03/26/15 – Will Grigg – The Scott Horton Show

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All right, you guys, welcome back.
I'm Scott Horton.
It's my show, The Scott Horton Show.
On the line, I've got the heroic Will Grigg from Pro Libertate.
That's freedom in our time dot blogspot dot com.
Freedom in our time dot blogspot dot com.
What in the world?
A felon for a Facebook post.
What is this?
Welcome back to the show, Will.
How are you?
Scott, I'm doing well.
And I want to point out that we're dealing in this story with somebody.
I would consider an authentic hero, which is a designation I think is appropriate to Matthew Townsend.
He's a cop blocker, peace activist, Ron Paul partisan, something of a gadfly at large.
And he's made himself a perfectly commendable nuisance to the powers that be in Meridian, Idaho.
And this is a story that I think demonstrates the principle I've called scalable totalitarianism.
It's the sort of a story that confirms our intuitive understanding of the depths of viciousness that are routinely limbed by the police state, even in a town as unexceptional as Meridian, Idaho.
He was on a street corner on a sidewalk at an intersection on the 2nd of February in Meridian, dressed as the Grim Reaper, which is one of the costumes he affects from time to time when he's conducting street protests.
He was holding a sign, a protest sign in front of what I refer to as the oxymoronically named Liberty Tax Service.
And Liberty Tax Service, as you've probably seen, often employs people to stand in front of their buildings wearing a costume of the Statue of Liberty, and Matthew apparently decided to wear something that was more suitable and more honest.
He believes the principle of truth in advertising.
So the sign on one side said that liberty, or forgive me, taxation does not equal liberty.
And on the other side, it said taxes fund terrorism, both of which of course are incontestably true.
A police officer, and I want his name to be circulated far and wide, I want it to become the worst kind of famous, Officer Richard Brockbank of the Meridian Police Department pulled up to Matthew Townsend when he was on the sidewalk and accused him of blocking the intersection, which of course he hadn't been doing.
And in the course of a conversation that lasted a couple of minutes, Officer Brockbank tried to get Matthew to admit to doing this.
And Matthew of course refused to, first of all because he hadn't, second of all because he knows that the standard investigating protocol for the Meridian Police Department is for the police to bully and browbeat, and occasionally physically to beat people into confessing crimes that they may or may not have committed.
That's the only way that they can go about solving crimes in the city of Meridian apparently, including crimes of their own manufacture.
And at various points during this encounter, Officer Brockbank asked Matthew Townsend for his ID.
He didn't have it with him.
But Matthew supplied him with his name and his address, and these of course were well known to the Meridian Police Department because of Matthew's activities as a cop blocker.
And he conducted various field sobriety exercises and so forth.
He's trying to build a stop, trying to find an excuse to arrest Matthew.
At one point, Matthew became surfeited with this officious and bullying behavior and said, listen, charge me with a crime or let me go.
At that point, the officer fell silent, and so Matthew shrugged his shoulders and hit the button on the crosswalk and started across the street, legally using the crosswalk for its intended purpose.
At that point, Brockbank screamed out, I'm not done with you, and then he called for backup and on the other side of the street, he arrested Matthew Townsend for resisting and obstructing, which is to say, for exercising his legally protected right to cut off a contact with a police officer who has not charged him with an offense.
So he was scheduled for a pre-trial hearing a week ago today, Thursday, the 19th of March, and the eve of this hearing- Wait, wait, stop for just one sec.
When he got across the street and the cop said, hey, hold it right there, whatever, did he then fight the cop or he put his hands out, go ahead and cuff me, or what happened there?
He submitted to the arrest, which is something that he is required by what the state calls the law to do, but which is not required as we've pointed out on a couple of occasions by common law.
If you're being subjected to an unlawful arrest, according to Black Bad Elk vs.
U.S., you actually have the right to resist up to and including the use of lethal force if your life is being threatened, but acting as a peace advocate and as a believer in non-confrontation where possible, Matthew submitted to this patently unlawful arrest.
He didn't resist in any way, he did not fight, he did not flee, he did not object.
