Here's what's going on with Maricopa County Attorney Rachel Mitchell trying to prosecute some protesters - both our Arizona Senate President Warren Petersen and House Speaker Steve Montenegro have now filed a brief in the case pointing out that she is violating our state's anti-SLAPP law, which prohibits litigation or criminal prosecution in retaliation for exercising the First Amendment.
Petersen and Montenegro provided a hypothetical analogy to explain their argument. The protesters had violated a minor law, a curfew. So if a town councilman directs police to target an activist opponent for a minor infraction like speeding to silence criticism, anti-SLAPP dismissal is warranted — even though speeding is unlawful and unrelated to speech — because it chills participation.
They said if the law only applied when someone’s expression was lawful, it would have no “practical effect.” They described Mitchell’s filing as “near-incoherency,” “strange” and “as textually unfounded as it is intuitively unsettling.”
They also criticized AG Kris Mayes, noting that a judge appeared likely to throw out her prosecution of Arizona’s alternate electors for Trump in the 2020 election due to violating the anti-SLAPP law.
Read the rest of the article at The Epoch Times Arizona
