Good news! First Amendment is still go!

By LMagnuson on Mon, Mar 10, 2008 1:53 pm

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Performance artist Milan Kohout's criminal case was dismissed on Friday, letting him off charges of peddling without a license. By the end of it all, even the prosecutor was calling for the case to be dropped.

"I grew up in a totalitarian system which misused the law to prosecute dissidents for their critical expression," wrote the native of former Czechoslovakia on his web page. "For the government to use bogus charges to punish artists for their expression is a step toward that kind of system."

On November 9, Kohout, 52, stood outside the downtown Bank of America headquarters holding a sign that read, "Nooses on sale." Police, taking his message and the pile of nooses at his feet literally, confiscated his materials for being an unlicensed a transient vendor. Kohout meant it as a symbolic reaction to the bank's involvement in the sub-prime mortgage crisis.

"I wanted to wake up people to the fact that if we continue to support the economic system that causes this kind of suffering for the people we are literally putting a noose around all of our heads."

Kohout is now asking the Commonwealth to return his nooses and sign. Good luck with that, they should be right behind the Aqua Teen Hunger Force LED's.