Nick Nefedro

Nick Nefedro, the Gypsy psychic who challenged Montgomery County's fortune-telling ban and won, tells City Desk that he plans to come back to Bethesda and start looking for a place to re-open his psychic shop. 

Well, just as soon as the time for filing an appeal is up. The county has 90 days to dispute the June 10 Maryland Court of Appeals ruling, which found the county law an unconstitutional restriction on free speech.

The appellate court rejected the county's argument that fortune-telling is "inherently fraudulent," writing, "While we recognize that some fortunetellers may make fraudulent statements, just as some lawyers or journalists may, we see nothing in the record to suggest that fortunetelling always involves fraudulent statements. Indeed, fortunetellers, like magicians or horoscope writers, are able to provide entertainment to their customers or some other benefit that does not deceive those who receive their speech."

One wonders, incidentally, if fortune tellers should object to being lumped in with lawyers and journalists!

"I felt it was my civil rights," says Nefedro, who now lives in New York, "it was a question of freedom of speech, a question of freedom of religion, and my civil rights as a Romani Gypsy. I felt that ruling was, I guess, all of that."

Photo by Darrow Montgomery

Since pretty much everyone has the day off except journalists, the downtime has been enormous.  I got lunch (a first in a long time). I paid off a cellphone bill and changed my cellphone plan. I even faxed some healthcare paperwork to a lab that was a week late. And I talked for a good while with an old college buddy. But I also got to thinking about the District's own recent civil rights victories.

The biggies that come to mind are the D.C. Council's passing of the gay-marriage bill. And the settlements that have come out of the protester cases. Both the Becker and the Barham cases awarded historic sums and legit reforms concerning police tactics. The Pearl Beale case also was rightfully lauded for its own historic settlement over the death of a D.C. Jail inmate.

What do you think were our biggest civil rights victories in recent years? Cathy Lanier becoming police chief?  Getting rid of the control board? Gay marriage? Pershing Park?

*file photo by Darrow Montgomery.

David Schroer had already accepted an offer to become the Congressional Research Service’s terrorism specialist when he revealed plans to begin the new post as Diane Schroer. Library officials swiftly rescinded their offer. Schroer teamed up with the American Civil Liberties Union and filed a sex discrimination lawsuit in 2005. A federal judge in Washington awarded Schroer $491,190 earlier this year. On Tuesday, the Department of Justice let the deadline pass for appealing the decision.

A Metro section-front story reports how Espina’s son, Manuel de Jesus Espina Jacome, who watched his father die, stood up at a community meeting last week and asked county police officials: “What are you doing with assassin police officers?”

It’s not the first time Jackson’s version of an arrest didn’t jibe with other facts.

The Post has another story today about a traffic stop Jackson made in Hyattsville in May last year that led to the arrest of Shawn M. Leake. In his report, Jackson said Leake came out of his car swinging and “even tackled me to the ground.” The only problem is the police video, obtained by Leake’s lawyer and given to the Post, shows Jackson pulling Leake out of the car, slugging him and throwing him to the ground.

County prosecutors dropped the charges against Leake. Nevertheless, Jackson was cleared by an internal police investigation.

About three months after arresting Leake, Jackson shot and killed Espina while moonlighting as a security guard at the apartment complex where the confrontation occurred. Jackson has maintained that Espina was violently resisting arrest. But his son and another witness allege he was on the ground and not trying to fight back when the officer beat him and then pulled the trigger. While he wasn’t on the police payroll that night, Jackson is still on administrative duty until the internal inquiry into Espina’s death wraps. That investigation has dragged on for so long one can’t help but question whether the department is waiting for the case to fade from public view before deciding Jackson’s fate.

It makes you wonder what’s going on inside the P.G. County police force. Two other officers are also on administrative duty pending the outcome of an investigation into another traffic-stop incident involving a Latino, the Post reports.

Today’s Post goes through the motions of listing “signs” that police and the Latino community are rebuilding their tattered relationship. But it smacks of public relations spin. The fact that Jackson remains on the force nearly a year after Espina’s death – especially since it wasn’t the first time his version of events clashed with other evidence – seems sign enough that little has changed.

