[Lnc-business] MOTION: Amicus brief from the LP in support of lawsuit against New York anti-loitering law

Sun Oct 2 14:38:24 EDT 2016

Correct - right now there are too many unanswered questions.  Perhaps you
should get with Nick and Wes off list?

On Sunday, October 2, 2016, David Demarest <dpdemarest at centurylink.net>
wrote:

> Starchild,
>
>
>
> I support the moral spirit of your motion and may offer to co-sponsor
> after hearing more about the legal ramifications.
>
>
>
> *Libertarianism: Leader Humility - Transparency - Principle Before Party *
>
>
>
> ~David Pratt Demarest
>
> Secretary, Nebraska Libertarian State Central Committee
>
> Region 6 Representative, Libertarian National Committee (IA, IL, MN, MO,
> ND, NE, WI)
>
> Nebraska State Coordinator, LP Radical Caucus
>
>
>
> *From:* Lnc-business [mailto:lnc-business-bounces at hq.lp.org
> <javascript:_e(%7B%7D,'cvml','lnc-business-bounces at hq.lp.org');>] *On
> Behalf Of *Caryn Ann Harlos
> *Sent:* Saturday, October 01, 2016 10:52 PM
> *To:* lnc-business at hq.lp.org
> <javascript:_e(%7B%7D,'cvml','lnc-business at hq.lp.org');>
> *Subject:* Re: [Lnc-business] MOTION: Amicus brief from the LP in support
> of lawsuit against New York anti-loitering law
>
>
>
> I am very much in favour of this idea but I am wondering if costs would
> need to be allocated.  Lawyers aren't free :)
>
>
>
> On Sat, Oct 1, 2016 at 9:42 PM, Starchild <sfdreamer at earthlink.net
> <javascript:_e(%7B%7D,'cvml','sfdreamer at earthlink.net');>> wrote:
>
> While libertarianism is making great strides, we know that many
> politicians and others who sometimes use libertarian rhetoric fall well
> short of actually embracing public policy in accord with the Non-Aggression
> Principle, and still support or excuse, among other things, government
> mistreatment of members of disadvantaged or marginalized groups –
> immigrants, poor people, Muslims, prostitutes and their clients, people of
> ethnic minorities, and so on. By doing so, they place themselves squarely
> against justice and historical progress, and it is crucial to the cause of
> freedom that we not allow them to tarnish that cause by association and
> drag it down in the eyes of the public.
>
>
>
> As reported yesterday by the New York Times (see article below), the Legal
> Aid Society of New York is filing a constitutional challenge against that
> state's anti-loitering law, which has been used to harass and arrest
> thousands of people, disproportionately the poor, transgendered people, and
> members of minority ethnic groups. This strikes me as an excellent
> opportunity for us to weigh in with an amicus ("friend of the court")
> brief, and counter harmful misperceptions spread by opponents of freedom
> that Libertarians are right there with benighted reactionaries when it
> comes to attitudes toward the less fortunate among us.
>
>
>
> Therefore, *I move that we direct staff and/or our legal counsel to
> prepare and file a short amicus brief in support of this lawsuit, citing
> libertarian principles, and that the action be mentioned in our public
> communications (e.g. a press release, blogging on LP.org <http://LP.org>,
> and/or a write-up in LP News).*
>
>
>
> Don't think of this as a distraction from the election. If the moral
> clarity of the issue isn't convincing enough by itself, consider it in
> terms of earned media: This is a timely opportunity to reap some favorable
> publicity that can help engender goodwill toward our party and candidates
> that mere outreach and paid advertising can't buy, among communities our
> message might not otherwise be reaching.
>
>
>
> Love & Liberty,
>
>                                    ((( starchild )))
>
> At-Large Representative, Libertarian National Committee
>
>                                 (415) 625-FREE
>
>
>
>
>
> http://www.nytimes.com/2016/10/02/nyregion/poor-
> transgender-and-dressed-for-arrest.html?_r=1
>
> Poor, Transgender and Dressed for Arrest
> By GINIA BELLAFANTE SEPT. 30, 2016
>
>
> Measured in terms of cultural attention, it can seem like a very
> enlightened time to be living with an unconventional gender identity. The
> rights of transgender people have been a concern of presidential politics;
> “Transparent,” the comedy about a middle-aged male political scientist in
> the process of becoming female, is popular and in its third
> season; gender-neutral bathrooms are on the rise, and opposition to them
> puts challengers in the position of seeming benighted and cranky, as though
> they hankered for a world still dominated by three television networks.
>
> And yet, at 6:30 a.m. on Feb. 3, as she was walking toward a bus stop in
> the Bushwick section of Brooklyn, Natasha Martin, who is 38 and
> African-American, and had been thrown out of her mother’s home in Virginia
> as a teenager for preferring to wear girls’ clothes when she was a boy, did
> not encounter this new collective awakening. She had just lit a cigarette
> when a white police van pulled up and the officers inside asked her who she
> was, whether Natasha Martin was her real name and if she was aware that the
> area where she was standing was known for prostitution.
>
> Ms. Martin joked at the time that she hadn’t seen any signs, she recalled
> one recent afternoon. “I said: ‘Who am I supposed to be prostituting to?
> There is no one here!’” At that point she was taken into custody, under a
> 40-year-old statute in the state’s penal code — 240.37 — that allows the
> police broad discretion in arresting anyone they deem to be loitering for
> the purpose of engaging in prostitution.
>
> How can this purpose be discerned? The law is vague enough to make almost
> any posture vulnerable to suspicion. You could be arrested while talking to
