Hamlin's Political Prisoner

[XLFD]

Back on November 6, 2024, we indicated in an article Hamlin Hat Harassment we looked at an incident that happened out at the Hamlin Township Hall the previous day, Election Day, where a woman went into her polling place to vote, and chaos ensued because of her choice of head-covering apparel.  We indicated then that there would be more to come on this topic, noting that we had filed FOIA requests for records from the Mason County Sheriff's Office (MCSO) and Hamlin Township.  

Here, we will take a look at the ordeal of getting public records about this incident four months after the fact, we will then look at the woman's experiences in the justice system, we will then look at the incident report which the woman received as part of the discovery process, after we first look at the cap (below) that started this all.  A cap wore on a cold November day that served a dual purpose of keeping the woman's head warm and covering her greying hairs-- yet had within it the power to also create disruption when poll workers saw something illegal in it.

The FOIA Experience

One might expect the town hall to have some sort of security system to record what happened that day between the becapped person who wanted to vote, Muzette O'Connell, and the Township Clerk, Catherine Lewis, who was supposedly assaulted.  But the Hamlin township supervisor responded to my FOIA request that they had no camera footage or anything else in regard of that incident.

My request to the MCSO asked for their report on the incident, their bodycam footage of the incident after they arrived, and any supplements.  I was given a notice of a ten-day extension the next day, suggesting that it would take some time to process.  At that point, O'Connell had been arraigned for multiple charges, and one would suspect that the investigation was over and that due to the nature of the offense, there would be no outstanding forensic procedures in progress.  

Oddly enough, the next day they denied the request in full, citing that release would interfere with law enforcement proceedings, without explaining why.  Such responses, often given by police and prosecutorial agencies when they don't want to release records, are generally in violation of the law as explained in the seminal Michigan Supreme Court ruling in Evening News v City of Troy.  It violates all six rules that court gave in determining any claim of exemption in such situations.

Rather than fight it then, I resubmitted the request on December 1st, presuming any sort of issue they had over three weeks earlier may have worked itself out, but I received a reply from their FOIA Coordinator telling me that the prosecutor was not allowing any records to be released on this case.  I immediately appealed to Sheriff Kim Cole, telling him about the illegality of the prosecutor's dictum, all without any sort of legal explanation by her, but he would say:

I resisted the urge to immediately go to the local circuit court to appeal this disregard for the law by our two "respectable" justice system officers, hoping I might be able to catch some of the materials by attending O'Connell's court appearances, but this would prove difficult.  

O'Connell's excursions in district court

Almost four months after the polling place incident and next day arraignment, O'Connell's case is bogged down in the 79th District Court, where traditionally by this time it would have been either bound over to the circuit court (as felonies are being pursued against her) or dismissed.  

One could say the time has been extended because O'Connell has switched court-appointed attorneys (CAA) twice.  She was given CAA Tracie Dinehart, but the mouthpiece was summarily dismissed by November 27th due to O'Connell's distrust of her to give valid counsel and enough time to her case.  CAA Horia Neagos was assigned to her the next week and the probable cause conference was rescheduled to January 29 to give him time to acquaint himself with the issues.  O'Connell would convince the judge that Mr. Neagos wasn't working out for her, and he was officially dropped the next day.  Her opinion was that neither saw the various issues she deemed important.

This reporter went to the courthouse on February 12 to catch a preliminary conference regarding the Maddox Rosloniec case, another crime victim who became a potential 12-year felon for running.  He wasn't there; presumptively the prosecutor and Rosloniec's counsel talked remotely over the case since he would have to come from Coopersville.  But my visit was fruitful, in that the woman I struck up a conversation with on the benches in the hall was found to be none other than Ms. O'Connell who was there for her own case.  She would go before an understanding Judge John Middlebrook and get assigned her third attorney, James Marek, and another court date the same time next week.

As expected, the next week Marek asked the court for more time to acquaint himself with the case and brought up an interesting item in that he had reports from the prior lawyers serving O'Connell but did not have any police videos from the arrest where the felonies of resisting and opposing (R&O) would have been charged due to the alleged actions of O'Connell.  It seemed incredible that she did not have access to these videos which could play a major part in her defense 3.5 months after the arraignment.  The assistant prosecutor who inherited this case from Prosecutor Beth Hand, David Marvin, did not see it as a big deal, but agreed to send those videos over as soon as he could.

