Federal Riot Law used against Protesters: 1968 - 2009

by Jody Ballew

What is a riot?  Elliot Madison from Jackson Heights, NY was arrested for Twittering police transmissions to protesters on the streets in Pittsburgh.  His apartment was searched and a lengthy catalog of his belongings were seized by the FBI.  Why?  Because the FBI is searching for proof that Madison caused a riot in Pittsburgh. 

Elliot's arrest and the subsequent search and seizure is being challenged by his attorney Martin Stolar of the NY National Lawyers Guild.  Mr. Madison's arrest and the seizure of his possessions is particularly alarming when considered in the light of the laws the FBI Anti-Terror unit used to justify his arrest: Federal Anti-Riot Laws. 

Many see this development as supportive of larger arguments that America is a growing police state:

"It's purely political," his lawyer, Martin R. Stolar, said. "The government is trying to say that anarchists are the equivalents of terrorists, just like it is trying to say that protesters are the equivalents of terrorists."

These laws are not new.  While their application has become more explicit under the horrid history of Operation Garden Plot, COINTELPRO, and The Department of Homeland Security;  the constitutionality of these statutes, first passed in the Anti-Riot Act of 1968, was first challenged when they were used against the Chicago Seven. 

In fact, the Anti-Riot laws are in the Civil Rights Act of 1968.  So, buried in a progressive document that forbids discrimination across lines of race, color, religion or  national origin in the categories of housing and more broadly commerce, we find a repressive effort against the very civil rights leaders who organized, struggled, and protested to bring about these changes. 

Isn't the very existence of such laws a point of legal crisis for government and citizens?  How can the Constitutionally established First Amendment and The Federal Anti-Riot Acts of 1968 co-exist?

As far back as 1969 concerned political activists argued that these laws were the foundation for a police state.  They were vocal in their opposition to these laws. 

Where is our generation's outrage?!  I think it is brewing. 

Why doesn't the press cover these stories?!  Shouldn't such obvious challenges to - destruction of civil liberties be front and center in the public's eye?

On Monday, Elliot Madison faced a U.S. District Court Judge who was to decide if his lawyer's order (that all items seized be returned to him sealed) should be granted.  Also at issue: if the use of the the Anti-Riot Laws was unconstitutional.  This argument is almost identical to those made after the arrests around the 1968 Democratic National Convention.  In that sense, we are in 2009 exactly where we were 40 years ago in the U.S.A.: activists, protesters, and organizers face a set of Federal mandates that undermine their Constitutional Civil Liberties at every turn.  In other words, politically active citizens who have an ethic in which dissent becomes necessary are forcefully met with the illegality of the expression of that ethic. 

To bolster our resolve in light of a civil crisis, we should turn to William Kunster, the attorney who successfully defended the Chicago Seven, for the thinking that we need to keep fighting, an expression essential to any who would defend civil disobedience: 

"That's the terrible myth of organized society, that everything that's done through the established sytem is legal, and that word has a powerful psychological effect."