> two men on a corner; while talking to someone through a car window; while
> walking down the street with a bottle of Korbel; for going to your job
> selling sofas; if it happens that you have worked as a prostitute before;
> just for wearing something an officer decides is too provocative.
>
> On the morning of her arrest, Ms. Martin had set out from a friend’s
> apartment wearing a Lane Bryant tracksuit. The charges against her were
> eventually dropped but not before she was made to appear in court five
> times.
>
> Over the past several years, the Legal Aid Society of New York has handled
> so many of these cases of wrongful arrest, particularly among transgender
> women who are black and Hispanic, that it was expected late last week to
> file a federal civil rights suit in the Southern District of New York on
> behalf of several plaintiffs — Ms. Martin is one of them — challenging the
> constitutionality of the law. Between 2012 and 2015, the Legal Aid Society
> says, nearly 1,300 people were arrested in New York City under the
> loitering law. More than 600 were convicted, and close to 240 served some
> time in jail. During that period, five precincts in the city were
> responsible for more than two-thirds of the arrests, each of the precincts
> serving neighborhoods that are predominantly black and Hispanic, in the
> Bronx and central Brooklyn.
>
> The deployment of Statute 240.37 is, in essence, a perverse equalizer,
> extending the indignities of stop-and-frisk policing, experienced by so
> many young black and Hispanic men, to an entire population of women already
> facing myriad forms of discrimination. In one instance, the suit notes,
> over the course of two hours on a June evening last year, officers near
> Monroe College in the Fordham section of the Bronx arrested at least eight
> transgender women. The women told their lawyers that one of the officers
> said they were conducting a sweep to let “girls like them” and
> their friends know that if they were seen hanging around after midnight
> they would be hauled off.
>
> The Police Department declined to comment on the suit until it was filed.
>
> Some of the neighborhoods where transgender women are being arrested with
> some regularity — Bushwick, for example, and Hunts Point in the Bronx — are
> undergoing rapid gentrification, leading to the obvious supposition that
> the greater mission is to instill enough fear in the women to make them
> leave, and congregate somewhere else. Ms. Martin had been arrested 14 other
> times under the loitering statute in the early 2000s, she told me, in most
> instances while she had been in the meatpacking district, as it was
> evolving from a place of bohemian and transgressive club life to a world
> of croque-monsieur and Stella McCartney.
>
> The policing of female sexuality is something bourgeois women talk about
> often, with little understanding that what exists largely in the realm of
> metaphor for them remains, for poor women, a very literal and criminalizing
> surveillance of how they present themselves when they leave the house.
> Again and again, the Legal Aid Society has represented women arrested while
> wearing short dresses or high heels or tight pants and, in one bizarre
> instance, that well-known symbol of sexual seduction: a black pea coat.
> Just as it is unthinkable that the same strictures would apply to a black
> man drinking a tallboy on a sidewalk in East New York and a private equity
> investor having a glass of pinot noir on his stoop on East 93rd Street, it
> is inconceivable that a woman in Chelsea would be stopped by the police on
> her way to Barry’s Bootcamp in cropped leggings and a sports bra.
>
> The loitering law that has caused so much of this unnecessary contact with
> the legal system was developed in the 1970s, at a time when vice was
> rampant in New York City. Over the years, laws almost identical to 240.37
> have been found unconstitutional in six other states, including Florida.
> The continued application of others suggests that certain styles of
> policing, far from ensuring law and order, merely articulate the ways in
> which law enforcement seems to function in a vanished world. As police
> departments across the country try to incorporate more sensitivity and
> difference awareness training into their curriculums, to heal the ruptures
> and divisions that have seemed so systemic, they might include a few
> tutorials on how modern women dress, and what clothes tell us about
> one another, and don’t. Let the reform begin with a subscription to Vogue.
>
>
>
>
> _______________________________________________
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>
>
>
>
>
> --
>
> *In Liberty,*
>
> *Caryn Ann Harlos*
>
> Region 1 Representative, Libertarian National Committee (Alaska, Arizona,
> Colorado, Hawaii, Kansas, Montana, Utah, Wyoming, Washington) - Caryn.Ann.
> Harlos at LP.org <javascript:_e(%7B%7D,'cvml','Caryn.Ann.Harlos at LP.org');>
>
> Communications Director, Libertarian Party of Colorado
> <http://www.lpcolorado.org>
>
> Colorado State Coordinator, Libertarian Party Radical Caucus
> <http://www.lpradicalcaucus.org>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>

-- 
*In Liberty,*
*Caryn Ann Harlos*
Region 1 Representative, Libertarian National Committee (Alaska, Arizona,
Colorado, Hawaii, Kansas, Montana, Utah, Wyoming, Washington) - Caryn.Ann.
Harlos at LP.org <Caryn.Ann.Harlos at LP.org>
Communications Director, Libertarian Party of Colorado
<http://www.lpcolorado.org>
Colorado State Coordinator, Libertarian Party Radical Caucus
<http://www.lpradicalcaucus.org>
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