Former NFL player tackles Florida city over First Amendment

Filed 2h ago · Via Courthouse News · The Buffoon Desk

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Kevin MacLeod · incompetech.com · CC BY 4.0

Photo: Rijksmuseum · CC0 · via Wikimedia Commons

Warren Sapp has sued the city of Tampa, alleging officials violated his First Amendment rights by trespassing him from city hall after a disturbance near a September 17 council meeting. Sapp says he was there to pick up paperwork when council chair Alan Clendenin halted proceedings, had the chamber doors locked, and called police, who removed him from the building.

Video shows Clendenin declaring the people involved 'out of order' and saying they refused to leave when asked. The city, as institutions facing lawsuits tend to do, declined to comment on pending litigation.

This is not Sapp's first runaround with local government: he was trespassed from a Tampa city building in February after a public-records visit, and picked up a misdemeanor in Hollywood, Florida in May for entering a restricted area with a camera. He is seeking a jury trial and nominal damages, represented by Anthony F. Sabatini.

The full dispatch is available from the source below.

✒ FROM THE EDITORIAL DESK

A public meeting that has to lock its own doors is telling you something about how it thinks the public should behave, which is quietly and somewhere else. Whether Sapp is a principled records-requester or a fellow who enjoys poking a hornet's nest with a camera, the city keeps handing him the same stick to poke it with. Three trespass encounters in a year is not a coincidence, it's a pattern, and patterns are exactly what juries get paid to look at.

Source: Read the original at Courthouse News → Scored: The Show Must Be Go · Kevin MacLeod · CC BY 4.0

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