Judge made citizens afraid to exercise rights
In the next few weeks and if sanity prevails, the General Assembly will teach the judge that here in America, you can’t blast citizens for exercising their constitutional rights — then thwack them with a bill on top of it.
Because of Parker, two local Republican delegates — Tom Gear of Hampton and Harvey B. Morgan of Middlesex — have filed measures in Richmond to protect citizens against being forced to pay removal costs, attorney fees or other sanctions, should those citizens have the audacity to petition to remove an elected official.
If either measure succeeds, the outrage that the judge perpetrated last month upon petition organizers in Gloucester won’t happen again in Virginia.
Parker has ordered 40 Gloucesterites to pay $80,000 of $125,000 in legal expenses incurred by four scurrilous county supervisors who battled their own removal with tooth, nail and many, many months of pricey legal representation charging up to $525 an hour.
The petitions were dismissed on a technicality. Then Parker, harrumphing that he’d never “seen more misuse of the judicial system,” slapped petitioners with the supervisors’ legal bills. County taxpayers in general, he said, could pick up the rest of the tab.
His ruling stunned legal experts from the ACLU of Virginia to the University of Richmond Law School to the Thomas Jefferson Center for the Protection of Free Expression.
The decision could — and should — be overturned on appeal.
But those proposals in Richmond should reaffirm a fundamental First Amendment right that we all take for granted.
And if you think that Parker’s boneheaded ruling hasn’t had a chilling effect, think again…(Read More)