RSS Feed
March 4th, 2012 
FAKE NEWS for the Zionist agenda
In a major victory for Americans who value liberty and the First
Amendment, a Cook County, Illinois judge ruled that the state’s highly
controversial eavesdropping law is unconstitutional. ~ Madison Ruppert
The law made the simple act of recording a police officer without
their consent, even during the course of their public duties, a felony
offense.
Judge Stanley Sacks declared that the eavesdropping law is
unconstitutional on the grounds that it has the potential to criminalize
what would otherwise be “wholly innocent conduct.”
I couldn’t agree more, and it’s great to see that there are, in fact,
some sane individuals working in the American justice system still.
I’ve been incredibly disillusioned by cases like that of Thomas Arthur and the wildly inconsistent prosecution of criminal acts, but this gave me a much-needed boost of hope.
The eavesdropping law, in principle, doesn’t seem like all that bad
of an idea. After all, it is supposedly there to protect peoples’
private conversations from being recorded without their permission.
However, the way in which it was utilized was a different matter entirely.
Using this law to punish people for recording their interactions with
police is patently absurd. The police are public servants carrying out
public duties in public places, all funded by the taxpayer.
As a taxpayer, why shouldn’t you have a right to film your employee
carrying out their public duties in a public area? It simply makes no
sense.
The application of this law to encounters with police is based on the
clearly erroneous idea that police have a reasonable expectation of
privacy while performing said public duties.
If this was a case of an off-duty police officer being recorded in a
private residence or other location in which they obviously had a
reasonable expectation of privacy and were not engaging in public duties
and therefore not being paid by the taxpayer, I would think that the
application is fair.
Of course, that is far from how this law was applied in the case of Christopher Drew.
Drew is an artist who was arrested back in December of 2009 for
selling art without a permit. After it was discovered that he had an
audio recorder in his pocket capturing his conversations with the police
officers, he was charged with a felony violation of Illinois’
eavesdropping law.
While the story at the Chicago Tribune ends there, some additional details can be found via Kevin Gosztola of FireDogLake.
“Drew, who has a history of challenging the city’s restrictions on
the selling of art, was peddling silk-screened patches for $1 in an act
of civil disobedience. A First Amendment lawyer and a team of
photographers filmed his arrest,” Gozstola reports.“A First Amendment lawyer and a team of photographers filmed his
arrest. The police let the filming go, and Drew was arrested. When it
was time for Drew to face his charges, he found out he had been given a
Class 1 felony charge for violating the Illinois Eavesdropping Act and
filming his arrest. This meant he faced a possible sentence of fifteen
years in prison.”
Gozstola reinforces my earlier point in highlighting the fact that
Chicago police have leveraged the eavesdropping law not to protect the
privacy of regular people but instead as a nice way to avoid lawsuits
for the abuses police might carry out while on duty.
Gosztola cites an example from an Occupy Chicago demonstration as
proof of this activity, “In the final days of January, Occupy Chicago
was out protesting in the city when a police officer took a camera from
someone who was live streaming the action and deleted the video. He told
the live streamer, Keilah, that she could have been charged with a
felony.”
In his article he says that while police may continue to try to
arrest demonstrators under the eavesdropping law in order to avoid being
filmed, any charges brought under the law are unlikely to hold up.
This is a huge step forward not only for what is commonly referred to
as “citizen journalism” but also for those brave individuals who are on
the front lines of protests across the country and recording police
misconduct.
Furthermore, it is an even greater blow to the dualistic justice
system which treats everyday Americans completely differently than an on
duty police officer.
This will help keep police in Illinois accountable, especially during
the upcoming protests focusing on the G8 and NATO summits. However,
there have been some disturbingly draconian laws (not to mention the so-called “Trespass Bill”) put in place that might outweigh whatever benefits this latest ruling might have.
That being said, I don’t think that these facts diminish from the
power that this decision could have on the future of the American police state.
Madison Ruppert – March 3, 2012 – posted at IntelHub
Source End the Lie
digg
muti
del.icio.us
google
reddit
facebook
Views: 0
Posted in 
Tags: 
