Where does a citizen’s right to assemble end and trespassing begin? Apparently the line is drawn at 28 White Bridge Road, the location of U.S. Sen. Bill Frist’s Nashville office. On Monday, a Metro General Sessions Court judge ordered two Nashville peace activists to stand trial for criminal trespassing—even though they were protesting Frist, an elected public servant, at a public office paid for with taxpayer funds.
The catch is that Frist’s office isn’t considered public space. It’s housed on private property, in the Anderson Building office complex shared by several physicians and other tenants. That supersedes First Amendment rights to assemble and petition the government for a redress of grievances. Or so ruled Judge Mark J. Fishburn, who declined to dismiss charges against demonstrators Jason Bell and Andy Smith stemming from an incident earlier this year.
On March 21, some 60 people gathered outside the Anderson Building to protest the new majority leader’s support of the war in Iraq. Several charged that Frist’s hawkish stance was a direct violation of his Hippocratic oath as a former surgeon. Among those was Smith, a longtime activist who lives in an artists’ commune on Short Mountain and edits the anarchist ’zine Fifth Estate. Angered by Frist’s public use of medical analogies to justify warfare, the horn-rimmed, long-haired Smith showed up in hospital scrubs bearing the words “Hurt None.”
Dressed more conservatively that day was Jason Bell, a Vanderbilt University philosophy student. Bell, a clean-cut, soft-spoken former Republican who could pass for a youth minister, had come to drop off a letter of protest. Once there, Bell joined the crowd of war protesters on hand outside the building. Most, apparently, expected a face-to-face with Frist’s staffers. Instead, a “select group” of approximately 15 people were ushered into a conference room in his office, where they met with Frist representative Bart VerHolst. The rest waited outside the building’s front doors, thinking they’d be sent in next.
The sides can’t agree on what happened next. In court, Anderson Building property manager Scott Mathiesen testified that, as far as he knew, the Frist office decided to hold only one meeting with protesters. According to Mathiesen, the arrangement was made with Karl Meyer, an East Nashville activist who had been maintaining an anti-war vigil at the Frist office. But protesters on the scene said they knew of no such agreement. In fact, several said they didn’t even know Meyer, so there’s no way he could have spoken for them.
At any rate, when Mathiesen, flanked by police, asked the demonstrators to leave, they cited their First Amendment rights and refused. Andy Smith, who goes by the nickname Sunfrog, took the classic civil rights gambit of sitting down inside the lobby and refusing to budge. If anything, Bell’s response was even more unconventional. When he saw the front doors close and arrests begin inside, he politely asked the officer at the door if he could be arrested too. “She just said, 'Step inside,’ ” Bell recalls with a chuckle. “We had a perfectly pleasant conversation.” He theorizes that’s why, when he was arrested alongside Smith, his handcuffs were looser.
All told, Bell and Smith spent no more than five hours in jail. Other than their loss of freedom, Bell said the worst hardship they endured was jailhouse chow. The other prisoners were sympathetic, down to an unpaid-tickets violator who complained the country had “blow jobs under Clinton and no jobs under Bush.” To Smith’s wife Victoria Jackson, however, the experience was terrifying. “They took my husband down to this...basement in handcuffs,” she remembers, watching him nervously in the courtroom before his hearing. “I felt really violated.”
So do other Middle Tennessee anti-war activists, who see the Frist fiasco as the current administration’s latest end run around the First Amendment.
“Frist has a public office on private property,” says Hannah Burdine, a young paralegal who got involved in the defense after reading about the arrests. “What if 500 people have an opinion to express?” She sent Smith and Bell to see what she terms “the liberal elite” of Nashville Democrat lawyers, and she says they either wanted too much money or had better-paying clients. In the end, an avowed Republican attorney, Ray McGowan, took the case pro bono on First Amendment grounds.
At least at this hearing, those grounds didn’t matter. Judge Fishburn ruled that the real issue was whether Bell and Smith had vacated the premises when they were asked to leave. Since they apparently didn’t, they will be brought up on criminal trespassing charges, and the case will be bound over to a grand jury. The protesters could face a fine, maybe even jail time.
The stunned mood after the hearing stood in marked contrast to the rally outside beforehand. At the height of morning rush hour, more than 20 demonstrators lined Woodland Street with burning-flag posters and placards that read, “Frist Do No Harm.” They stood in Oxford shirts and Dockers as well as top-knots and baggy jeans. They chatted amiably with police, even after Smith delivered a scorching prepared statement through a portable PA. “If America is to be the revolutionary culture it once was,” Smith read, as passing cars inched by and poker-faced cops watched from the corner, “we can no longer live in the constant denial of our leaders’ complicity in cruelty and carnage.” The traffic moved on.
“On the one hand,” Jason Bell said afterward, “I’d like to have seen it dismissed. On the other, now we get to argue the First Amendment implications, and this could be a groundbreaking case.”
Lisa Abell, a demonstrator who was present at the Frist protest, put it more bluntly. Pausing on her way out of the Ben West Building, she said, “Frist is on trial now.”
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You gotta admit it's interesting Frist rented space there, since the Anderson Building representative/owner/lessor was/is none other than Scott D. Mathiesen, thrice convicted sex offender. http://www.tbi.state.tn.us/sorint/sor_Details.aspx?htid=00109971
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