Ray Hill
Just two days after filing to run for Texas House District 147 Houston LGBT activist Ray Hill has been arrested… again.
Yesterday evening Hill and his friend Richard Nevills visited Treasures, a gentlemen’s club on Westhiemer Rd. According to Nevills he dropped Hill off at the door and went to park the car. When he returned a young police officer was “shoving Ray into a squad car and bragging that ‘ain’t no one gonna call me a motherf*cker.'” Nevills reports that the officer was yelling so loudly “you could hear him yelling across the parking lot.”
Hill has a long history of arrests for civil disobedience, including one that led to the the landmark civil rights case Houston v. Hill in which the United States Supreme Court upheld the right to yell at police officers as free speech. Nevills is uncertain if Hill actually used the aforementioned obscenity at the officer. Lower courts have routinely found that obscenities directed at the police are protected speech, including recent cases in Pennsylvania and Idaho.
Hill is currently being held in the Houston Police Department Central Jail awaiting transfer to the Harris County Jail. He has been charged with an unclassified assault on an officer and is awaiting a second charge. Bail has not been set. Video of the incident was taken by an observer according to Nevills who is trying to get permission from that person to release the video.
Nevills says that Hill is in good spirits and that the police department has told him they are looking out for the elderly Hill’s health concerns; “Ray’s just letting the process do it’s thing.”
The last time I was arrested was in 1993 the whole thing was on video. All five arresting officers were suspended and plead guilty to filing a false official document . All got probated sentences. My case was dismissed without trial. This recent event was caught in the security camera. I was in the business exactly 45 seconds and I have made the tape available to reporters in local media and it is available to Voice reporters who want to see it but I and my lawyer Stanley Schneider are not releasing it to be broadcast or show up on someone’s web site until it has been used as evidence. Both the Houston Chronicle and Houston Press have current stories. Check them out. The tape shows three HPD officers attaching and assaulting a passive, handicapped, old man after 6 seconds of conversation…