No Trespassing! Court Rules Hand Overreached

[XLFD]

On the afternoon of September 5th, an epic civil rights battle took place in the main courtroom of the Mason County Courthouse between the forces of tyranny and a simple man who lost the manifest right to enjoy, on equal terms as everyone else, a walk in the park, a park that his taxes are used to maintain.   In the end of a three-hour legal skirmish, Judge John Middlebrook came to the only logical conclusion, a conclusion that would secure the ends of justice and affirm American values that all of us should hold dear. 

Middlebrook decided that neither the Ludington police nor the city manager had the power to arbitrarily take away any citizen's rights to use Cartier Park by issuing a letter of trespass, declaring it off-limits for any period of time, with rare exception in cases where public health and safety may be compromised.  His Honor was frequently distracted away from the core legal purpose of the motion hearing, which was to determine whether the man's procedural due process rights were violated by the trespass letter.  This document and other city policies offered the man no way to appeal the sanction which was applied to him when he was caught in the midst of a deer cull and called for help to extricate himself.  

County Prosecutor Beth Hand (pictured above in her rarely-seen true form) was trying her best to avoid addressing the procedural due process issues that reasonable people would think that she should be defending under the oath she takes to affirm and defend the Constitution.  Instead, in her brief in opposition to the motion to dismiss (for violations of due process) she not only avoids the topic of due process in her title, but also in any way meaningful throughout the course of her legal ramblings. 

Hand would only address local ordinances and statute in detail over 11 pages, which could be relevant if the case had not the fatal flaw of city agents ignoring the due process rights of the man involved.  She lowered herself for a page or so to address one of the due process precedents brought forth, but argued in the brief and in court with some presumption that local ordinances had some supremacy over the federal issues involved and would suggest in court that the only way the man could redeem his basic civil rights was to file an action in federal court after going through a show trial in the 79th District Court.  

The case was ridiculous in the first place, and we have followed it with a definite interest in these pages, for the man involved was this reporter and he was being effectively targeted by the City of Ludington through their police department (fully supported by our elected representatives by their noncommittal in halting the latest witch hunt) and Prosecutor Hand.  A brief summary:

On the late afternoon of March 12th, 2024, I entered Cartier Park from the nearby Lakeview Cemetery and my motives were purely to save as many deer from being killed that night by spoiling all of the illegal bait piles I could find in the 74 acres and spooking as many as I could to get out of an area where we were all told repeatedly that they would be killing deer in the middle of the night with their night-vision equipment.  In broad daylight, over forty minutes before dusk, I was very fortunate to see the cullers first.  

There was no notice in area media or city web pages, no 'cull night' established, no signs posted in the cemetery and campground entrances to the park indicating that there would be lethal bloodsport taking place that evening.  Shots rang out nearby a couple minutes after my sighting of their ATV; I could have very easily been killed that night due to the city creating so much liability by their egregiously negligent actions.

My near-death experience that night wasn't what caused this persecution, it was Police Captain Mike Haveman's decision to give me a form-letter of trespass for Cartier Park, indicating I could not set foot in the park for 30 days.  Knowing even then from my knowledge of civil rights that this piece of paper had no power over me, I went to the park the next morning to view the aftermath-- and even though the official line was that they had killed 21 deer that night in the small park where I saw none over the course of nearly two hours where crepuscular deer would be most active, I and a couple of others could find no sign of gun violence on deer in those 74 acres and even beyond them. The 2024 Ludington deer cull head count was a hoax costing $20,000; there is no doubt in my mind. 

It's also when I saw the city manager in the campground and brought myself to his attention, we talked for a few minutes, and he affirmed the letter, but allowed me to continue looking around the park for about another hour.  I remember boldly telling him my legal impressions about the letter, but agreed to his curfew that day, since I was mostly finished with my hunt for gore. 

I would come back two days later, where I was spotted by two DPW workers walking down the walkway on a nice March afternoon just like many others.  One of the workers was the husband of the local circuit court judge-- and based upon that sighting, I was charged with trespassing, not then, but six months later.  I would also be charged with a complimentary misdemeanor from the motor vehicle code, but that had no effect on this Friday's hearing and should be dismissed as baseless at a later date, as I had a valid driver's license in March 2024.