Hand was pretty consistent in her improprieties in this case; to whit, she had no valid exemption for keeping the police report and body cam footage from me, but she did anyway, and then even though discovery was immediately issued by O'Connell's first attorney, unedited body cams that should have been produced immediately were not produced for over three months from asking.  Fortunately, O'Connell was provided with a new court date in mid-March and the MCSO police report in the meantime, and she was kind enough to share it with me and gave me permission to share it with my readers and analyze it with a fair eye for them.

The Election Day police report

The report is six pages long with the first two pages giving personal information of the four people involved and noticed that O'Connell's car was impounded.  The last page just noticed the incident was 'cleared by arrest', the narrative is in the other three pages.

The three witnesses interviewed had similar stories:

These accounts indicate that O'Connell was observed wearing her Trump cap and told it was forbidden, then she got out her phone to record the area, Clerk Lewis put up her hand in front of the phone and then was summarily pushed back into the treasurer.  

While we have discussed why wearing apparel supporting a candidate is not illegal and is not electioneering (and the State of Michigan agrees by not listing it as a no-no) in our prior post, her cap incited Lewis to come over and encroach upon her space and raise her hand towards O'Connell's phone, two say nothing about the phone going to the ground.  Only Lewis' mentions the phone fell and shattered.  In O'Connell's account, she would claim not only this, but says Lewis knocked it on the ground and then accosted her while she picked up the phone.  

This was what she declared in relevant part on November 6th when I contacted her to get her side of the story, since the official line seemed difficult to square:

"She ripped the phone from my hand and threw it and it broke. It didn't just break. the face came off and shattered.  The video is more insane than you have ever seen; she is absolutely unstable. violent and threatening. It's really revealing. It also shows that I only videoed because I was threatened. She said she was gonna get me, screaming, hands shaking anger."

This aspect is vitally important as it's logical that someone wouldn't drop a phone just to give someone a push, unlikely that a phone would shatter from such a drop, and reasonable to believe that Lewis (a very excitable personality in her own right) would have accosted O'Connell while she was trying to pick up her shattered phone from the ground because she was still wearing her cap.  One would give a defensive push under such conditions to get an attacker away from them.

But even if Lewis did not throw the cell phone on the ground, her act of reaching for it was arguably the assault that happened first.  The Geno Law firm among others synthesizes what an assault in Michigan is:  "A person does not actually have to have any injury for an assault charge, so if someone slapped a phone out of someone else’s hand or took it away from them... the key is not so much whether there was an injury, but that there was an offensive threat or offensive contact."  

Inarguably, Lewis approached O'Connell and at the very least put her hand towards the phone, before any shoving happened, at most swatting the phone away and hampering the efforts to get that shattered phone.  The one resultant push was a reaction to the encroachment and then the assaultive act by Lewis.  

In any case, O'Connell's shove could and should be looked at as an act of self-defense.  Prain Law describes Michigan's Self-Defense Act, which summarized says that one may use force anywhere they have a right to be (such as a polling place) with no duty to retreat if they honestly and reasonably believe that the use of that force is necessary to defend themselves from the imminent unlawful use of force by another.  

Why wouldn't the two responding officers consider Lewis' actions as assaultive and O'Connell's as defensive?  First, there would be the natural bias in favor of the township official trying to enforce election law and being mostly ignored for doing so.  Second, O'Connell had a prior attempted assault charge stemming from a 2019 incident.  Third, O'Connell offered resistance while being arrested claiming that she had done nothing wrong.  Lastly, the two deputies involved, Mike Fort and Noah Noble, have a history of making questionable arrests (here, here, here, here, and even here for both).

This was another questionable arrest by them, using force immediately on someone who was arguably a victim of assault, had they actually tried better to piece together what happened.  Acting solely on statements by the clerk and treasurer they went for the arrest using excessive force before any attempt was made to get O'Connell's side of the story when she came back to vote after being denied the first time and was eager to tell the deputies what Lewis had did to her.  

One can imagine that the unreasonable and careless actions taken that day by Fort and Noble is a major reason why the bodycam footage of their interactions that day have been suppressed and hidden not only from FOIA requests but also from lawful discovery.  

