Elisha Strom sits in jail because she can’t make the $750 bail. Why bail was needed to assure her return to court is unclear, given that it’s unlikely that will abscond, leaving her 12 year old daughter behind in Virginia. Her crime? Blogging in the first degree. From WSLS 10 News :
Elisha Strom, 34, of Thaxton, is charged with one count of harassment of a police officer.
A search warrant on file in Bedford County circuit court claims on July 3rd, Strom posted the home address of a Charlottesville police sergeant.
It also shows she posted a picture of the officer getting into his unmarked patrol car in front of his home.The officer works for the Jefferson Area Drug Enforcement Task Force, or JADE.
Court records indicate the officer confiscated her computers, notebooks, and cameras.
Great in-depth reporting. Apparently, the rulebook for WSLS 10 limits each paragraph to a sentence, and requires that they never actually highlight the single most significant fact: Strom did this on her blog.
A police spokesman said, “We ain’t got no stinkin’ first amendment crap around here. And if you write something on that pad of yours I don’t like, I’ll toss your sorry butt in jail too.”
No, he didn’t really say that. I just made that up.
But this arrest, and the fact that Strom sits in a jail cell, caught the attention of the Washington Post, which provides a somewhat better description of events.
But this arrest, and the fact that Strom sits in a jail cell, caught the attention of the Washington Post, which provides a somewhat better description of events.
Elisha Strom, who appears unable to make the $750 bail, was arrested outside Charlottesville on July 16 when police raided her house, confiscating notebooks, computers and camera equipment. Although the Charlottesville police chief, Timothy J. Longo Sr., had previously written to Ms. Strom warning her that her blog posts were interfering with the work of a local drug enforcement task force, she was not charged with obstruction of justice or any similar offense. Rather, she was indicted on a single count of identifying a police officer with intent to harass, a felony under state law.
It’s fair to say that Ms. Strom was unusually focused on the Jefferson Area Drug Enforcement task force, a 14-year-old unit drawn mainly from the police departments of Charlottesville, Albemarle County and the University of Virginia. (Her blog at http:// , expresses the view that the task force is “nothing more than a group of arrogant thugs.”) In a nearly year-long barrage of blog posts, she published snapshots she took in public of many or most of the task force’s officers; detailed their comings and goings by following them in her car; mused about their habits and looks; hinted that she may have had a personal relationship with one of them; and, in one instance, reported that she had tipped off a local newspaper about their movements.iheartejade.blogspot.com
It’s rather naughty to post pics and home addresses of cops, particularly those working a narcotics task force and possibly undercover. But a crime? Did she harass them by doing nothing more than posting about them, using publicly available information to chronicle their daring work? And what of her free speech and press rights? Oh, I forget. They ain’t got none of them down their in Virginny.
Obviously, a judge thinks there’s probable cause to prosecute her. Not only that, but that she’s a flight risk. I can picture her sitting at a bar in Argentina, explaining to the former concentration camp guard next to her, “Yeah, I had to flee because they were going to lock me away for blogging.”
The WaPo has this to say:
Obviously, a judge thinks there’s probable cause to prosecute her. Not only that, but that she’s a flight risk. I can picture her sitting at a bar in Argentina, explaining to the former concentration camp guard next to her, “Yeah, I had to flee because they were going to lock me away for blogging.”
The WaPo has this to say:
Ms. Strom is not the most sympathetic symbol of free-speech rights. She has previously advocated creating a separate, all-white nation, and her blog veers from the whimsical to the self-righteous to the bizarre. But the real problem here is the Virginia statute, in which an overly broad, ill-defined ban on harassment-by-identification, specifically in regard to police officers, seems to criminalize just about anything that might irritate targets.
It should not be a crime to annoy the cops, whose raid on Ms. Strom’s house looks more like a fit of pique than an act of law enforcement. Some of her postings may have consisted of obnoxious speech, but they were nonetheless speech and constitutionally protected. That would hold true right up through her last blog post, written as the police raid on her home began at 7 a.m.: “Uh-Oh They’re Here.”
Two thoughts come to mind. As much as I’m disgusted by Strom’s politics, so what? That’s the beauty of America, room for disgusting political thought, where it will be roundly rejected in the marketplace of ideas. No sale. That’s how you get rid of disgusting ideas.
But not jail. Not prosecution. And yet that’s exactly what’s happened. And given Dan Solove’s complaint about too much discretion in the Henry Gates and Big Yawn cases, maybe this one, given its additional overlay of free speech, ought to be cause for scholarly concern. I hope her nasty politics don’t stand in the way of intellectual integrity.
However, one bone remains to be picked with WaPo. Notably missing from its editorial slam is Strom’s free press right. I take from this that WaPo, the real press, won’t give Strom, a lowly blogger, the credit of deserving the right to publish as if it was covered by that other clause of the First Amendment. I can’t help but wonder whether those who think the Washington Post isn’t so great would do the same.
H/T The anonymous Ed at Blawgreview.
Update: Jdog, posting at his alterego blog, ShaygetzPundit, offers his thoughts on Strom’s health and wellbeing:
Fine. If she happens to be out walking someday and a cow falls out of a clear blue sky to squash her flat, that would be a sad thing only because it would be a waste of a good cow. Got it.
He’s an animal lover, you know. He prefers them barbecued. but fried is good too. Everything tastes better fried. Yet Joel writes:
Damn. Well, you don’t always get the good poster boys and girls on this civil rights stuff. Yeah, sometimes you luck out and get a real hero like Rosa Parks, or Savana Redding.What did Ernesto do to get into the middle of this?
But most of the time it’s scumbags like Ernesto Miranda or Elisha Strom.
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And people tell me I’m nuts when I say we live in a police state.
“You’re still able to blog,” they say. “That proves we don’t live in a police state.”
I wonder what they’ll say now….
Perhaps that’s not why people tell you you’re nuts? Just saying…