Last year some racist a**holes, while exercising their first amendment rights, were arrested and charged with violating 354-B:1 New Hampshire’s Civil Rights Act. A judge threw the case out, but the AG says his office will file a motion to reconsider.
Two members of the group, known as NSC-131 or the Nationalist Social Club, had asked the court to dismiss the trespass complaints. The judge agreed Monday, saying prosecutors’ interpretation of the state’s Civil Rights Act was unconstitutionally overbroad.
The New Hampshire attorney general’s office had said the two men were motivated by race and trespassed on public property when they draped the banners off the highway overpass in Portsmouth. …
New Hampshire prosecutors will be filing a motion for reconsideration within the 10-day deadline, said spokesperson Michael Garrity. “The Attorney General feels this is a critical case,” he said by email on Tuesday.
Critical how? Disregarding how offensive we may find white nationalists, neo-nazis, anti-semites, BLM, Antifa, or anyone else willing to use racism, intimidation, or violence to advance an agenda in the absence of incitement (an expression directing immediate acts of violence – a challenging standard to meet), there’s no there there.
You can’t have a civil rights law that infringes on the First Amendment, nor can you pretend it capable of such a thing when the legislature never intended it. What are you after, and why do you think you can get it? I’m opposed to anti-semitism and race-hating white purity movements but not at the expense of free speech.
Is this some veiled effort to get a shadow of a penumbra of a hate-speech ruling squeezed out of 354B:1, and if so, to what end?
354-B:1 Civil Rights Enforcement. –
I. All persons have the right to engage in lawful activities and to exercise and enjoy the rights secured by the United States and New Hampshire Constitutions and the laws of the United States and New Hampshire without being subject to actual or threatened physical force or violence against them or any other person or by actual or threatened damage to or trespass on property when such actual or threatened conduct is motivated by race, color, religion, national origin, ancestry, sexual orientation, sex, gender identity, or disability. “Threatened physical force” and “threatened damage to or trespass on property” is a communication, by physical conduct or by declaration, of an intent to inflict harm on a person or a person’s property by some unlawful act with a purpose to terrorize or coerce.
II. It shall be unlawful for any person to interfere or attempt to interfere with the rights secured by this chapter.354-B:2 Civil Action by Attorney General. –
I. Whenever the attorney general has probable cause to believe that any person has violated any provision of this chapter, the attorney general may bring a civil action for injunctive or other appropriate equitable relief.
Does anyone aside from me see the problem with this statute? It is the major flaw with the entire hate speech and hate crime agenda, and the AG’s critical concern is proof. Motivation based on “race, color, religion, national origin, ancestry, sexual orientation, sex, gender identity, or disability” is irrelevant. This is the justice is blind version:
All persons have the right to engage in lawful activities and to exercise and enjoy the rights secured by the United States and New Hampshire Constitutions and the laws of the United States and New Hampshire without being subject to actual or threatened physical force or violence against them or any other person or by actual or threatened damage to or trespass on property.
The word “persons” defines everyone without regard to any other metric. We all have these rights because the Constitution is blind to every other detail. Anyone who tells you otherwise is injecting demographic division for some political perversion; to create crevices into which government can chip away at fundamental liberties.
If the AG insists on proceeding with this “critical case,” he is violating the statute he claims justifies the prosecution. The assholes with the “Keep New England White” sign … have the right to engage in lawful activities and to exercise and enjoy the rights secured by the United States and New Hampshire Constitutions and the laws of the United States and New Hampshire without being subject to actual or threatened physical force or violence against them,” by the government.
And they know that. Why doesn’t the Granite State’s top cop know that? There’s no law limiting speech based on civility, nor should there be,
Given the inherent vagueness of the concept of “civility,” and the resulting discretion it vests in enforcing authorities, the enforcement will be at best arbitrary and unpredictable, and at worst discriminatory, targeting disfavored speakers or ideas. Consistent with historic patterns, authorities are likely to enforce any such discretionary standard in accordance with their own subjective values, or those of powerful interest groups. …
In today’s context, any civility code would no doubt be enforced against people who are protesting current government policies and actions, ranging from police practices to pandemic measures. Similarly, campus officials would likely enforce such codes against critics of their policies. On all sides of controversial issues, individuals with strong views are unlikely to confine their communications to those that other people, including officials, consider civil – nor should they be required to do so.
They could still be charged with trespass for hanging a sign without a permit, but when asked by the local PD, they willingly removed the offending sign without protest. This is thin gruel and a citation and fine at best. It’s a frikkin parking ticket. Trying to make something more of it reeks of political interference whose only objective can be fishing for a judicial interpretation that might be used to further harass the population at the whim of the AGs office or his boss, Governor Sununu.
Given that the Governor nor his AG can be trusted with that sort of latitude, we hope the court will remind the State again that they have erred in their interpretation and send them on their way.