A few years ago, I led with this headline: “If NH AG Pushes Civil Rights “Case” Against White Nationalists, He’s Going to Lose.” The case John Formella’s office brought, former governor Sununus’ AG, was a civil rights violation case against a White Supremacy Group. NSC 131 displayed a banner on a bridge over Route 95. Portsmouth was prepared to charge them with trespassing but did not when they removed the sign and left when asked.
Why the Attorney General’s Office got involved remains a mystery. I’ve speculated it was an attempt by Sununu’s administration to create speech intimidation via court precedent by linking speech arbitrarily to a violation of Civil Rights law. This would be the test case. That is what the AG decided. It charged NSC 131 for a victimless crime based on their perception that one or more ought to exist on their say so.
A very common problem with modern law and law enforcement.
The state’s top prosecutor scratched the itch in his pants to prove that 354:B-1 and 354:B-2 required he prosecute.
Free speech is the wind under The ‘Grok’s wings I had a few thoughts.
Does anyone aside from me see the problem with this statute (354-B:1 Civil Rights Enforcement.)? 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.
We were proven right in June of 2023 when a lower court judge threw it out, saying the AG’s application or interpretation of the statute it applied was “unconstitutionally overbroad.”
Yesterday, news broke that AG Formella did not just lose his appeal of that ruling (at the State Supreme Court), he lost hard.
On Friday, the court issued a ruling affirming the lower court’s decision, saying the state’s construction of the Civil Rights Act is “unconstitutional.”
…
The overbreadth of the state’s construction of the Act creates an unacceptable risk of a chill on speech protected by Part I, Article 22 of our State Constitution.”
His office is disappointed but not as disappointed as we are that you wasted some unknown sum of our tax dollars prosecuting something that a part-time blogger understood with more clarity than an office full of lawyers and investigators.
It suggests a dangerous ignorance, indifference to natural rights, or some other agenda.
