Free Speech Takes a Licking in L.A. : Threats by one councilman, Mark Ridley-Thomas, forced cancellation of a fund-raiser for Laurence Powell.

Los Angeles City Councilman Mark Ridley-Thomas, in orchestrating the cancellation of a private fund-raising dinner for former LAPD Officer Laurence Powell, has put a stiletto through free speech and fairness. What is even more astonishing, conspicuous members of the media and self-styled liberals have saluted Ridley-Thomas for a denigration of the search for truth on a level with the Pope’s Index librorum prohibitorum.

Several facts about this scandal seem uncontested and uncontestable. The Los Angeles Police Revolver and Athletic Club, a private organization, leases facilities from the city and makes them available to other private groups, generally upon payment of a fee. No official or unofficial policy blacklists controversial or unpopular groups. For instance, the facilities have been rented to a lesbian rights group.

On June 20, the Legal Affairs Council, a private organization headquartered in Fairfax, Va., rented the club’s facilities for an event billed as a “Reception and dinner to benefit Laurence Powell.” At the time, Powell was in the last months of a prison sentence for using excessive force in the arrest of Rodney King. The banquet was uneventful and prompted no complaints from the club or the city.

A few months later, the Legal Affairs Council again arranged with the police club for use of its facilities on Dec. 14, to host the “Officer Laurence Powell Homecoming Dinner and Rally,” an event modeled on the June 20 banquet.

The promotional costs for this dinner have been substantial. The event promised to bristle with political expression and legal views. Attendees would be voicing support for Powell’s pending legal claims and his insistence of innocence, and for the widely held view that his conviction carried adverse implications for virtually all police officers. They would also be urged to back legislation that would prohibit, in most cases, federal prosecution for conduct that had previously occasioned a state criminal trial.

It is not just fastidious concern for free speech that makes continuing and evenhanded scrutiny and debate over the Powell verdict compelling. Equally if not more sobering are the annals of jurisprudence. Guilty verdicts in controversial cases like Powell’s often have been overturned on further judicial review, have occasioned executive branch pardons or have been reversed in the eyes of history. The Dreyfus affair in France, the Birmingham Six and Guilford Four cases involving the Irish Republican Army in Great Britain, and the Haymarket Square bombing, Scopes and Sam Sheppard trials in the United States are emblematic. Powell himself anticipates filing a motion for a new trial in federal court soon. As Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes warned: “Great cases, like hard cases, make bad law. For great cases are called great, not by reason of their real importance in shaping the law of the future, but because of some accident of immediate overwhelming interest which appeals to the feelings and distorts the judgment.”

On Nov. 14, however, in an atmosphere reeking with official coercion, the club announced it was scuttling the Powell banquet. The Times reported that Ridley-Thomas was prepared to introduce a motion on Nov. 15 calling for the city to consider ending its various lease agreements with the club if the banquet were held. He boasted that his threat was pivotal to the club’s about-face: “It was a warning to [the club] to use good judgment, and to get this situation cleaned up, or else we would subject the whole lease to review. . . if not cancellation.” The Los Angeles Police Commission had earlier urged the club to cancel the Powell event. In a press release, the club confessed that it had carefully considered the views of the council and commission. There never was any nonideological reason offered for opposing the banquet.

The government is not constitutionally required to make its land and buildings into a public forum. But if it does, the First Amendment prohibits government censorship of particular viewpoints, either directly or by intimidation, a decades-old axiom of the U.S. Supreme Court. If truth is to emerge from a free marketplace of ideas, the government cannot be permitted to muzzle those it dislikes but let agreeable views circulate freely. It is gravely worrisome that America’s free speech learning curve has apparently entered a sharp declivity, at least in the city of Los Angeles.