A man who displayed a “Cops Ahead” sign to warn drivers of a police trap on a suburban street and was arrested now has been given permission to sue the officers.
According to a description of the case by Courthouse News, a ruling from the 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals lets Michael Friend pursue the city of Stamford, Connecticut, for First Amendment violations and malicious prosecution.
“Friend was violating no law by standing on the sidewalk and displaying his sign, and [Police Sgt. Richard] Gasparino had no lawful reason to order him to desist from that conduct,” the appeals court ruled.
The appeals court said the sign was protected speech because it expressed an opinion on “a matter of public significance” and, “[A] citizen does not need to show that a police practice is unlawful – or that it deviates from some notion of propriety – in order to object to it.”
A trial court judge had sided, previously, with Gasparino, the arresting officer.
The report said Friend’s protest happened April 12, 2018, “as he stood on a sidewalk with his handmade poster two blocks from a police trap to catch drivers using their cellphones. After Sgt. Gasparino told him to leave the scene and took the sign, Friend moved one block farther from the operation, to a gas station where a supportive worker provided a bigger piece of cardboard to fashion another poster.”
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Gasparino then arrested Friend for “police interference.”
He was held behind bars until 2 a.m. when he was released on his own recognizance. Gasparino had demanded a $25,000 bail.
The charge against Friend was dropped shortly later, after the prosecutor admitted Friend actually had helped police “do a better job than they anticipated because, when [drivers] saw the signs, they got off their cellphones.”
Friend’s three pending claims cite the First and Fourth Amendments.
EDITOR’S NOTE: Long the world’s most Christian nation, America today is being taken over by a new “official” national religion, one being imposed on the entire populace by every major societal institution, from government, media and big tech, to academia, entertainment and business.
This new state religion is Wokeism. “Going woke” conjures up visions of someone claiming to be acutely sensitive (“awake”) to “systemic social and political injustice.” And not just alleged bigotry against blacks, but toward every other “minority” as well, from LGBT folk – especially everything transgender and “nonbinary” – to “undocumented immigrants.” All of them, being VICTIMS, intrinsically more virtuous than the shameful oppressor class: primarily heterosexual white males.
This new “woke” consciousness has turned America upside-down – from the nationwide Antifa and Black Lives Matter riots in 2020, to tearing down of historic monuments, to demanding multi-million-dollar reparation payments for blacks, to appointing transgenders as top government officials, to rampant reverse discrimination in every area of life, to the U.S. military imposing mandatory “diversity training” and transgender pronoun use on all personnel, causing recruitment to disastrously plummet.
Yet there is hope. Being “saved” – which in Wokeism is called being “woke” – is largely a matter of worshipping victimhood by becoming an “ally” and “defender” of all the many victim classes, and a determined enemy of the straight white male oppressor class. Thus, “joining the righteous” as an ally – even if one is cursed to be a straight white male – opens the door mercifully for salvation, even to the most wretched.
That is the power of the religion of Wokeism. And it’s explored as never before in the February 2023 issue of WND’s critically acclaimed monthly Whistleblower magazine. If you’ve ever wondered, for example, exactly how the most radical elements in American society are successfully pressuring the biggest corporations into adopting the most outrageous and immoral policies imaginable, even when doing so permanently damages and devalues the company, the stunning answers are in this issue of Whistleblower, titled “WOKEISM: AMERICA’S OFFICIAL STATE RELIGION.”
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