Whoops!
I just keep dropping this everwhere I go…
2 Likes
It means the state of Oklahoma cannot make a law with the explicit intent to increase the penalty for people damaging bulldozers in response to people wrongfully damaging bulldozers in protest in your area.
I asked what your interpretation of those rights allow you to do. But I can rephrase it. In the circumstances described, what do you believe are the limits of constitutionally protected protest, if any?
“Right of the people peaceably to assemble” includes the word peaceably, which is important. If you are engaging in activities that fall under the traditional definition of a “breach of the peace”, then it is not a “peacable assembly”. A breach of the peace can include criminal trespass or property damage. As I understand it, criminal trespass differs from simple trespass by either the intent to do harm, or trespassing after being warned not to do so,including written warnings, which follows the Oklahoma law about signs and walls.
And I answered you:
That’s the actual, factual answer to the question of what the first amendment allows you to do: nothing at all. It prohibits government from doing things, it doesn’t allow you to do anything. The presumption is that you are already, by right of just being a person, allowed to do whatever you want unless there is a law stating otherwise. Laws don’t allow people to take actions.
There’s a huge body of law we could study about how to apply first amendment rights. But I’m not advocating for some particular interpretation of first amendment rights. I’m pointing out that whether or not a thing is illegal cannot be part of the analysis of whether it is a protected right. In fact, since all the first amendment does is disallow the making of certain laws, I could go further and say that the first amendment doesn’t apply unless the protected thing is illegal. It’s the moment that the government makes or attempts to make a law restricting religion/expression/protest that the first amendment comes up.
I’m not sure what you expect. I can’t list the full range of possible human actions and put each into one box or the other, and I’m not well qualified to do so anyway. But the fact that constitution beats legislation every time isn’t my interpretation, it’s a solid fact. I don’t know what you think I mean by that, but all I mean is exactly what I’m saying. If you think I’m saying that someone can burn your bulldozer, you are wrong. Hell, they probably can’t even stand on the street in front of your property with signs since at some point that would constitute harassment.
If they were prevented from protesting you for owning a bulldozer then that would be because legislation said they couldn’t do that. If they attempted to challenge that legislation on constitutional grounds, the fact that it was illegal wouldn’t be relevant - that fact would be the thing that they were contesting.
3 Likes
I can’t see why any thoughtful member of a democracy isn’t appalled at the very idea of this bill.
- There are already laws against destruction of property. To create a separate law that specifically refers to protest will suppress individuals’ willingness to peaceably protest, regardless of what it says or how it is applied. Fear of police is rising, and I don’t think anyone wants to be bankrupted or imprisoned.
- This is only one of several similar laws being considered in a number of states, so it’s not just an isolated event.
- Even if this law is not such a big deal in itself (a point I disagree with), it represents a further chipping away at our democracy. Not only point 2, but there are plenty of other bits and pieces of our democracy that have already disappeared: voting restrictions, government invasion of privacy, secret travel bans, weaponization of police, etc.
- Let’s not forget that the Boston Tea Party, so loved as a positive point in US history, was an act of destruction of a bunch of crates of tea.
3 Likes
I guess the disconnect here is what constitutes legal protest. I agree that we are not given any rights, but that they are simply enumerated.
And certainly the belief has been expressed here that activities that would ordinarily be illegal become legal once those actions have been declared part of a protest.
I really think it is important to think of this in terms of the whether the activities you are advocating would be acceptable if committed by a group that you oppose. That is why I brought up the subject of abortion protesters. Most of us here support women’s bodily autonomy. I am sure there are exceptions. But the point is that they earnestly believe that their protest is a matter of life and death.
If you can block access to a coal fired power plant, then they can block people’s access to a clinic.
If it is acceptable for you to spray paint slogans on construction equipment, then they should be allowed to paint fetuses or bible verses on the clinic walls.
But we have established that so far, they cannot do these things. Even though they each have received a personal message from God that it is their mission to do so.
I would love to hear a reasoned argument as to why destruction of or tampering with equipment at an LNG terminal, a power plant, or a dam should ever be considered acceptable forms of protest.
Some activities do, that’s the point of the first amendment (or, alternatively, a law becomes void when it is demonstrated that it does restrict freedom of speech). Other activities do not because the first amendment doesn’t apply to them. It doesn’t make murder or arson legal. I could imagine trespassing laws running afoul of the first amendment in some cases, particularly if they were applied government land, or to land where private companies have been given licence to extract natural resources.
Ideally the analysis should be done objectively. The law treats all people equally (in theory) so it can’t matter who is doing it. It can matter what is being done, though, and often people make some pretty specious analogies between different forms of protest. Blocking entrance to a government building is not the same as blocking entrance to an energy plant is not the same as blocking entrance of a medical clinic.
In the first case removal might be in order but presumably people should tread carefully about arrests. In the second I’d say it depends a lot on the specific circumstance and why the protest is happening and whether the building is public or private (though I think the public has a certain interest in power plants even if they are technically run by private entities). In the third case I’d say that one person’s right to protest can’t interfere with another person’s right to medical treatment. That’s not because I favour one policy over the other, it’s because it’s obviously different to obstruct one thing than another and it has different impacts and conflicts (or doesn’t conflict) with other constitutional rights. Like how in my first example, I imagined there was such a thing as a generic government building - really there isn’t. If it’s an office building where corporate types work then I’d have a very different attitude than if it was a courthouse doing small claims - the former is disrupting non-necessary work, the latter interfering with people’s rights.
