The RNC 8 Railroad

[Bjorn Against]

The RNC 8 Railroad

BY DWIGHT HOBBES

It’s not speculation that the Republican National Conven-tion 2008 was rigged to be protest proof. It’s practically a truth we hold to be self-evident. Now the courts are playing out that string. Law enforcement acted arbitrarily, immune to account. Cops pepper-sprayed and handcuffed citizens like it was lunch, perceptibly, storm troopers putting down an uprising.

Having good reason, or vaguely probable cause, didn’t enter the picture. No one even had to look at one of them funny. If you were on the street anywhere near the Xcel Convention Center between Sept. 1 through 4, it pretty much was your ***. That included some poor woman who, simply out taking in the day, got snatched up in the dragnet and was hauled off to jail. Of the hundreds charged with disorderly conduct, parading without a permit and other offenses, the bulk have already been acquitted. FBI infiltrator-informant Andrew Darst, however, got convicted of assault and property damage. So, along with slipshod prosecution, there’s the embarrassment that the Feds enlisted a criminal who couldn’t stay out of trouble until after he testified for the state.

Activists across the country have sworn up and down since the first arrests that cops’ actions and politicians’ failure to call police departments to account amounts to a selective repealing of the U.S. Constit- ution’s First Amendment (that’s the one about freedom of speech and everyone’s right to peacefully assemble). It is hard to argue. Whooping and hollering, marching down the street with placards and banners may not be the most serene way to state a case. Such demonstration, at worst practicing time-honored civil disobedience, nonetheless qualifies as peaceful assemblage.

St. Paul’s Ramsey County has whittled the cops’ haul down to the last cases, those city prosecutor John Choi hopes to convince a jury hold water. Among those still charged, he’s trying to nail to the proverbial courthouse door defendants nationally known as the RNC 8: Luce Guillen-Givens, Max Specktor, Nathanael Secor, Ervy Trimmer, Monica Bicking, Erik Oseland, Robert Czernik and Garrett Fitzgerald. They’re charged with Conspiracy to Riot in the furtherance of Terrorism, a felony.

http://www.southsidepride.com/2009/04/articles/The_RNC.html