| Toke of the Town. |
Medical marijuana activist John Tracey acted on two eminently reasonable beliefs late last July. The result? He got busted.
Belief 1: That a Black Sabbath concert would provide a mother lode of support for a petition to put a referendum on medical marijuana on this fall’s ballot.
Belief 2: That the First Amendment is in effect at Cruzan Amphitheatre, since it’s owned by the South Florida Fair and is, by state law, public property.
He was right about one of those things.
Tracey’s petition-gathering (and that of many others) paid off, as all of Florida now knows. But for his efforts that particular July evening, Tracey was hassled by Cruzan staff, who then called the cops, who charged him with trespass and hustled him off to the hoosegow for the night.
The charges were eventually dropped, but Tracey was miffed. “The fuck can I trespass on public property?” he wrote to New Times, shortly after the arrest.
Now it’s payback time. Or so Tracey hopes.
Last week, his attorney, Michael Minardi, laid the groundwork for a false-arrest suit. Minardi filed a notice of claim with the Palm Beach County Sheriff’s Office (such notice is a legal prerequisite for lawsuits against official bodies) and sent similar notices to the South Florida Fair and to Pavilion Partners, an operations arm of Cruzan’s owner, Live Nation.
Broward-Palm Beach New Times has more.