Four arrested outside Wu’s house
Four women were arrested and criminally charged with disturbing the peace after protesting outside Mayor Michelle Wu’s Roslindale home Wednesday morning.
“(Expletive) your ordinance,” the woman can be heard chanting as a Boston Police sergeant walks up to them in a video by External Affairs Porter, a Boston YouTuber.
“An Ordinance Regarding Targeted Residential picketing,” proposed by Wu at the end of February and adopted by City Council at the end of March, bans picketing a targeted residence between the hours of 9 p.m. and 9 a.m. and is enforced by fines.
The protesters — Marie Brady, 51; Shannon Llewellyn, 46; Danielle Mazzeo, 41; and Catherine Vitale, 32 — were arrested within the banned hours, according to the police report, at 7:45 a.m.
All four were charged not only with a violation of the ordinance, but also with the criminal charges of disturbing the peace. The police say they received multiple 911 complaints on the noise.
Llewellyn banged on a metal pot and the whole group chanted things like “Shame on Wu,” and “Free speech is not a crime,” according to a video.
An unknown woman approached the group to express frustration with the noise, according to the police report, and Llewelyn responded that “If we were yelling for abortion rights, you would be cool with it, though, isn’t that right?”
Ilya Feoktistov, the Boston attorney representing all four defendants, called it an occurrence of “selective prosecution” of free speech laws in Boston under the Wu administration.
“The ordinance simply states that it will be civilly handled, but the commonwealth charged it criminally,” Feoktistov told the Herald. “It’s like being charged criminally for littering … or a parking ticket.”
Feoktistov said that the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court already contended with the issue of disturbing the peace charges while protesting 50 years ago in Commonwealth v. Orlando, in which the court wrote “We have construed the Massachusetts disturbing the peace law so that it excludes protected expression from its scope.”
“We’re not going to idly stand by while citizen’s rights are being violated,” Shana Cottone, the president of the group Boston First Responders United and an occasional protester at Wu’s house, told the Herald Wednesday. “We will utilize all judicial avenues to ensure civil and constitutional rights are protected for all people, whether Michelle Wu likes it or not.”
Wu’s office did not return a request for comment late Wednesday afternoon.