Ag-Gag Law Ruled Unconstitutional -

[Jude Iam]

let the truth be available everywhere! reveal it, label it - may we all know everything.
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An Ag-Gag Law Has Been Ruled Unconstitutional
for the First Time
https://www.takepart.com/article/201...tutional-idaho

An Idaho federal judge ruled that the state’s law banning undercover investigations on farms violates the First Amendment.

Aug 4, 2015
by Willy Blackmore - TakePart’s Food editor.

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After years of animal rights activists saying the spate of state laws outlawing undercover investigations of farming operations—so-called ag-gag laws—violate free speech rights, a federal judge has ruled the very same.

On Monday, U.S. Chief Judge B. Lynn Winmill of the District of Idaho said the state’s 2014 law—which came in response to an exposé video produced by the animal rights group Mercy for Animals that went inside an Idaho dairy farm—both violated the First Amendment and selectively targeted critics of the industry. It’s the first time such a law has been struck down on constitutional grounds.

In his summary opinion, the judge wrote that “the effect of the statute will be to suppress speech by undercover investigators and whistleblowers concerning topics of great public importance: the safety of the public food supply, the safety of agricultural workers, the treatment and health of farm animals, and the impact of business activities on the environment.”

“The facts show the state’s purpose in enacting the statute was to protect industrial animal agriculture by silencing its critics," he wrote.

It’s the kind of language you might find in an op-ed from the head of an animal rights group. The judge went on to reference Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle, the 1906 novel that exposed harsh conditions in the meatpacking industry and led to widespread reforms in Chicago’s stockyards. To research the book, Sinclair spent seven weeks working in slaughterhouses.

“The reference to Upton Sinclair and The Jungle is significant,” said Matthew Liebman, one of the Animal League Defense Fund’s lead attorneys on the case. “As the judge noticed, if this legislation had been in place when Sinclair lied about who he was to get a job and write The Jungle, he would have been a criminal.”
To be fair to Sinclair, a dyed-red-in-the-wool socialist, he was more concerned with the workers than with food safety and animal welfare, the issues that became the book’s legacy.

Were the book set in Idaho in 2014, the author could have been convicted on misdemeanor charges punishable by a maximum sentence of one year in jail, a $5,000 fine, and restitution. Under the law, it was illegal to enter a facility or obtain records “by force, threat, misrepresentation or trespass”; acquire a job “with the intent to cause economic or other injury to the facility’s operations”; make an unauthorized audio or video recording; or damage facilities.

But as far as ag industry advocateRuss Hendricks is concerned, any contemporaries of Sinclair should be treated as criminals if they lie or misrepresent themselves to gain access to a farming facility.

When asked what he thought of the argument that the legislation violated the First Amendment, Hendricks, the director of government affairs for the Farm Bureau’s Idaho chapter, quickly said no and, after a pause, repeated himself.

“That argument we found wholly unpersuasive,” he continued. “That’s a misunderstanding of the First Amendment. Certainly anybody has a right to write about anything they want, to say anything they want—but they can’t trespass or misrepresent themselves to gain information. That is not part of the First Amendment.”
If activists do not have permission to record audio or video on a farm, “they have violated that person’s property rights,” he said.

That’s one of the primary arguments made in favor of what those in the agriculture industry call farm protection laws. But as activists and lawyers like Liebman point out, there are already numerous laws on the books that protect the property rights of farm owners. And the courts have lent support to that notion, it seems, by throwing out ag-gag charges while pursuing charges for violating long-standing criminal trespass statutes.

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