Punished for Free Speech?

[ndebord]

White House protestor charged for outburst

The protester who disrupted a White House ceremony for Chinese President Hu Jintao was charged with a federal crime punishable by up to six months in jail.

Wenyi Wang, 47, a doctor who lives in New York, got onto the White House lawn Thursday morning as a credentialed journalist for a newspaper associated with the Falun Gong.

She was arrested by the Secret Service after she began yelling from a media platform.

http://www.upi.com/NewsTrack/view.php?StoryID=20060422-014832-8456r


P.S.

Wenyi Wang said, "Stop oppressing the Falun Gong," "Your time is running out," and "Anything you have done will come back to you in this lifetime." To George W. Bush she said, "Stop him from persecuting Falun Gong!"

She has been charged by the Feds under a law that says, in part: anyone who "intimidates, coerces, threatens, or harasses a foreign official or an official guest or obstructs a foreign official in the performance of his duties" face up to six months in jail.

Under the theory that the punishment should fit the crime, does this act of protest meet that standard?

[Lindsey]

Under the theory that the punishment should fit the crime, does this act of protest meet that standard?
Hard to say, since she was speaking in Chinese. ;-)

It's not the first time a press pass has been used to voice a protest; Bush I was subjected to something along the same line during his term as president. And the fact that he cooled it out and didn't immediately have the guy hauled away by the Secret Service took the guy completely by surprise and left him, quite literally, speechless. "This American Life" produced a segment a year or two ago with the protester involved in that incident recounting the story, with great embarassment in retrospect, which made for a pretty funny narrative. Oh, yeah, here it is: Act Two of this program (http://207.70.82.73/pages/descriptions/04/257.html).

--Lindsey

[Judy G. Russell]

Yep, it fits. She's not being prosecuted for what she said. She's being prosecuted for the circumstances under which she said it: she snuck into a restricted area under false pretenses for no purpose other than to scream at Hu and embarrass him (and/or Bush) in that setting. If she'd done exactly the same thing right outside the White House gates, she'd have been 100% protected.