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Feds block Boston police testimony; ACLU joins Picariello legal defense team
Associate Justice Paul K. Leary was annoyed. "Oh, this is a zoo. I want these people out of the courtroom and a guard at the door."
Associate Justice Paul K. Leary was annoyed. "Oh, this is a zoo. I want these people out of the courtroom and a guard at the door." This was how the judge reacted to friends of Richard Picariello, as they began to enter the room on the morning of January 19. It was Picariello’s fifteenth appearance in Boston Municipal Court since being arrested—twice—in March, 2004. That seems like a lot of court time for the kind of offenses Picariello is supposed to have committed. The cops say they busted him the first time for putting a political sticker on a telephone pole—although they didn’t actually see him doing this. A week later, some other cops spotted him in a crowd, made up mostly of labor union members who were loudly and belligerently protesting outside a Bush fund-raiser. The police report said that Picariello, "known from prior pictures and involvement in prior demonstrations," was arressted that day because he "became loud and belligerent, to the dismay of the crowd." Picariello’s attorneys are convinced that he is being singled out for political reasons. His supporters believe that the arrests are linked to the a coordinated program of surveillance and harrassment aimed at stifling political dissent. There were a number of political arrests in the weeks leading up to the Democratic National Convention, including the Lafayette 8 in Cambridge, whose trial is still pending. The reason Picariello has not come to trial is that the Boston Police have refused defense attorneys’ requests for files on their client. Jurists call this "failure to comply with discovery." One document that did come out through discovery was a brief memo from a Boston police detective saying that Richard Picariello’s name was mentioned at a police briefing just before the Bush fundraiser. The case is beginning to draw wider interest. On January 19, for the first time, a staff attorney for the American Civil Liberties Union joined the defense team. The U.S. Attorney was also present for the case. Before assigning Justice Rosalind H. Miller to the trial, Justice Leary asked the U.S. Attorney if she were acceptable to him. In turned out that Picariello’s attorneys had to ask Justice Miller for yet another postponement. Boston police officers, whom the defense had wanted to question, failed to answer their subpoenas. The U.S. Attorney had moved to assert "federal privilege" and quash the subpoenas. He argued that by reason of their participation in the Joint Terrorism Task Force (JTTF), these Boston police officers had become federal agents, and thus not subject to a local subpoena. A JTTF is a special team comprised of local, state, and federal agents. It was first used in the 1970s, following exposure of the FBI’s illegal COINTELPRO domestic surveillance operation. Justice Miller said, "I have no idea how that operates." She ordered the two sides to produce written arguments and set a new trial date of March 6.