Tasering Of Student Andrew Meyer Ruled ‘Within Guidelines.’

 

We are living in a world where it is now OK for five police officers to release repeatedly 50,000 volts of electricity into a twenty-one year old college student, who was armed with only a book. The Florida Department of Law Enforcement in a three-hundred page study that lasted less than five weeks, has determined that officers were justified in using a Taser to repeatedly stun into submission Andrew Meyer, the University of Florida student who garnered national attention September 17, while attending a John Kerry speech.

As I wrote last month,

“Meyer is a college senior who came prepared to discuss with the U.S. Senator, in an open Q and A session held on university grounds, issues that led to Mr. Kerry’s loss of the 2004 presidential election. Meyer, in addressing Kerry, held up a book he suggested the Senator might want to read. The book, Greg Palast’s ‘Armed Madhouse,’ from which Meyer based several questions, and with which Kerry said he was familiar, suggests hundreds of thousands of votes not counted were in part the reason George Bush was able to retain the presidency.”

What is astonishing to me is the lack of outrage exhibited by the American press. This, to me, is clearly a federal civil rights case. Three hundred students protested the day after Meyers’ tasering and subsequent arrest. The ACLU and Amnesty International “condemned” the use of a taser by the police. Senator Kerry, not surprisingly, “showed a lack of leadership” by allowing the police to use force, and by not interrupting their attack. But the press, which has a personal investment in any and all First Amendment issues, has spent little time investigating this issue, and little time reporting it.

The irony here, though not widely reported, is that the forum was held on Constitution Day, an official American federal holiday to honor our Constitution. In fact, the law “mandates that all publicly funded educational institutions provide educational programming on the history of the American Constitution on that day.”

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Andrew Meyer, Meet John Kerry. Senator Kerry, Meet A Lost Opportunity To Defend Freedom Of Speech.

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Tags: Andrew Meyer, civil liberties, First Amendment, John Kerry, leadership, liberty, News, Police, taser, The Constitution, University of Florida, YouTube