He simply shut his mouth and submitted to this act of criminal violence by Officer Richard Brockbank and two officers who have yet to be identified.
There's no predicate for the arrest, there was no resisting or obstructing involved in the actual execution of the arrest.
He was booked, he was given $300 bond, which he paid, and he was released on his own recognizance.
He had a pretrial hearing a week ago in Meridian, actually at the Ada County Courthouse in Boise.
The Meridian City Attorney's Office contracts all of its prosecution to the Boise City Attorney's Office and so they have a very young law school graduate working as an assistant city prosecutor by the name of Abby Jermaine, who represented the city of Meridian in this proceeding.
The night before the pretrial hearing, Mr. Townsend posted a notice on his Facebook page that if the case were not dismissed, which of course it needs to be, and if the charges were not dropped, as they should be, that he would conduct what he called a shame campaign, which would target Officer Brockbank and those in his professional circle who are responsible for doing what they did to him.
So when he shows up for the pretrial hearing last week, his court-appointed public defender says that he just that day, just within the last few minutes of this encounter, had received notice that they intended to arrest him at the courthouse on a complaint that he had been engaged in serious intimidation of a state's witness.
And so there was a pretrial hearing on the resist and obstruct charge, and after that business was concluded, Jermaine announced to the judge, Judge James Cawthorn, that the state intended to move to revoke Matthew's bond and to file a new charge, a felony charge, through the Ada County Prosecutor's Office for the crime of felonious intimidation of a state's witness, specifically the heroic, intrepid, valiant, badass Richard Brockbank, who despite the fact that he goes to work a cooter in every variety of implement of lethal violence and the pain infliction, and he wears body armor, and he's clothed in this impregnable shield called qualified immunity, notwithstanding all of this, and the fact that Meridian, of course, is part of the same pool that gives us the Ada County Metro SWAT team, and they can call on these people for assistance when he finds himself imperiled, notwithstanding all of this, he's such a timid, paling creature that a Facebook post promising to shame him supposedly would intimidate him from acting as a witness in the resist and obstruct trial, if indeed this goes to jury trial, as it probably will, of Matthew Townsend.
Now what happened in that hearing is quite interesting.
Judge Cawthorn, and I've actually spent most of the morning doing a partial transcript of the audio recording of that hearing from last week, is Judge Cawthorn, I'm mispronouncing his name, forgive me, he refused to allow the state at that point to file charges.
He set the matter for a hearing on March the 30th, and he required that the city of Meridian provide a motion to the defense attorney outlining its theory of the case and its evidence and such like, that was supposed to be presented on Monday of this week, and so he said we're going to hear this on the 30th at 1030, and then he gaveled the matter shut.
Now that should have resolved the issue in terms of this spurious charge of felonious intimidation of a witness, however, the city of Meridian, or the Ada County Prosecutor's Office, I've not been able to nail this down, they conducted an ex parte hearing, that is to say only a one-sided hearing with a different judge, they went judge shopping, they found a compliance judge, they filed a criminal complaint and an affidavit with that judge on that Thursday, and then they immediately put it under seal so we couldn't find out the details of it, and then the following night, after darkness had descended, while Matthew was getting to sleep because he had to get up very early in the morning on Saturday to go to his job in the productive sector, he gets a knock on the door, and Ada County Sheriff Deputies, three of them, show up and arrest him and drag him off to jail, and he's hit with a $25,000 bond on this perfectly spurious, felonious charge of intimidation of a witness.
That was, as far as I can tell, I just barely got off the phone before talking to you, Scott, with the former Assistant Attorney General of the state of Oregon, and she conferred to me that arrest was illegal because it violated an existing court order.
So this is, I think, a really good example of Soviet-style criminal misconduct by police state operatives against a political dissident in the state of Idaho.
Yeah, boy, sure sounds like it so far, but boy, we got some follow-up questions on the other side of this.
Brig, just you wait.
It's the heroic Will Grigg from freedominourtime.blogspot.com.
We'll be right back.
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All right, you guys, welcome back to the show.
I'm Scott Horton.
I'm talking with the great Will Grigg from freedominourtime.blogspot.com, the blog Pro Libertate.
