BREAKING NEWS: case dismissed against Leo protester

NORTHEAST HARBOR, May 12, 2023 - The disorderly conduct charge against Bar Harbor resident Eli Durand-McDonnell for protesting against dark money operative Leonard Leo last summer has been dismissed, District Attorney Robert Granger informed the Quietside Journal.

https://theqsjournal.substack.com/p/breaking-news-arrested-protester

“Lincoln, I wanted you to be the first to know that I just filed a dismissal in this case. This is the matter you took an interest in where Mr. McDonnell was arrested for disorderly conduct after yelling obscenities at Mr. Leo & his family in Northeast Harbor.  It was scheduled for a Motion hearing tomorrow but this dismissal resolves the matter entirely.

“I assumed responsibility for the case last month, examined the factual evidence and undertook considerable research on the applicability of the State’s disorderly conduct law that in some instances can intrude upon constitutionally-protected freedom of expression. This case was on the precipice between criminal conduct as defined by Maine law and lesser distasteful expression.  As the U.S. Supreme Court noted in Cohen v. California,  403 U.S. 15 (1971), ”[w]hile the particular four-letter word being litigated here is perhaps more distasteful than most others of its genre, it is nevertheless often true that one man’s vulgarity is another’s lyric.  Indeed, we think it is largely because governmental officials cannot make principled distinctions in this area that the Constitution leaves matters of taste and style so largely to the individual.”  The Court continued, “[o]ne of the prerogatives of American citizenship is the right to criticize public men and measures  --and that means not only informed and responsible criticism but the freedom to speak foolishly and without moderation.

“Conduct and expression run afoul of the law, however, where words “which by their very utterance inflict injury or tend to incite an immediate breach of the peace . . . .”  See State v. John W., 418 A.2d 1097, 1102 (Me. 1980).  Protesters need to consider that when their conduct crosses this line, they can expect prosecution. Distinctions and context of encounters are critical to prosecutorial decisions.

“It is unlikely we would reach a trial of this matter for an additional year or more given the significant backlog of criminal cases clogging the docket. Even if a jury found Mr. McDonnell’s conduct criminal here,  it was on the de minimis side of the equation. I could not imagine a Court would impose anything other than a small fine on a conviction. Hence, this case was on the lower end of our priority list. One of my primary goals has been to focus our attention on prosecutions involving  violent offenders rather than getting bogged down in cases in which reasonable persons could arrive at different opinions. We have far more serious cases to focus our attention on such as drug trafficking that results in overdose deaths, sexual assaults, manslaughter cases, kidnapping, robberies, burglaries and the like. We are currently short one prosecutor and our case load is up over 27% from this same time last year. As of May 5, 2023, we have 1,602 cases pending in Prosecutorial District 7, (Hancock and Washington Counties).  Our caseload is up 53.3% in Hancock County over May 2019, and Washington County cases are up 27.1% during that same period. Our staffing has gone unchanged.  In short, we are stretched to the limit right now.  If we are to make serious efforts to tackle the case backlog problem, hard decisions must be made. Those decisions are sometimes difficult for victims to appreciate but if we don’t get our caseload under control the entire system will collapse.”