Occupiers said they’re hopeful the D.C. city council will modify a crime bill that they initially said targeted Occupy-like protests.
As it currently stands, the bill would expand portions of the city’s code on disorderly conduct, banning anyone from blocking a sidewalk or a park and forbidding protesters from returning to a restricted area that they’d been asked to leave.
Occupiers cried foul, saying that the provisions stifled free speech. D.C. lawmakers said that revisions to the city’s disorderly conduct laws in 2010 had unintentionally forced the U.S. Attorney’s office to handle protest-related disorderly conduct charges, and that they were simply trying to move prosecutorial responsibility to District prosecutors.
At a hearing for the city’s Committee on the Judiciary, council member Phil Mendelson, who proposed the crime bill, heard testimony from two dozen activists and Occupiers who said the bill would restrict their freedom of speech.
“This should be titled the Anti-Occupy, Anti-Free Speech Amendment,” said Mara Verheyden-Hilliard, the executive director of the Partnership for Civil Justice Fund. She called language in the bill “hopelessly vague.”
But a representative from the U.S. Attorney’s office later said in testimony that the provision banning protesters from blocking a park could be problematic, and protesters are hoping that that portion will be excised from the bill in mark up, said Jeff Light, an attorney for Occupy D.C.
“I think the parties will all be able to come to some solution that doesn’t restrict First Amendment rights,” Light said.
