This State Prosecutor Is Against Desantis' Anti-Protest Bill
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This state prosecutor is against DeSantis’ anti-protest bill | Opinion By ANDREW WARREN SPECIAL TO THE SUN SENTINEL FEB 10, 2021 AT 3:52 PM The “Combating Violence, Disorder and Looting and Law Enforcement Protection Act” advancing through the Florida Legislature is an assault on our democracy. Not only does it fail to advance public safety, it addresses none of the urgent policy needs of our communities. Florida will soon pass 30,000 deaths and two million infections from COVID-19. More than 600,000 Floridians are looking for work. Our schools desperately need help sorting out funding issues. Our government’s priorities should reflect these issues. It is bizarre and alarming that Gov. DeSantis and legislative leaders introduced this “anti-protest bill” as House Bill 1 — their top priority for the legislative session. The bill does nothing to create jobs, make us healthier or build a better school system. Instead, it pays only lip service to public safety and erodes basic freedoms. All across Florida, last year’s public demonstrations were almost entirely within the bounds of free speech and peaceful assembly. These demonstrations were filled with passionate signs and slogans, not broken windows or bones. That’s something Americans have supported since our founding day. During these demonstrations, some participants crossed the line into criminal activity. They damaged property, harassed people and some even attacked law enforcement. Existing laws already give police and prosecutors the tools to hold looters and rioters accountable. Here in Hillsborough County, my office is prosecuting more than 120 people for more than 260 separate criminal charges of looting, burglary, theft and attacking police. Most of the cases stem from a single night of widespread unrest in Tampa on May 30. Two-thirds of these charges are felonies, each carrying a potential penalty of at least five years in prison if convicted. Protesting for justice is part of the fabric of America and has been since the Boston Tea Party. America became a more perfect union thanks in large part to the peaceful protests of the suffrage and civil rights movements. Whether your ideological leanings are left, right or center, you should worry about government taking steps toward criminalizing peaceful assembly and free speech. Nothing in this new legislation would help protect public safety: It does not give prosecutors a tool we current- ly lack, and it does not help law enforcement achieve the difficult balance required when policing a mostly, but not entirely, peaceful demonstration. It certainly would not have prevented the one night of looting and destruction we saw in Tampa and other Florida cities. It would, however, be a big step toward criminalizing and discouraging dissent and peaceful assembly and make it harder for anyone of any political persuasion to hold a peaceful protest without risking that they might run afoul of the law and be arrested after doing nothing wrong. The bill also yanks away local control of your community’s public safety budget, allowing the governor and one Cabinet member to reject a city or county budget if that budget shifts any amount of money away from the po- lice budget. Your town council could unanimously vote for a change your community and police chief all want — e.g. reducing the police budget by $1 in a year where a global pandemic has forced millions of dollars of cuts to other essential services — but the final say is in the hands of just two people in Tallahassee. That works against common-sense efforts to ease how much we require law enforcement to handle in our communities, where they now serve as everything from dog catcher to crisis counselor, and it’s an assault on the principle of local control. Communities should be able to determine, through local leadership, how to address the issues that affect their community — including the budget for local law enforcement. This has been a cornerstone of democracy for centuries. This “anti-protest bill” is full of solutions in search of a problem. It stifles free speech. It takes away your com- munity’s control. It tries to tear a couple corners off the Constitution. And for what — possibly slightly longer sentences for crimes that are already being prosecuted? More importantly, our state’s leaders’ fascination with this bill reveals that their priorities are all wrong. These are difficult times with difficult problems facing hard-working, patriotic Floridians. They deserve real solutions to actual issues, not political theater. If our elected leaders focused on what Floridians really need — steps to create jobs, fix the unemployment system and effectively roll out vaccines — they would do far more to strengthen our communities than this bad bill ever will. Andrew Warren is the state attorney for Hillsborough County. Legislature’s