FREE SPEECH — A Riverside County jury on Friday acquitted two anti-abortion activists on charges of disturbing the peace and obstructing a peace officer in a November 2007 incident that should correct any illusions that thugs wearing badges confine their assaults on speech to leftist demonstrators.

For the facts we rely on the report of a not impartial source, ChristianNewsWire.com, but only because the local press has either not caught up with it yet or has decided it's not news.  It is.

Joey
Cox, Jason Conrad, and James Conrad and members of the pro-life youth
group Survivors, visited the college to peacefully exercise their
free speech rights by holding signs and handing out pro-life literature.

The pro-life demonstrators were told that all eight of them, including their signs and literature tables, were restricted to an area on campus too small to even contain the group and were required to remain there in order to stay to on campus.

Cox went into the police station to ask who issued this unconstitutional demand, he was escorted behind locked doors, shoved against a wall, handcuffed, and searched by three campus police officers.

During the search, the police discovered a digital recorder and they immediately tried to delete the recording, knowing that it contained evidence of their illegal actions.

Later the San Bernardino County District Attorney's office charged Mr. Cox with six counts of unlawfully recording a private conversation. At the time . . . he was standing next to a sign in the police station that read "The conversation at this office is electronically monitored to assure quality service."

"The jurors are to be commended for following the law and denouncing the police misconduct," Dana Cody, the director of the group, told LifeNews.com. "LLDF will seek damages in a civil suit against the officers for the violations of both the Conrads' and Mr. Cox's civil rights."

The incident occurred at Chaffey College in Ranch Cucamonga, The charges against Cox were dropped on the eve of trial, but the district attorney persisted with prosecuting the Conrads.  Jurors were apparently influenced by a videotape shot by another member of the pro-life group through a police office window, showing the Conrads' peaceable behavor—until the window it was covered with paper from the inside.  A more complete account of the incident is on a pdf linked here, which shows why the civil suit is likely to be formidable.