FlyingBouncyPantyGate ends with state attorney criminalizing any attempt to "disturb any lawful assembly"

Brian Haas outlaws much protest, evangelism, and music while clearing an activist of panty violence and sparing a manly sheriff's captain from testifying to his deep panty trauma. Really.

When I left you a few weeks ago, Polk County Sheriff Grady Judd’s deputies had just arrested panty-wielding, anti-forced birth activist Bonnie Patterson-James on a felony charge following a multi-day womanhunt.

Judd accused Patterson-James of battering manly sheriff’s Capt. Billy Strickland with a pair of balled up, tossed panties. The alleged lingerie projectile may or may not have bounced into Strickland’s uniformed leg during a pro-forced-birth advocacy event hosted by State Rep. Jennifer Canady, R-Nepotism.

Here’s my full account from a few weeks back. It was embarrassing for Judd and Strickland and Polk County to say the least.

Fast forward a few weeks. I’m back; and Patterson-James no longer faces a felony charge for battering Capt. Strickland, who thankfully seems to have recovered from his alleged panty battery injuries.

In fact, FlyingBouncyPantyGate no longer exists at all.

But somehow, in trying to kill the spectacle, our cratering State Attorney’s Office has made it both much, much dumber and much farther-reaching in its implications.

I did not have this outcome on my bingo card, MAGAs

In place of the felony panty violence charges, 10th Circuit State Attorney Brian Haas has charged Patterson-James with misdemeanor “attempting to disturb a lawful assembly.”

This charge criminalizes virtually all loud protestors who attempt to “disturb a lawful assembly,” — like, say, lawfully-permitted PRIDE events in Lakeland’s Munn Park or lawfully assembled drag shows or lawful clinics that terminate pregnancies lawfully.

That’s right, MAGAs, Polk prosecutors have:

1. Rejected your beloved Sheriff Grady Judd’s reason for arresting an anti-forced-birth activist.

2. Conjured a lesser charge for her from an entirely different fact predicate.

3. Criminalized much of what you most enjoy doing in your politics — attempting to disturb lawful assemblies.

I did not have those developments on my bingo card.

Did you?

Read the charging document if you doubt me

If you doubt me on the breathtaking scope of what Haas’ office just did, go read the “information” the 10th Circuit State Attorney’s Office filed with the Clerk of Court on June 12. (An “information” is a prosecutorial charging document. It’s essentially an indictment for charges that don’t come from a grand jury.)

Here is the really, really weird State Attorney language describing Patterson-James’ alleged offense. You will see no projectile panties there. Rather, Brian Haas’ office is charging Patterson-James for:

“utilizing a ladder to position herself above a solid fence in order to shout down to the people assembled below while using a hand held electronic megaphone to greatly amplify her voice, thus endeavoring to willfully and maliciously interrupt or disturb an assembly of people met for any lawful purpose, but Bonnie Patterson-James failed in the perpetration of said offense.”

You can see below the charges the Sheriff’s Office submitted with Patterson-James’ arrest affidavit and the essentially unrelated charge the SAO actually chose to prosecute instead. Together, they make a wild legal bait-and-switch.

On paper at least, the Sheriff’s Office arrested Patterson-James and wanted her prosecuted on a pissing-off-police charge, not for anything related to speech. Haas gave them the opposite.

Is “attempting to disturb a lawful assembly” actually a thing?

Um, maybe?

Prosecutors have used a mashup of two laws to charge Patterson-James with the misdemeanor. The first and most crucial law is Florida statute 871.01., titled: “Disturbing schools and religious and other assemblies.”

The text says this:

(1) Whoever willfully interrupts or disturbs any school or any assembly of people met for the worship of God or for any lawful purpose commits a misdemeanor of the second degree, punishable as provided in s. 775.082 or s. 775.083.

(2) Whoever willfully interrupts or disturbs any assembly of people met for the purpose of acknowledging the death of an individual with a military funeral honors detail pursuant to 10 U.S.C. s. 1491 commits a misdemeanor of the first degree, punishable as provided in s. 775.082 or s. 775.083.

