From the ASSOCIATED PRESS:
Pennsylvania police wrongly charged hundreds of people with disorderly conduct for swearing, the American Civil Liberties Union said in a pair of free-speech lawsuits filed Wednesday.
ACLU lawyers reviewed 770 disorderly conduct citations issued by Pennsylvania State Police in a recent one-year span. They said they found that while officers applied the law correctly in some cases, the majority involved profanities and other legal, nonobscene speech…
“You absolutely cannot cite someone just for uttering a profanity,” said ACLU lawyer Marieke Tuthill. The problem is ultimately a lack of police training, most likely because officers misunderstand “the difference between the colloquial definition of obscenity and the legal definition of obscenity,” she said…
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