To add insult to injuries from two rounds of assaults, O'Connell had her lawfully parked car impounded that day by order of Clerk Lewis from the Hamlin Township Hall's parking lot, you know, the lot her taxes help maintain.  Mason County Animal Control added an assist to the day's injustices by impounding O'Connell's pet dog in the back of that vehicle.  And although she had gone to the polls twice to vote, she was never able to do so, county and township officials victimizing her one last time by disenfranchising her vote for no other reason than for wearing her nicest goddamn cap to hide her gray roots and defending herself from multiple assaults.

And on February 19th, she was alerted that she would be facing a fifth as-yet-unknown charge to go along with two R&Os, the simple assault to Lewis, and a polling place violation for wearing the cap.  Welcome to the Mason County justice system.  See pages 3-5 of the police report here, we will post the bodycam videos when we get them, O'Connell's warrant is here.

[XLFD]

From your link:  ""Good reasons exist to restrict active electioneering in voting areas, but a voter simply expressing his or her political preference on clothing is a form or protected speech and should not be prohibited," said Witold Walczak, Legal Director for the ACLU of Pennsylvania."

I hope RK Hubbard can recognize and accept that Michigan's anti-electioneering law, with those three verbs I mentioned that do not happen with the wearing of a cap with a political message, was made to prevent electioneering, which is defined as:  "the activity of trying to persuade people to vote for a particular political party", alternatively, the legal definition: "the process by which political groups convince voters to cast ballots for or against particular candidates , parties , or issues (such as ballot issues, school board budgets, or referendums ) in an upcoming election."  Wearing items as clothing is not electioneering, in any definition.  If O'Connell actively campaigned for her candidate at the polling place, you'd have a case.

Personally, I put on baseball caps and t-shirts with messages on them to cover my pate or hide my manly torso from the adoring legions of female fans, and I generally don't give a second thought to what the message on them is or even a first thought as to why a government agent would ask me to remove them.  If one did, as Mayor Marx threatened to make me do last summer when I wore a Trump t-shirt to a council meeting, they would illustrate exactly why they shouldn't be a public servant in the USA-- we have civil rights here.

[RK Hubbard]

Michigan doesn't follow Pennsylvania laws. (duh!) Maybe it should, (and I agree in this case) but it doesn't. Until Michigan law is clarified, one should follow the law as interpreted by the Secretary of State and posted on the state's Web site, or risk arrest. Ms. O'Connell has a right to challenge the law in court, but she could have done so without actually getting herself arrested for felonies. The proper way to challenge a law is to invite the media, inform the authorities, stage a peaceful protest, get arrested in full view of the cameras, and (possibly with the support of the ACLU) file a case. When Rosa Parks was told she would be arrested, she simply said "You may do that." She was escorted peacefully to jail and released on bond. O'Connell chose confrontation instead of cooperation and paid the price. 

[XLFD]

The two states (MI and PA) along with 27 others do not have a prohibition on what you wear to the polls if you're a voter; lacking such law the First Amendment rules, as the PA ACLU attorney noted.

States with apparel restrictions include Arkansas, California, Delaware, Indiana, Kansas, Maine, Massachusetts, Minnesota, Montana, Nebraska, Nevada, New Hampshire, New Jersey, New Mexico, New York, North Dakota, Rhode Island, South Carolina, Tennessee, Texas and Vermont.

These states’ electioneering laws prohibit people from wearing anything that displays a political party, candidate name or ballot issue, which includes shirts, hats, buttons and stickers. In many places, this isn’t allowed within 50 to 100 feet of the entrance to a voting site, but in places like Kansas and Maine, the bans apply to a 250-foot distance.

The rest of the states and Washington, D.C. don’t allow people to have campaign materials, signs, banners or literature within or near polling places but don’t have guidelines on what someone can wear to vote.

I've seen Deputy/LPD Officer Mike Fort in action many times and he has never made a clean arrest that I've seen.  This is the idiot who didn't believe a woman victim of DV when she said she was so scared she peed in her pants that he rubbed his hand between her thighs and smelled his hand to check, but there are several other incidences where he did really stupid things-- and never a procedurally clean arrest.  If the footage is ever released, I guarantee that you will see unnecessary escalation and excessive use of force against someone who should have been considered a victim of assault by Hamlin's former clerk had an actual investigation took place before the arrest.