We're talking about this case of Matthew Townsend being persecuted by the police in Meridian, Idaho.
And well, to sum up here, he was protesting on the side of the road, was arrested for no good reason, other than the cop didn't like him, I guess.
And then he posted, and here's the quote, reading from Will's post here at freedominourtime.blogspot.com.
He says, I will begin, quote, I will begin a non-violent and legal shame campaign that will be remembered.
Homeowners Association upsets protests in the aggressor's neighborhoods.
Mailers, door hangers, online ads, local and hopefully national media.
I've done it before and I can do it again, as well as other peaceful but annoying avenues will commence.
Ooh, the terroristic threat implied in there, can you believe?
And so now he's being charged with a felony of attempting to intimidate a state's witness, the coward cop who arrested him in the first place.
And now let me make sure I understand you right, the way you tell this story here, Will.
Is it correct that the first judge said, oh, that's a bunch of crap and wouldn't go along with it and I guess either dismiss those charges or refuse to allow them to be completely filed or however that works?
And then so they just went and found another judge, not of a superior level in the court system, but just another judge who said, yeah, no, this is fine.
Go ahead and arrest him on this felony count of attempting to intimidate a state's witness with a declared intent to embark upon a very legal and peaceful shame campaign.
Is that really right?
That's essentially what happened.
I don't know who the second judge was.
It would have had to have been a second judge because Judge Coffin had actually set the matter for a hearing on March 30th and he had issued an order to that effect.
So there's an existing court order here that restrains what can be done here.
He actually had Matthew Townsend under his supervision on his own recognizance.
So the judge hadn't dismissed the charge, but he had just said, you know, come back to me on this and that date and then we'll work on this.
And that wasn't good enough for them.
They went and found a judge who would allow them to go ahead and arrest him on this charge.
Now, let me read specifically what the judge said.
I just just transcribed it this morning.
I'm concerned in as much as the allegation seems to be that Mr. Townsend has committed a new offense from the state's perspective.
It's awfully difficult for Mr. Austin, that's the court appointed defense attorney, to respond to that without knowing specifically what it is Mr. Townsend is accused of doing.
In addition, Mr. Townsend would have certain constitutional rights in regards to any allegations of the commission of a new crime and to place him in the position today of responding to those would be very problematic from a due process point of view.
While it is concerning what the state is alleging, what I don't hear is any threats related to any type of physical harm, violence, things of that nature to the officer involved in this case or his family.
Certainly I understand the concerns that the family members may have in this situation.
Not so much dealing with what you intend to do, Mr. Townsend, or what you meant to communicate.
Until that hearing, what the court is going to do is I'm imposing a pretrial release order in your case, unsupervised conditions of the court.
I'm not making you subject to the sheriff's office or anything like that, but what I am ordering pursuant to your attorney's reference today is I'm ordering you to untag the family members of the officer involved in the case.
And then we'll come back on the 30th and have this hearing related to the state's request at that time.
That was how the hearing ended a week ago in the Ada County Courthouse in Boise.
And you're saying that under the law, that's the end of that.
That's the end of that.
And you talked with this legal expert who said that they just have no authority whatsoever to go and find another judge to contradict that.
She expressed herself in a somewhat more pungent fashion than that, but that's the substance of what she said.
And we're talking about somebody who's a former deputy attorney general of the state of Oregon.
And so you're dealing here with a patently illegal arrest that was conducted under the cover of darkness for the intention of punishing and intimidating a conspicuous political dissident in Meridian, Idaho.
And doubly illegal because, as you write here, because they did it at night when they're forbidden from doing so under Idaho state law.
Yeah.
After 10 o'clock, it's after after 10 o'clock, it's 10 o'clock.
It's considered inappropriate, barring exigent circumstances here.
Now, if they want to concede that the mere prospect of being shamed is something that occasion such terror on the part of Officer Richard Brockbank, that's useful.
It's useful, I suppose, to get some measure of the cowardice that we're dealing with here.
This man has publicly admitted to being a coward.