That's the background, and while my first impressions of due process violations in March 2024 by the City was mostly intuitively based on my knowledge of civil rights law, I affirmed this when I received notice I was being charged with trespassing in September 2024, using an ACLU link titled "no trespass orders on public property".  The link addresses the topic in some detail, among these:

Our long-term followers will recall that the City of Ludington once trespassed me back in 2011 from city hall/LPD property and me, my attorney, and federal civil litigation made them pay for it in 2013, and the major problem then was the same issue now, there was no procedural due process for the taking of my right.  Methinks the City that keeps doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results is insan-city. 

But the dastards in charge that keep doing it never pay for it, that's what their risk management insurance and your taxes are for.  Until more people get up and demand better from their elected representatives, they'll keep steamrolling over your fellow citizens' rights even after the day it eventually rolls over yours.

Kudos to my court-appointed defense attorney, Nancy Urban (pictured above), who had the diligence and perseverance to finally get this motion hearing after a year of legal wrangling with an obstinate Prosecutor Hand obsessed more with vengeance against a reporter willing to tell the public the truth about her brand of justice which includes multiple Brady violations, one leading to her migration from Oakland County's prosecutor office, and other ethical lapses.  Such as the accusation of a law clerk of her using her feminine wiles to get her way on convictions with a lecherous old judge:

It was rather cathartic seeing Judge Middlebrook wrestle with the conflicting issues presented by Hand and Ms. Urban and gravitating away from the relatively minor issues of local, codified law and policy that have likely never been challenged for their constitutionality, and come to the conclusion that the prosecutor's defense of her position was not compelling when judged against the taking of a person's right to use a public park.  

His Honor would eventually craft his decision using an analogy of a person who creates a disturbance at a sporting event at a public venue, perhaps because they had too many drinks, and rather than just be thrown out of the event that day, he is not allowed back for 30 days for other events at that public venue.  While this would help lead him to the decision to dismiss the case on procedural due process, I would select a different analogy based on the fact that I was the victimized party here, almost shot late in the afternoon of March 12th, 2024.  Consider, if a man sexually assaulted a woman at a sporting event, would a reasonable peace officer throw the woman out, trespass her, and later charge her with a crime when she has the courage to come back to where she was violated?

I want to finish law discussions with Defense Attorney Urban's brief for dismissal based on due process grounds and the case law in federal courts that supported the dismissal.  Urban's legal philosophy is to be terse and focus on the topics under consideration, and while that conflicts somewhat in my natural tendency to want to overprotect the strength of my ideas with as much as possible, it worked here, and it includes three very cogent precedents in line with what happened here.

Her favorite was Catron v. City of St. Petersburg, which offered this:

My favorite was Anthony, v. State, because the ban from a park ran similarly to the facts in my case, and the judges supported the decision with plenty of existing case law:

But apparently the ACLU favored the third precedent as the first reference in its link to show that the government couldn't just trespass a person from public property on a whim in Kennedy v. City of Cincinnati:

Prosecutor Hand is not just the person who tries to gain convictions for those who may have committed crimes, part of her duties involves preserving the rights of those accused so that they can receive fairness and true justice.  Her legal brief, her statements in court, and her demeanor in court, showed that she had no interest in justice or the rights of the accused.  The latter two of these showed that this was either an exercise in vengeance against the man who would hold her actions into account or that she valued neither fairness nor due process, or both.  

Her threats in court to continue this persecution despite the due process violations bouncing back into her face is telling us all that her end is not the pursuit of justice or fairness towards the accused.  The acceptance of an even more specious claim of little old me disturbing the peace without saying a word (except to respond to a harassing LPD captain) to prosecute shows that malice towards me is at the forefront of her official actions.  This is unseemly of a person in her position, but she has a long history of unseemliness to draw from.

We must always be on the lookout for officials trying to keep us out of public spaces because I am not the only one around here getting abused.  Consider the mother who was trespassed from coming to her son's football practices and games in 2023 at our public school district (the LASD is a frequent due process violator, almost as bad as the City of Ludington).  Consider all of the people who have gone to the banks of the city marina to fish for years and had the state-recognized right-to-fish taken from them this year by a city manager who had zero authority to do so.  

We must always fight to protect our rights, especially for due process, because this right is the foundation of protecting our other rights from bad acting government agents.  I fought the battle, and I won, and there is no sign that those despicable corrupted agents in power positions where they don't belong are going to let up on anyone until they are held to account.