[Freedom Seeker]

Thanks again, X, for explaining that. One point in the article on PA ACLU was to show how an unclear law may be ruled if wording/intent is challenged.

MI AG has an interesting memo to law enforcement dated 10/10/24 which does not list political clothing as a crime, perhaps realizing the potential problem of Freedom of Speech rights.

https://acrobat.adobe.com/id/urn:aaid:sc:VA6C2:28cd91c8-f3fb-4cbc-b...

[RK Hubbard]

Nice work getting that letter, FS. I note that in addition to prohibiting the display of political information in or near a polling place, the law also prohibits video recording there. Counts one and two. When O'Connell shoved the clerk, that was assault. Then she refused to cuff up. That's resisting arrest. This is an excellent lesson on how to rack up charges and get arrested, all over a few grey hairs. 

"The two states (MI and PA) along with 27 others do not have a prohibition on what you wear to the polls if you're a voter;..."

Tom, this is only your opinion, not a legal fact. If one's interpretation of the law does not agree with the attorney general's interpretation of the law, is committing felonies and getting arrested the best way to clarify the language? If you are openly wearing anything that has words on it, you are displaying it. Arguing with law enforcement outside of a courtroom is stupid. And then you get appropriate prizes. Are you willing to do what Ms. O'Connell did and bring the case to court? You could be the next Rosa Parks! 

[XLFD]

I've looked through MI election law and couldn't find anything explicitly stating that recording an aggressive poll worker interaction is against the law, so perhaps you can point me at a MI law that says that.  Otherwise, you're just listening to guidance without a legal basis.  I sure hope that you are not affiliated with law enforcement or the courthouse, RK Hubbard, because it seems you are just looking for excuses to arrest a seasoned lady, rather than strictly applying the laws and the intent behind them. 

Additionally, the deputies were wearing bodycams, so unless county rules explicitly permit them to record in a polling place with them, there would be some charges coming their way for their recordings if we are to give merit to your beliefs.  

Again, there are plenty of clerks in Michigan, propped up by city and township attorneys who promote the myth of wearing political apparel at polling places is illegal; this may even include the SOS on occasion.  They are wrong; the link I provided backs me up on what the state's prevailing election law says about apparel, and how it is explicit in only 21 states.  Official-types love reading extra things into the law, so it would not surprise me that you work at some level of government.  We have enough laws without broad interpretations making criminals out of someone wearing a hat as a hat.

Ms. O'Connell has an excellent federal court case just waiting for her if she decides to fight back and I hope she does because they had no need to impound her car and her dog-- and herself for that matter and in the process, disenfranchise her from voting for her candidates.  This isn't even taking into account the improper arrest. 

In Ludington, I was blindside assaulted by some dog owner after his unleashed dog attacked me as I stood my ground and gave it a defensive kick to the nose back around 2013.  I reported it, had a bruise on my chest under where he crushed my camera secured in my coat pocket.  He was given a full interview, and was never arrested; never prosecuted either since he made a grand fiction of what happened.

[RK Hubbard]

Just look up the case law and the AG's guidance. If you don't like what it says, file a suit. Brig a case. 

[XLFD]

I can find no case law in Michigan that supports your claims; AG guidance, including the 2024 memo that FS supplied, does not support your claims.  Michigan law says nothing about the wearing of certain types of clothes to polling places being illegal, they explain exactly what 'electioneering' means in Michigan, just like it does in those other 21 states that actually mention apparel in their state laws. 

Can I find Michigan news outlets and municipal websites that do not relate what's objectively legal and illegal in Michigan?  Sure, and that's why we have all of these poll workers violating serious federal and state laws that say what's actually illegal in elections.  Clerk Lewis, IMHO, should have been arrested for assault and multiple election crimes for not letting O'Connell vote and slapping that phone from her hand.  She should resign-- she did-- and Hamlin Township is better for it.

I cannot bring a case, because I have no legal standing, O'Connell does, and I plan on helping her get an attorney who can get her justice in the federal courts.

[RK Hubbard]

The Michigan State AG's letter, posted by FS, explicitly states that video recording inside a polling place is illegal. Did you not read that part? That letter also specifies that displaying political material near or in a polling place is also illegal. Wearing clothing with political material on it constitutes displaying that material. Good luck finding a lawyer who would even touch this case, especially on a contingency basis. It's a sure loser.