That’s awesome!
The situation that landed 58-year-old Nancy Genovese in jail for four days in 2010 was subject to quite a bit of interpretation on the part of her arresting officer.
The Long Island native might have been taking a picture of a decorative helicopter in the hopes of using it as a feature on a “Support our Troops” website after leaving a rifle range with her legally owned and registered weapon. Or she might have been taking surveillance photographs of the Gabreski Airport at the Westhampton Beach Air National Guard base with a deadly weapon in her car.
Guess which of these interpretations won the day?
Four years after her incarceration, Genovese has been awarded $1.2 million by a federal jury which determined that Suffolk County had been falsely prosecuted her. This undue arrest may have been forgivable but for Genovese’s claims that her arresting officer made it clear that he was discriminating against her for her political beliefs.
Southhampton cops searched her and found a legally owned rifle and shotgun that she was transporting from a nearby rifle range. She contends a deputy sheriff arrived on the scene later and said to her, “I bet you are one of those Tea Party people.” When Genovese said she’s gone to Tea Party rallies, he allegedly said, “You’re a real right-winger, aren’t you?” and “You are a ‘Teabagger’” and then added that she’d be arrested for terrorism to make an example of other “right wingers.”
“Ms. Genovese was subjected to a level of abuse because [authorities] did not share the same political views as she did and saw this as an excuse to deny her even the most basic civil rights,” her lawyer Frederick Brewington said.
It seems ludicrous today to profile a middle age woman as a terrorist conspirator, but this was a period in which the Democratic Party and their allies in the media were doing their best to suggest that the Tea Party was a potentially violent group of malcontents. That association culminated in the 2011 shooting of Rep. Gabrielle Giffords by an unstable young man. Despite having no links to the Tea Party, the press and Democratic politicians spent weeks attempting to link Giffords’ shooter to Sarah Palin.
“One thing is clear, Palin, who has been at the center of so much of the political discourse and discussion the last two years, is right back in the center, you might even say the crosshairs, whether she wants to be there or not,” an ABC News report on the absurdly tenuous links between Giffords’ shooting and Palin read.
Many issuing this dubious claim made it clear that their goal was not to purify political discourse, but to shut their opponents up.
Protect and serve. Such a nice officer.
Thanks for posting. Good news is hard to come by these days.
Two rifles and a couple of hundred rounds of ammunition constitutes an arsenal according the the MSM...
That $1.2 million came from the taxpayers.
It ought to have come from the democrat prosecutors and police, PERSONALLY. And if they couldn’t afford it, they ought to be thrown in prison.
These “public servants” have no skin in the game. And the game won’t change until they do.
Random acts of justice are always welcome, accidentally or not.
But it's food for thought that in a climate of Criminal law enforcement in an atmosphere of increasing unconstitutional laws it's not always successful.
One cannot avoid noticing the heavy spin found on Snopes. Disgraceful
in 1993, the suffolk county cops average pay was $45,000.00 a year!
Cop should know better to mess with anyone with the last name Genovese.