Center for Constitutional Rights Urges Full Court to Review Animal Enterprise Terrorism Act
press@ccrjustice.org
April 22, 2014, Boston – Last night, the Center for Constitutional Rights (CCR) urged the full First Circuit Court of Appeals to reconsider a ruling by a three-judge appellate panel dismissing CCR’s First Amendment challenge to the federal Animal Enterprise Terrorism Act (AETA). The AETA punishes anyone found to have caused the loss of property or profits to a business or other institution that uses or sells animals or animal products, or to “a person or entity having a connection to, relationship with, or transactions with an animal enterprise.” The law makes no distinction between loss caused by criminal acts and loss caused by boycotts and other constitutionally-protected activity. In its ruling, the panel said that the plaintiffs could not challenge the AETA because the statute states that it does not punish “any expressive conduct.”
“The plain language of the AETA punishes
purposefully causing an animal enterprise to lose profit, regardless of
whether the loss is due to a boycott, civil disobedience, property
destruction, or freeing animals,” said CCR Senior Staff Attorney Rachel
Meeropol. “Congress can’t cure such a fundamental encroachment on the
First Amendment by adding a sentence to the statute saying that it
doesn’t violate the First Amendment.”
In its ruling, the appellate panel also demanded an
unprecedented threshold of injury before allowing plaintiffs to sue. The
court held that the plaintiffs could not challenge the
constitutionality of the AETA because their prosecution as Animal
Enterprise Terrorists was not “certainly impending.” But this holding
contradicts decades of Supreme Court precedent allowing plaintiffs to
challenge a law when their speech is chilled based on an objectively
reasonable interpretation of the statute, even if there is no imminent
threat of prosecution.
According to attorneys, the activists’ fears are even
more reasonable given that the AETA is part of a broader crackdown on
animal rights activists, which also includes so-called “ag-gag”
legislation punishing undercover investigations in animal agriculture.
“As more and more undercover videos have exposed the
horrific violence inherent in animal agriculture, the industry has used
its immense political power to push for and enact laws to silence
whistleblowers,” said lead plaintiff Sarahjane Blum. “I am not at all
confident that the industry will refrain from using that same lobbying
influence to push for prosecutions against activists who affect their
bottom line. As long as the AETA exists, the threat of prosecution is
real and chilling.”
Blum v. Holder was
filed on behalf of five animal rights activists with long histories of
participating in peaceful protests and advocacy efforts, who have
limited or even ceased their lawful advocacy out of fear of being
prosecuted as terrorists. In the first use of the AETA, in 2009, four activists were indicted and arrested in
California by the Joint Terrorism Task Force for protesting, writing on
sidewalks with chalk, chanting, leafleting, and using the Internet to
find information on animal researchers. One of the plaintiffs in Blum, Lauren Gazzola, was convicted under the previous version of the law,
the Animal Enterprise Protection Act (AEPA), and served 40 months in
federal prison for her role in publishing a website that advocated and
reported on protest activity against an animal testing lab in New
Jersey.
Although it targets animal rights activists
specifically, the AETA is written so expansively it could turn a
successful labor protest at Wal-Mart into an act of domestic terrorism.
Non-violent violators face up to twenty years in prison, depending on
the amount of profit loss that results. Groups including the Fur
Commission USA, the National Cattlemen’s Beef Association, and several
pharmaceutical companies lobbied for the law.
The Center for Constitutional Rights provided amicus
support in Plaintiff Gazzola’s AEPA case and was co-counsel in the
California AETA case.
Blum was filed in the U.S. District Court for the
District of Massachusetts. Alexander Reinert, a professor at the
Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law, along with David Milton and Howard
Friedman, of the Law Offices of Howard Friedman PC, are co-counsel on
the case.
The Center for Constitutional Rights is dedicated to advancing and protecting the rights guaranteed by the United States Constitution and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Founded in 1966 by attorneys who represented civil rights movements in the South, CCR is a non-profit legal and educational organization committed to the creative use of law as a positive force for social change.
the center for constitutional rights
