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The latest on the permit fray
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I predicted a few days ago that Wednesday's victory didn't mean that the battle over the permit for the March 14 anti-war and immigrant rights march was over, and I've been proven right — but the latest development was not what I had foreseen.
On Thursday, Andy Thayer, one of the main activists behind the demonstration, was back in court for an unrelated case. In November, Thayer helped organize a protest in response to the passage of California's Proposition 8 banning same-sex marriage. He had secured a permit for a rally at Federal Plaza, but at the end of the program a speaker urged the 5,000-strong crowd to take to the streets, and the crowd obliged.
Cmdr. Charles Keating and other officers who are on a first-name basis with Thayer singled him out an wrote him a citation. "The cops say that I alone was nailed for the parade permit violation on that day because it was my name on the Federal Plaza permit and that it would have been hazardous to stop the parade and write tickets for the other 4,999 people there," Thayer said. "I leave it to your judgment as to whether or not there was an additional agenda in play." Keating nailed Thayer with a pending felony charge in connection with a protest against then-President George W. Bush on January 2008.
Thayer was found guilty Thursday even though the prosecutor couldn't prove that he had incited the crowd to march. Thayer could have been fined up to $1,000; Senior Counsel Scott Sachnoff, who also happened to be the prosecutor in the January administrative hearing on the permit, offered to fine Thayer only $50, but he asked the judge to apply this additional penalty found in Section 10-8-330(t) of the Chicago Municipal Code:
Where the conduct of any parade or athletic event causes or results in a threat to public safety, the permit holder, including any affiliated organization identified on the permit application, and the parade or other event organizer, shall be barred from receiving another permit under this section for a period of one year.
"In other words, part of the penalty that the city was aiming to inflict for the parade permit violation on Nov. 15 was to nix all permits of any organization associated with me for the next year including, presumably, for our March 14th event," Thayer said. "This penalty in the ordinance is a patently unconstitutional violation of the First Amendment right of association, and we undoubtedly would have prevailed many months or years from now in court, but that would not have been very helpful for us in a few weeks time on March 14."
The judge didn't go for it, instead fining Thayer $500 plus $40 court costs.
