PGHIMC - Pittsburgh Independent Media Center

still guilty BUT . . .
by andy horrible Tuesday, Jul. 01, 2003 at 1:11 PM
arh6@pitt.edu oakland

m20 appeal full story

the summary offense public passage charge against mark eggerman and me was upheld today but the cloud, as is the wont of clouds :), was not without its silver lining. namely, it was also found that the time we spent in prison was sufficient time served.

we were very capably represented by cynthia s. akers from the firm healey & hornack. in particular, i thought her closing argument very much captured the reasons we were in court: first, that after tacitly allowing the march for 2 1/2 hours the police did not give us sufficient notice that their patience was exhausted and that arrests were about to begin and second, that were not not actually able to disperse.

summary offense obstruction public passage (5507, i think) has two parts. part a stipulates that our presence in the streets was sufficient to warrant our arrests. part b requires reasonable warning. our argument rested on the reasonable warning required by the second part, which we did not feel we received while the prosecution argued that merely because we were in the march we were guilty on the basis of part a.

we were in court from about 8am until about 12:15pm, but the trial itself could not have taken more than about 30 minutes.

i hope that our experience, as well as the experiences of the people who have not completed their community service hours, will figure into people's considerations of what to do should this happen again. i am still glad that people who did not want a record had an opportunity to take the agreement offered us by the d.a. on april 11; but in light of the "time served" decision today and people finding that they were not able to fulfill their community service requirement it looks like the agreement was not to the advantage of everyone who took it.

furthermore, because there were only two of us our defense very much consisted of questioning whether mark and i individually heard orders to or were able to disperse. had more people contested the charge it might have changed the dynamic of the trial; we might have been able to focus more on what i consider glaringly inproper police behavior.

all things considered, i am just glad that i had the opportunity to publically voice my discontent. i would like to thank all of the peope with whom i completed my "voluntary" community service hours: project 1877, free ride, and the cast/crew of "yo' mama." also, thanks again to the people at hillman library who raised money and to the rest of the 122.

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