Granny-18

More proof that minority groups get away with violating the law.

Eighteen "grannies" who were swept up by the New York City police, handcuffed, loaded into police vans and jailed for four and a half hours were acquitted yesterday of charges that they blocked the entrance to the military recruitment center in Times Square when they tried to enlist.

After six days of a nonjury trial, the grandmothers and dozens of their supporters filled a courtroom in Manhattan Criminal Court to hear whether they would be found guilty of two counts of disorderly conduct for refusing to move, which could have put them in jail for 15 days. The women call their group the Granny Peace Brigade and said they wanted to join the armed forces and thus offer their lives for those of younger soldiers in Iraq.

So an anti-war group now are offering their lives for younger soldiers is the facts? Why do I find this claim disingenuous?

The women -— from 59 to 91, many gray-haired, some carrying canes, one legally blind, one with a walker -— listened gravely and in obvious suspense as Judge Neil E. Ross delivered a carefully worded 15-minute speech in which he said his verdict was not a referendum on the Police Department, the defendants' antiwar message or, indeed, their very grandmotherhood.

But, he said, there was credible evidence that the grandmothers had left room for people to enter the recruitment center, and that therefore they had been wrongly arrested.

Next time you want to protest remember to leave space for other people, that way your protest won't be considered disturbing the peace or trespassing. This judge has got to be smoking something real good if he thinks this isn't a pass.

The women, sitting in the jury box at the invitation of the judge, to make it easier for them to see and hear, let out a collective "Oh!" and burst into applause, rushing forward, as quickly as women their age could rush, to hug and kiss their lawyers, Norman Siegel, the former head of the New York Civil Liberties Union, and Earl Ward.

"Listen to your granny, she knows best," crowed Joan Wile, 74, a retired cabaret singer and jingle writer who was one of the defendants.

Yeah, if granny is a crack-pot she's still right because she's sodding OLD. I'm certain experience as a cabaret singer helps in those decisions on national defense strategy.

If Mr. McConnell stuck to prose, Mr. Siegel did not hesitate to offer poetry. The defendants, he said in his closing, "tried to alert an apathetic public to the immorality, the illegality, the destructiveness and the wrongness of the war in Iraq." The grannies could not be punished for failing to obey a police command if that command violated their constitutional right to protest, he said.

That's right. Nor should they be punished for disrupting other people's rights or any violation of the law. Protests and first amendment rights trump all other law.

Double standards at their finest.