimidating others are the parking enforcers. They harass, threaten, and intimidate the good motorists of Keene six days a week by giving them threatening tickets for just trying to do some business downtown. Those tickets threaten, intimidate, and harass their victims into paying their fines so as to avoid the threat of having their car stolen. Talk about intimidation! This is why Robin Hood of Keene exists – we are here to save people from having to deal with the city’s threats. That’s always been the primary motivation, at least for me. I certainly don’t speak for everyone.
If the parking enforcers don’t like being called out for their threatening, intimidating, and harassing behavior, they should get jobs in the productive economy. Until the city council ends the parking department and turns over the spaces to downtown businesses to decide how to administer, per market forces, Robin Hooding will continue to rescue peaceful motorists from the threats of the city government.
The city has 30 days to appeal this latest failure. Stay tuned here to Free Keene for the latest.
Brooks gets his reporting mostly correct, though I don’t share his view that bitcoin is doing poorly. It’s arguably the strongest currency in the world at over $335 USD per BTC as of this writing, with a myriad of businesses accepting it online and as Brooks notes, a bunch of NH businesses. By no means has it skyrocketed in popularity among average folks, but we’re talking about a major change in money here – there’s a learning curve involved at this point. It’s important to keep things in perspective: Bitcoin was released to the world in 2009. It’s been six years – a drop in the bucket of time. Bitcoin is just getting started.
Bitcoin is also easier to use than ever before. In the beginning, it was only geeks who could access bitcoin. As it spread and investors and more entrepreneurs got involved, easy-to-use wallet software became available. Now, all you need to do to get started with Bitcoin is download a free wallet and drop by the Keene Bitcoin Vending Machine at 661 Marlboro Street in Keene (Route 101), or acquire bitcoin in various other ways. Visit Bitcoin.com to learn more.