I can’t imagine they ever would, which is what makes a law against protesting in that way an awful law that targets protest groups in an unacceptable way. Tampering with power plants is almost certainly going to be pretty damn criminal to begin with. Adding on additional penalties because it was part of a protest is a flagrant violation of the first amendment. Their first amendment right is not going to protect them from charges related to dangerous vandalism of public infrastructure, but it should obviously protect them from a law that specifically targets the fact of the protest, and it should definitely protect other members of a group that they claim to be part of from being fined by association.
In the last election in Canada one party suggested they would start a “barbaric cultural practices” tip line to report things like honor killings. If there was an honor killing next door, I’d call the police to report murder, not a special racist tip line to go after people for being Muslim while murdering. When something is already a crime, we don’t need a law against protesting while doing it. Either the first amendment overrides the law against the thing or it doesn’t, but it definitely overrides the extra-punishment-because-it-was-a-protest law, which is what this law appears to be.
I have to agree in principle that the punishment for a crime should not be based on what a person was thinking when they committed the act. But in reality, we accept that hate crimes should be subject to more severe punishment than impersonal assaults.
In this case, it is not unreasonable to say that the purpose may be to differentiate between a person who vandalizes a building under construction by stealing copper wire out of the walls to buy drugs, from someone who is part of a group intent on vandalizing a power substation in a plan to bring down the power grid.
Really, if you read the law carefully, there is nothing in there that would prohibit legal protest. There is no mention of protest at all. Purely trespassing remains a misdemeanor, and even so the law is crafted to ensure that covered forms of trespassing are intentional, with the language about the facility being “completely enclosed” with barriers or signs.
It really comes down to the idea that many here believe that they should be able to shut down pipelines, power stations, and communication networks whenever they feel the political call to do so. Most people believe that activists should absolutely be prevented from doing those things.
Framing the argument as being about crushing political protest is disingenuous. It does make a more appealing argument than if you argued honestly that it restricts your ability to organize attacks on the power grid. Especially a power grid that could possibly disrupted without inconveniencing people in SF or Portland.
Using the art of google-fu, it appears that lawmakers in NY and CA are also calling for better protection of “critical infrastructure”, partly in response to the 2014 San Jose power substation attack.
Ha, right. You SAY you’re not on the side of the “pond- scum” corporate overlords, but when push comes to shove, it becomes clear which side you’re on.
1 Like
Welp, that’s completely wrong headed. For an example, consider 1st degree vs 2nd degree murder vs negligent homicide vs etc. In all cases someone has killed someone else, but the gears engaged within the justice machine are different.
Based - in part - on the defendants state of mind and intentions;
- the charge can vary,
- conviction is based on the evidence, and
- the punishment is explicitly tailored
Agreed, poorly stated on my part.
If the government feels that there is a systemic problem with people attacking infrastructure, then they should take action to address that. As someone who reads a lot of laws there are a few things about this law that put my antennas up:
The “conspiracy” part seems very vague to me. If it were an amendment to existing criminal law regarding conspiracy then we’d have a lot of case law around what a “conspiracy” is. But the phrase “found to be a conspirator” doesn’t really specify what it means or how it will be applied. There’s a big difference between criminal penalties and administrative ones. Notice in the section about individuals it says the fine will be handed out “upon conviction” and that it’s a misdemeanor. No similar language explains under what circumstances organizations will be penalized.
Maybe all of this is assumed because of other parts of Oklahoma law that are already established, I’m much more familiar with Canadian law than American law so I wouldn’t know. But I’m inclined to believe this isn’t the case because I would think the law would reference that in some way (the same way it says, “on conviction” for an individual). So I’m left to read the law as something that allows the government to extract fines from groups that have a criminal as a member, and it sure looks like the point is to “bankrupt groups that organize political protests” exactly as a headline says.
I imagine that’s unconstitutional because organizations have been given first amendment rights by the supreme court, and guilt by association is a first amendment issue. But I also imagine the argument over whether its constitutional is pointless because when the government wields its power to bankrupt you, it shuts down your ability to have your constitutional rights enforced, since constitutional rights are pay-to-play.
Of course all of this circles back to my main point - that constitutional rights are there to override laws, and the illegality of the underlying action has nothing to do with whether it is constitutionally protected.
I think their use of the phrase “found to be a conspirator” relies on the idea that conspiracy is fairly narrowly defined as a legal term. The phrase “has an understanding of the unlawful nature of a plan and knowingly and willfully joins in that plan” from the legal definition of conspiracy would rule out a group with one rogue member who spontaneously commits a criminal act. They also add the term “found to have committed”, which excludes one of the types of prosecutable conspiracy where the criminal plan was not carried out. I guess if any experts on Oklahoma criminal law are out there, they can add a more nuanced analysis than I can.
I still think the law is designed as a deterrent against people and groups that want to damage power plants and dams and such. But if someone really feels that their right to protest includes and requires the behaviors proscribed by this law, they will likely feel that the law is designed to shut down those protests.
I have said that I think the act of “defacing” should stay on the misdemeanor side of the law. I think that would apply to spray painting slogans on walls and such. But knowledge of local laws has always been a reasonable part of preparation for a protest that involves trespassing or damage.
If we were talking about an individual being accused of being in a conspiracy to commit a crime I would agree. Organizations are not capable of that kind of conspiracy.
Anyway, we’ll see. I’d put my $20 down that this law will be used to target a protest group by blaming the organization for the action of one of its members.
I honestly hope that the law will not be used to suppress lawful protest. If it is, then I will absolutely be a vocal opponent of the law.
1 Like
This topic was automatically closed after 5 days. New replies are no longer allowed.