These days, Nevada Sen. John Ensign's playing the role pretty well.

Ensign's the guy who introduced the amendment to D.C. House Voting Rights Act last week that gutted that gun laws passed by the D.C. Council and signed by the mayor. It looks like his legislative maneuver has the potential to derail the larger bill, which would leave Ensign pleased as punch.

The senator strolled up to the Senate daily press gallery this afternoon to talk guns, voting rights and vouchers with a gaggle of reporters. LL was not present, but frequent City Desk commenter Ryan Grim was, and he passes on audio of the discussion.

The recording starts with a question about whether Ensign would be OK with separating the gun language from the D.C. House Voting Rights Act.

"It's best to keep it on the bill simply because if it's taken off the bill, there's no guarantee that it won't just get shoved someplace in the dark, and they can't guarantee that. We've seen that too many times."

Then things turned to vouchers. Ensign lamented the fact that it looked unlikely that the Senate would have the opportunity to strip language threatening voucher reauthorization from spending bills: "They know they can pass the reauthorization and this program dies anyway because the D.C. city council will vote to kill this bill....The problem that I have with that is that people are voting with their feet; they are saying—these families, these poor kids are saying that they want...their kids to have a better education than what the D.C. public schools are allowing."

Then a reporter raised the fact that in the rest of the country, Congress doesn't get to meddle in local educational affairs.

Responded the senator, "First of all, under the Constitution we absolutely have the constitutional authority to regulate Washington, D.C. We have that guarantee under the constitution. Now, having said that, also one of the reasons that D.C. was chosen [for vouchers] was because of the constitutional authority and to prove whether the system works."

A reporter then raised the fact that Eleanor Holmes Norton is having a civil-rights group "score" a House rules committee vote on the D.C. House Voting Rights Act, much as the National Rifle Association is threatening to.

"Well, first of all, the D.C. voting rights bill all by itself is completely unconstitutional...and if she wants to change it then she needs to change the constitution, that would be the proper forum to address it."

Would you support an amendment? asked another reporter.

"I would not support that simply because I believe that the founders wanted to see the District as not controlled by any of the states. There were a lot of political reasons that they did that and I believe that they had a lot of wisdom in doing that, and that has nothing to do in my mind with civil rights."

Ensign went on to point out that the District gets a whole lot of federal funds. To which a reporter pointed out that it can't say how much of it gets spent—"Isn't there a bit of a conflict there?"

"I go back to the constitution. The constitution didn't want the politics of the city that housed the seat of government—that was the whole compromise: Let's have a District of Columbia that was not part of the states. There was a lot of wisdom in that because they would be disproportionately powerful."

After speaking about the omnibus spending bill now wending its way through the Hill, Ensign fielded a simply question: "Is the gun amendment designed to move forward or to implode the D.C. vote legislation?"

"The gun amendment is to, figuring that the D.C. bill was moving forward and there was no way to stop it—we didn't think we could stop it—so on a bill that was moving forward, to restore the 2nd Amendment rights to people in Washington, D.C."

Then one reporter asked Ensign if he'd rather see the House Voting Rights Act defeated or see his gun legislation enacted into law.

Said Ensign, "I'd rather see the legislation go down and my legislation passed."

Any room for compromise with D.C. folks on the gun language? a reporter then asked.

"I dunno. They haven't offered it," Ensign said before expounding on the District's gun laws: "What they've done now is just made the burdens too great on gun ownership—way too burdensome, much more burdensome then anywhere....Matter of fact, I think they are more burdensome than any place in the country. and when you have the highest murder rate of anyplace in the country for decades and the strictest gun control laws, it doesn't seem to make a lot of sense."

Later another reporter asked, "Do you oppose the idea of District residents having a vote in Congress?"

"Yes," Ensign replied, "because of the constitution."

He then expressed some extremely measured support for retrocession to Maryland though he did have some awareness of reality: "I understand Maryland doesn't want it."