Bonnie Patterson-James was allegedly attempting to “disturb” a ground-breaking for a forced birth clinic that Jennifer Canady was claiming credit for funding with your tax money.

A forced birth clinic is not a “school” or “an assembly of people met for the worship of God” or an “assembly of people met for the purpose of acknowledging the death of an individual with a military funeral honors.”

So prosecutors are jamming this “assembly” into the “any lawful purpose” clause/category. That clause/category seems to include literally any lawful gathering of people — certainly to include PRIDE events and drag shows and medical clinics that terminate pregnancies.

Hell, it seems to include backyard barbecues and pick-up basketball games. It’s hard imagine what “any lawful assembly” would exclude. And I wonder — perhaps lawyer friends can tell me — if this law has ever been invoked before for the generic “any lawful purpose” category.

Say what you want about Bonnie Patterson-James; but she did not fail to disturb

And I really don’t understand the “attempted” part of the charge, which comes from Florida Statute 777.04. That law just says that attempting and failing to commit a crime is a crime, in and of itself. Failure to execute a crime is not exoneration.

In this case, there is no obvious difference in severity for attempting to disturb and succeeding in disturbing an assembly. Both are 2nd degree misdemeanors. And yet, the State Attorney’s Office goes out of its way to say that Patterson-James failed to disturb the event, when, in reality, she clearly succeeded in disturbing it.

¯\_(ツ)_/¯. LOL.

I mean, it’s been more than a month now; and we’re still laughing at Capt. PantyWound. And Brian Haas is tying law and protest policing into knots, while theoretically criminalizing the former CCDF (which lives to disturb the lawful assemblies known as schools and School Board meetings) over this spectacle.

If this is undisturbed, I’d hate to see disturbed.

And give it up for Bonnie Patterson-James, whose alleged flying panties have managed to provoke Polk’s ridiculous fake Christian dictatorship into one absurd and revealing and self-destructive toddler tantrum after another.

I can’t remember a more successful bit of local civil disobedience — and now she won’t even face a felony charge. Life is weird.

Send Brian Haas your pictures/videos of forced-birth and anti-Polk PRIDE protestors who “disturb” lawful assemblies

Moreover, anyone who attended Saturday’s PRIDE event in Lakeland’s Munn Park knows a handful of fake Christian MAGAs were attempting (and largely failing) to disturb the lawfully permitted assembly.

I believe the protestors were using amplification; but I’d like video or pictures to confirm. When I walked down there about 2:30 p.m., one fine fake Christian was shouting “God’s gonna fuck you up” to the lawful assembly.

I’d encourage everyone who has video to inundate Brian Haas and his number two man and public spokesman Jacob Orr with pictures and videos of the fake Christian MAGA protestors attempting to disturb PRIDE.

People should do the same for the forced birth activists who disturb and torment women seeking to end pregnancies and the Nazis who have disturbed lawful drag shows.

And they should ask Haas and Orr, repeatedly, why those protestors aren’t facing the Bonnie Patterson-James treatment.

Here are their emails: bhaas@sao10.com and Jorr@sao10.com.

Haas, a very weak man who is afraid of his own shadow — and especially fake Christian MAGAs — will be very very reluctant to do anything about the PRIDE and anti-abortion and Nazi drag disturbances because it’s not politically correct for his boss Ron DeSantis.

But people should absolutely rub Haas’ and Orr’s faces in their cowardice and dishonorable, selective prosecution in the public’s name. It’s the only chance we have of overcoming it as a community.

Haas and his Leo Schofield-torturing, Rick Nolte-protecting, FlyingBouncyPantyGate-ducking prosecutorial leadership has neither basic professional courage nor impartiality. And they should be made to relentlessly marinate in that fact. (As always, I exclude the competent and professionally brave SAO investigators from that assessment.)

An absolute nightmare for police. Who told the SAO this was a good idea?