His officials or his superiors in the Meridian Police Department, who apparently are the instigators of the criminal complaint and the warrant that was used to arrest Matthew Townsend, they're admitting that this officer is a coward, that he cannot withstand so much as public scrutiny of his actions, that he's somebody who will wither like tissue paper before a match in the face of public criticism of his actions.
That's all useful, of course.
But the means they use to make this disclosure, which I appreciate, were patently illegal because they violated the existing corridor by the trial judge.
And now.
So what about the fact that the way I read this, it sounds like he accidentally tagged some family members of this cop in his Facebook post and it kind of freaked out that this is actually something that was addressed by his defense attorney in that hearing as well.
But he sent this out as widely as possible in an effort to make the message known to the public.
What he said, and I'm quoting now, is that he does not know the officer's family.
He does not know where they live.
He does not know if all the people he tagged were family members or not.
They could be cousins.
They could be kids.
They could be his wife.
They could be anybody with the same last name.
And he tagged other people who weren't even involved with the family.
He wanted to get the message out.
That's all he was trying to do.
That same post was tagged to every media outlet in the state of Idaho and beyond.
So what he was doing was using whatever associative function exists in the Facebook algorithms to find if he could get this message to Officer Brockbank by tagging the last name Brockbank.
So conceivably there are people throughout the blogosphere, not geographically limited to the state of Idaho or to the United States, who received this message, most of whom probably looked at it and said, that's interesting, but what does it have to do with me?
But in order for this to be a true threat, this is something that's not been really hashed out so far in case law having to do with the internet specifically.
But in terms of the substance of what was said, for it to be a true threat, it has to be a statement regarding imminent criminal violent action.
That is to say, he would have to not only be giving off these vaporous outbursts of frustration, but he would have to be articulating a specific set of actions that are violent and that are criminal.
And the substance of what he said, the explicit statements that he made, forswore the use of any criminal means or any violent means.
So this is not a true threat to begin with by any definition, certainly not with respect to what we have in terms of the protected activities under the First Amendment, but the way that it was tagged was somewhat indiscriminate because of the expressive nature of what he was doing.
That's something that his court-appointed attorney talked about at some length, and I was quite surprised and somewhat gratified to see that he was so impassioned in defending the First Amendment activities of Matthew Townsend as a gadfly, as an activist here.
And Abby Germain, who is representing the city of Meridian, apparently was auditioning for a daytime Emmy by clothing everything that had been written in his Facebook post with the heavy insinuation that this man was somehow a megalomaniacal stalker who intended to do harm, not only to the valiant officer Brockbank, but to anybody he might care about.
Because presumably, this guy with the protest sign is the villain in this scenario, rather than the armed goon who threw him to the street and then took him away at gunpoint, simply because he had been protesting and expressing a point of view peacefully on a public sidewalk, and then using a public crosswalk after deciding that he would end an investigative contact because the officer didn't want to charge him, he didn't have the grounds to charge him with anything.
He's being punished for contempt of cop.
Yeah, but don't the cops have a point here that this isn't America, this is the homeland, and the Bill of Rights is a dead letter, and you're a slave, and you'll do what you're told or you'll die.
Isn't that the law now?
Well, that's an interesting point that you bring up, because in discussions regarding the resisting and obstructing charge, and this is something that I'm getting second hand, so I'm not going to be reporting this as if it were an established fact, but apparently there were discussions about the nature of resisting and obstructing, and the fact that Matthew hadn't done anything physically or violently to resist the officer, and that he had acted on his own volition to cut off the contact.
That was something that would be within the discretion of a police officer to describe as resisting and obstructing.
You see, they have discretion when they make a contact with you, because there's a proprietary claim over your actions.
This is essentially the same mindset that we had in the 19th century when slave catchers were dealing with slaves who were out without their master's permission.
There you have it, everybody.
Hey, listen, go and read this great piece.
It's at freedominourtime.blogspot.com, a felon for a Facebook post, the abduction of Matthew Townsend by the heroic Will Grigg.
Thanks so much for your time again, Will.
Thank you, Scott.
Hey, y'all.
Scott Horton here for Liberty.me, the social network and community-based publishing platform for the liberty-minded.
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