LL's old colleague Grim then asked Ensign his opinion, given all of his meddling in District affairs, of home rule.

"I mean, there is nothing wrong with giving them some say-so over what they do," Ensign said, "but you still have to have the federal government oversight."

"They'll be out around the route," Verheyden-Hilliard says of the legal observers. "They'll be out there monitoring the police action and the Secret Service action." She couldn't say how many observers will be volunteering for the inauguration detail. The plans are still be worked out.

But she's already noticed a little something about the inauguration windup. It isn't all hope. "I think it's very distressing that the Secret Service is making Washington so inhospitable for people." By people she means us and the out-of-towners who are coming because the event means so much to them. Instead, they get road closures, and bridge closings, and fortified security zones. We get gridlock.

"At the same time, the Secret Service seems to be bending over backwards to help the corporate law firms and lobbyists that have all the office buildings that line Pennsylvania Avenue to make sure their caterers and Hors d'œuvres get in," the lawyer notes.

I asked her about the D.C. Police. The department has a bad history handling massive crowds: "It's the usual situation when they have huge numbers of police working many hours a day, that doesn't always go that well."

Verheyden-Hilliard knows what she's talking about. She also has been battling the checkpoint issue.

Anyone remember Pershing Park? Lanier had her hands in that fiasco which resulted in hundreds of people being rounded up, arrested and hogtied. It also resulted in a lot of lawsuits that cost the city tons of dough. And proved to be a huge blemish on the career of then-Chief Charles H. Ramsey.

I can't imagine anyone getting hogtied by some thumper cops. But just in case, you should know who to call if you feel your rights are being violated. You should call on the Partnership for Civil Justice. The organization's team of lawyers did brilliant, tough work on the Pershing Park cases and have taken strong positions regarding the inauguration and making sure it is as civilian friendly as possible.

The partnership has already helped free the inauguration from being overly privatized. And have put in work on the free-speech beat.The group offers a fresh antidote to a city very much enthralled with Obama and seemingly willing to give up huge chunks of downtown real estate to the rich and connected for the coming week.

Update 4:02 p.m. The AP is reporting that inaugural security is going to be the highest ever.

LL reported Friday, and the Examiner reported today, about Cheh's proposed bill, which aimed to give police the ability to put the kibosh on allegedly hostile protests by a group called Stop Huntingdon Animal Cruelty. Labor and civil-rights groups raised immediate questions.

She did not cite those concerns this morning, when, at a council press conference, Cheh told reporters she won't be pressing the issue at tomorrow's council meeting. She explained that she has met with police and there's been an effort to clarify how existing laws can be enforced. "Given that there's been movement there," she says, "what I will do is I will not move forward on Tuesday."

Cheh says she still plans to explore permanent legislation when the new council term begins in January.

From my colleague Radley Balko:

In California, the Proposition 8 ban on gay marriage actually failed among white voters, 51-49.  It was the 70 percent support from black voters that put the measure over the top.

Florida's ban would have passed among white voters 60-40.  But it passed among blacks 71-29....

Kind of a sad irony if in helping achieve one civil rights milestone, last night's historical black turnout also helped perpetuate state-sanctioned discrimination against gay couples who wish to marry.

From Andrew Sullivan:

Yes, it is heart-breaking: it is always hard to be in a tiny minority whose rights and dignity are removed by a majority. It's a brutal rebuke to the state supreme court, and enshrinement in California's constitution that gay couples are now second-class citizens and second class human beings. Massively funded by the Mormon church, a religious majority finally managed to put gay people in the back of the bus in the biggest state of the union. The refusal of Schwarzenegger to really oppose the measure and Obama's luke-warm opposition didn't help. And cruelly, a very hefty black turnout, as feared, was one of the factors that defeated us, according to the exit poll.

Historically, black voters who have overlapping allegiances to fundamentalist Christianity and progressive ideologies don't see voting against sodomites while citing institutional racism as a moral hazard.

But for some reason, I felt liked I'd been kicked in the gut when I saw the exit poll data.