Lauren Noble is a free speech champion arrested for something she never said:
I never thought I’d end up in handcuffs and a jail cell for something I didn’t say. But last May, police in New Haven, Conn., arrested me — because a parking attendant falsely claimed I had used a racial slur against him nearly a year earlier.
I denied it. I asked the cops to check the parking lot’s surveillance video. They didn’t — and the state charged me first with disorderly conduct, then with three counts of breach of peace in the second degree.
It took almost a year, tens of thousands of dollars in legal fees and endless stress before the nightmare ended on March 27, when the prosecutor finally dropped all charges.
Why? “Insufficient evidence,” “inconsistencies,” “credibility issues,” video that “clearly contradicted” the accuser’s claims — and a possibility that I wasn’t even the right person. The judge dismissed the case.
If this can happen to me — a First Amendment advocate with resources, legal counsel and a public reputation to defend — it can happen to anyone.
In 2011, I founded the Buckley Institute, named for conservative hero William F. Buckley, Jr. Our mission is to promote intellectual diversity and freedom of speech at Yale….
Headlines in local newspapers [about my arrest] made much of both Buckley and conservatism generally, as left-leaning media outlets welcomed the opportunity to advance the dishonest narrative that everyone on the right is racist.
They made the malicious assumption that those who defend free speech do so to say offensive things…
When the state finally obtained the video footage I had asked the police to view before arresting me — footage that had been accessible all along — it showed me, on multiple dates, calmly parking, getting out of my car and walking away. No confrontation, not even any interaction, with the accuser. No slurs.
Connecticut prosecutors periodically prosecute people for allegedly saying racist things, sometimes speech protected by the First Amendment, and sometimes speech that doesn’t even violate state law.
For example, they have used the state’s racial ridicule law to prosecute people for saying racist things that aren’t advertisements, even though the racial-ridicule law only applies to
- Any person who, by his advertisement,
- “ridicules or holds up to contempt any person or class of persons,
- “on account of the creed, religion, color, denomination, nationality or race of such person or class of persons”
For example, prosecutors charged University of Connecticut students with racial ridicule, after they laughingly said the N word to each other, and NBC Connecticut reported that “A teenager who attends school in Fairfield was arrested [for racial ridicule] after an alleged racist post circulated on social media, according to police. Officials said a 16-year-old boy allegedly posted a photo on Snapchat which included a racial slur directed towards a Black male classmate, who was also in the photo.”
Prosecutors not only ignored the fact that the racial ridicule statute only applies to speech that is an “advertisement,” they also ignored the fact that most racial ridicule is protected against prosecution by the First Amendment, see R.A.V. v. St. Paul (1992) and Iota Xi Chapter of Sigma Chi Fraternity v. George Mason University (1993).
