What’s up with NH police?

It seems that police in the “Live Free or Die” state are having a slight mental breakdown. First, Matt Lepacek, armed with only camera, press pass and an uncomfortable question for Giuliani, was arrested for criminal trespass.

Matt Lepacek, the reporter who was kicked out of the CNN press room and arrested after asking Rudy Giuliani’s staff a question, has now been released on bail. Criminal indictments are now being pursued against the police involved as well as Giuliani’s staffers for their flagrant abuse of the First Amendment, assault and wrongful arrest.

And now, there is a story about a woman arrested for making faces at a dog.

Hutchinson, 33, of Lebanon, N.H., was charged with cruelty to a police animal and resisting arrest after a July 31 incident in West Fairlee in which police were called to a market to investigate a report of a brawl. They were approached by Hutchinson, who told one officer she had been assaulted the day before by one of the men involved.

She asked Vermont State Police Sgt. Todd Protzman to take her statement but he refused, telling her she smelled like alcohol and was drunk but that he would take her statement at another time.

After a heated exchange, she approached Protzman’s cruiser, where his dog Max was waiting, putting her face within inches of the window and “staring at him in a taunting/harassing manner,” Protzman wrote in an affidavit.

In a stunning display of good sense, the prosecutor has dismissed the charges against the woman.

A prosecutor has dropped charges against a woman who was arrested for staring at and making faces at a police dog.

“Prosecuting a woman for `staring’ at a police dog is absurd,” said her lawyer. “People are allowed to make faces at police dogs and officers to express their disapproval. It’s constitutional expression,” said public defender Kelly Green, who represented Jayna Hutchinson.

It is a scary time when the home of the Free State Project sees people arrested for exercising their constitutionally protected rights of expression and dissent.

~ by Miche on June 7, 2007.