Now that even attempting to “disturb any lawful assembly” is a demonstratively prosecutable crime, can you imagine the shit show police are going to endure? Anybody can accuse anybody.

They prosecuted Bonnie Patterson-Jones for attempting to disturb. Why aren’t you arresting those MAGAs now. You arrested those MAGAs; why aren’t you arresting those people? Bias!!

And so on and so on.

How do you even define “attempt to disturb,” which is far less strict as a standard than even the undefinable “disrupt”? How would you train police for enforcing it?

It’s just another source of public conflict with cops, who cannot possibly enforce with any equity the full scope of potential offense Haas just opened for them. It’s not humanly possible even if they want to.

For instance, the Lakeland Downtown Farmer’s Market is routinely “disturbed” by loud fake Christian “musicians” playing excessively loud, amplified music in Munn Park without a permit. They attempt and succeed in disturbing the event on behalf of a warped, intrusive, and unwanted evangelism.

Lakeland Police have said they are powerless to do anything about it. Brian Haas says clearly that they’re not. They should get their positions straight. Indeed, if I were Lakeland Police Chief Sam Taylor, I’d get Haas on the phone and ask, pointedly: what the hell are you thinking?

Full disclosure: my wife runs Downtown Lakeland’s events and the Farmer’s Market. And I get really annoyed at the disturbances when I attend. They are rude and selfish and impose themselves on thousands of people just trying to enjoy a lawful civic assembly.

But, as tempting as it is to fully weaponize Haas’ new law toy against these rude attempts to disturb, “attempt to disturb a lawful assembly” is impossibly broad madness as a prosecution and a real step in the direction of tyranny.

A narrow tailoring of amplification would make sense. Maybe clearly defined, equally applied specific protocols for police would make sense. But that would require these “leaders” to actually think and act as civic and legal leaders. I guarantee you nobody in law enforcement or local government has had a meeting to think through seriously what this charge means for life on the ground.

Why would they do something this stupid? To protect Grady Judd and Billy Strickland from further humiliation?

I am hard to shock when it comes to the capacity of Polk’s fake Christian dictatorship to do dumb, panicky, thoughtless things. But I have to confess: this shocks me. I can’t wrap my head around it.

So I would very much like to know the backstory of how this happened.

For instance, what is Judd and Strickland’s point of view on the charging bait-and-switch? Did they push for it? Oppose it? Go along with it? Did they know it was happening?

Here’s my theory of the case. But it’s just a theory. I would welcome the real story from anyone who knows it:

Strickland and Canady got their blood up at the event and goaded each other into revenge/intimidation against the uppity and uncouth Patterson-James. That’s why Canady shit-talked her in The Ledger like she was taunting the weird girl at Lakeland Christian School playground.

And then the thrill of vengeance wore off; and everyone, including Brian Haas, realized they were going to have to try a woman for felony panty battery on a cop in the context of Florida’s brutal and deeply unpopular new abortion ban, which was sponsored by Canady, who is set to be Florida speaker of the House in distant future.

Suddenly, this whole episode was no longer so emotionally satisfying.

And everyone realized Canady and Strickland and Judd were probably going to be deposed — and might have to testify at trial. I’m quite sure Strickland wasn’t prepared to answer a defense lawyer asking: Can you show us where the panties hurt you, Captain? Did you seek treatment for your wounds?

At the same time, our heroes didn’t want to let Patterson-James off scot free and admit the womanhunt and arrest and was a hilariously wasteful, rancid, indulgent abuse of power and policing resources. Unfortunately, the Sheriff’s Office only submitted charges related to how Patterson-James treated Strickland as a cop.

So dropping those charges meant dropping everything.

Enter the innovative Brian Haas, who solved this problem for Grady, Strickland, and Canady by criminalizing essentially everything at a lower level and dumping responsibility for enforcing it on the governments and police of cities (where most lawful assemblies and protests happen) who had nothing to do with causing this absurd problem in the first place.

Voila! Compromise.

If that’s not how it happened, please please tell the public so you can arrest me for laughing loudly at your next lawful assembly.