anti-protest bill is anti-American | Commentary By PATRICIA BRIGHAM AND PEGGY A. QUINCE FEB 16, 2021 AT 6:00 AM GUEST COLUMNIST | ORLANDO SENTINEL Floridians, your First Amendment right to peacefully protest is under attack. Not by extremist groups, but by our very own Florida Legislature. The vehicle is a bill known as HB 1 and its Senate companion, SB 484. Gov. Ron DeSantis announced plans for this bill following the largely peaceful Black Lives Matter protests, which took place throughout the United States and around the world after the brutal murder of George Floyd last year. Now the legislation has cynically been rebranded as an attempt to address the insurrection that took place at the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6; in fact, it was filed that very night. HB 1 at its core would dilute the rights that this country and this state were founded upon. This legislation includes enhanced criminal penalties for offenses already codified by law. Innocent bystanders caught in a protest gone unruly could find themselves arrested and thrown in jail for the night, their bail eliminated before a first court appearance after their arrest. The state could preempt local government authority when law-en- forcement budgets are cut, allowing the governor and Cabinet to force local governments to cut other needed local services. This proposed legislation is completely unnecessary. There are already criminal laws — both state and feder- al — that address rioting, insurrection, treason, assault, and battery. In fact, if this legislation passes, it would have a chilling effect on exercising one’s right to to peaceably assemble. Even more alarming is the granting of an affirmative defense to persons who may deliberately injure innocent protesters that peacefully protest when a gathering is designated a “riot” under the vague standards of the legislation. Since the founding of these United States and the establishment of the state of Florida, we, the people, have enjoyed the right to peaceably assemble and the coordinated right to petition the government for redress of grievances. Article I, section 5 of the Florida Constitution provides: “The people shall have the right to assem- ble, to instruct their representatives, and to petition for redress of grievances.” This right derives from the First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution. The First Amendment specifically provides that Congress cannot make a law that abridges the right of the peo- ple to peacefully assemble. Likewise, no state legislature can deprive the people of this basic and fundamental right. This was made clear by the U.S. Supreme Court in De Jonge v. Oregon, 299 U.S. 353 (1937). Writing for a unanimous Court, Chief Justice Charles Hughes said letting states interfere with a group’s right to gather and discuss political issues was “repugnant to the due process clause of the Fourteenth Amendment.” HB 1, like the bill denounced in the De Jonge case, would abridge the right of the citizens of the state of Florida to the free exercise of their right to assemble and petition their government. HB 1, or as its sponsors have named it, “Combatting Public Disorder,” is not just anti-protest and anti-First Amendment, it is outright anti-American. We the people have seen the power of the right to assemble from the days of William Penn to the modern civil-rights movements. Abolitionists took to the streets to raise the nation’s awareness of the evils of slavery. Suffragists used the power of protest to redress the grievance of voter disenfranchisement for a large segment of the population — women. Labor activists, religious organizations, LGBTQ communities, and other groups throughout our nation have gathered, with their collective voices, to call for redress of problems that plague our democracy. As a result, Americans of all racial, ethnic, cultural, and religious backgrounds have peaceably protested and made positive changes. This is the essence of democracy. This is the essence of a government as described by Abraham Lincoln in the Gettysburg Address, “[a] government of the people, by the people, for the people.” The Bill of Rights in the U.S. Constitution and the Declaration of Rights in the Florida Constitution form the foundations for this democracy. Each right is a pillar that keeps the house, our democracy, steady. When we tear down one pillar of the house, the foundation begins to shift. The house is then subject to collapse. We must not allow this house, our precious democracy, to fall. We urge our legislators, both representatives and senators, to reject HB 1 and its Senate companion. By doing so, we preserve the right to peaceably assemble and we preserve a necessary pillar of our democracy. Patricia Brigham is president of the League of Women Voters of Florida. Justice Peggy A. Quince served on the Florida Supreme Court from 1999 to 2019 and is a current board director of the League of Women Voters of Florida.