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Another year of crushing free spirits at our colleges and universities
Law school is not known for being fun, so some professors spice instruction with far-fetched hypotheticals. To some students at Widener University School of Law in Wilmington, Delaware, one longtime criminal-law prof's hypos went too far.  

WIDENER UNIVERSITY SCHOOL OF LAW

Law school is not known for being fun, so some professors spice instruction with far-fetched hypotheticals. To some students at Widener University School of Law in Wilmington, Delaware, one longtime criminal-law prof's hypos went too far.

Professor Lawrence Connell's ordeal began in December 2010, when he was accused of violating Widener's faculty discrimination and harassment code. Students apparently complained about classroom hypotheticals of violent crimes, in which Connell used law-school faculty and staff, including Dean Linda L. Ammons. It was further alleged that Connell used racist and sexist language, including the shockingly racist phrase "black folks."

Fortunately, a faculty panel saw through the flimsy case and, in March, recommended that the school drop dismissal proceedings. That's where it should have ended. Instead, three days later, Ammons bizarrely prompted two students to refile harassment charges, according to the professor's attorney. Connell's fate, wrested from the faculty, was thus transferred to an administrative panel.

One panel member, Vice-Dean Patrick Kelly, had interviewed Connell's students as part of the investigation. One student, according to her sworn affidavit, told Kelly that Connell's teaching style was "extremely useful" and that some of the allegations against him appeared to be "completely fabricated." But nowhere among the complaints and negative student evaluations was this sympathetic student's interview. It was, in the parlance of criminal procedure, suppressed. Were a prosecutor to withhold this kind of information, it would arguably be deemed obstruction of justice.

Connell, for his part, is not taking this quietly, filing in April a defamation suit against Ammons for labeling him a racist, sexist, and "a threat to the physical safety" of campus members. Whether "obstruction" charges are added remains to be seen.

For subjecting a professor to possible dismissal for harmless and common classroom hypotheticals, and for suppressing student interviews favorable to his cause, Widener School of Law is awarded the highly uncoveted Double Muzzle.

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Our annual look at the dishonorable enemies of free speech and personal liberty in New England
To understand just how disappointing Barack Obama has been on civil liberties, you need only consider the case of David House, a founder of the Bradley Manning Support Network.  

To understand just how disappointing Barack Obama has been on civil liberties, you need only consider the case of David House, a founder of the Bradley Manning Support Network.

Last November, House, a Cambridge resident and former MIT researcher, arrived at O'Hare International Airport in Chicago following a vacation in Mexico. According to a lawsuit later filed on his behalf by the ACLU of Massachusetts, federal agents stopped him, seized his laptop computer, a flash drive, a digital camera, and his cell phone, and kept them for 49 days while they inspected the contents.

The agents also interrogated him about Manning, the Army private suspected of providing confidential US documents to WikiLeaks. In a classic example of guilt-by-association, the feds decided that House's activism on Manning's behalf was enough to raise suspicions. House, to his credit, has stayed strong, refusing recently to testify before a grand jury looking into WikiLeaks and calling the investigation "Nixonian."

By targeting House for, in effect, speaking out, the Obama administration demonstrated its utter contempt for the First Amendment. And though the House case has received considerable publicity, it was hardly an isolated example.

It is against this depressing backdrop that we present the 14th Annual Muzzle Awards, our Fourth of July round-up of outrages against free speech and personal liberties in New England. There is never a shortage of overzealous police officers, clueless politicians, and censorious school officials upon whom to bestow the uncoveted statuettes. What's truly distressing, though, is the situation at the national level.

No, the Obama administration can't compare with the Bush-Cheney White House and its embrace of torture, its illegal wiretapping program, and its secret practice of extraordinary rendition, under which terrorism suspects were sent to be questioned in countries where waterboarding is considered a warm-up for the hardcore stuff.

Still, for a president who came into office promising transparency, the Obama record is a bitter disappointment.

Consider that two Democratic senators, Ron Wyden of Oregon and Mark Udall of Colorado, recently accused the administration of secretly abusing the notorious Section 215 of the Patriot Act, which allows the government to snoop on what library books you've borrowed, what videos you've rented, your medical records, and other personal information.

Or that the Justice Department recently issued a subpoena ordering New York Times reporter James Risen to reveal his sources in his reporting on the Bush wiretapping scandal.

Or that the FBI will reportedly soon unveil new guidelines that will give it even greater powers to invade people's privacy than the agency claimed during the Bush years.

"I'm disgusted with this president," ACLU executive director Anthony Romero said a little more than a year ago.

Not that the Obama administration is alone in its contempt for the First Amendment. To the surprise of few, Joe Lieberman, the unctuous independent senator from Connecticut, suggested at one point that not only should WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange be charged with violating espionage laws, but so, too, should the Times, for the offense of publishing documents obtained by WikiLeaks.

"To me the New York Times has committed at least an act of, at best, bad citizenship, but whether they have committed a crime is a matter of discussion for the Justice Department," Lieberman told Fox News.

The Muzzle Awards were inspired by noted civil-liberties lawyer and Phoenix contributor Harvey Silverglate, who wrote the sidebar accompanying this article. They are named after similar awards given by the Thomas Jefferson Center for the Protection of Freedom of Expression.

This year's edition, as always, was compiled by tracking the previous year's free-speech stories in New England, and is based on reporting by the Phoenix newspapers in Boston, Providence, and Portland, as well as the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) and various news organizations and Web sites — including the Boston Globe, the Boston Herald, the Providence Journal, the Portland Press Herald, the Associated Press, the New York Times, Politico, the Atlantic, cnn.com, the Narragansett Times, the Barrington Times, the Salem News, the Swampscott Reporter, and wbur.org.

The envelopes, please.

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