A man will collect $215,000 from the city of Los Angeles to settle a lawsuit arising from alleged freedom of speech violations.
Michael Hunt, a Venice, California community activist who is black, showed up at a 2011 public meeting wearing a Ku Klux Klan hood and a T-shirt bearing a racial slur.
Officers kicked Hunt out of that Board of Recreation and Parks meeting when he refused to remove the garb after being told that he was in violation of the city’s rules of decorum.
Police issued him a citation for disturbing a public assembly, which was later dismissed. Hunt, however, sued the city for violating his rights to free speech by not allowing him to address the board.
The city has now reached the conclusion that it is more cost effective to settle and make the case go away rather than go forward with a full-blown trial, especially when big-ticket attorneys fees are factored in.
According to Hunt’s lawyer , “These rules of decorum should not be used to silence people unless they engage in actual disruption of the meeting. And actual disruption doesn’t mean upsetting people or offending people.”
Hunt, according to his attorney, “has worn the KKK hood and the T-shirt with the racial slur to various meetings to turn the tables on a city government he believes is ‘engaging in discrimination.’”
Added the lawyer: “He has co-opted these images and uses them to protest back against the city.”
This is not Hunt’s first big lawsuit-related payday from the city. Hunt, who is a vendor on the Venice boardwalk, separately won $264,000 plus $340,000 in legal fees from the city in a jury trial in connection with his challenge of the boardwalk vending ordinance there.
In this clip from 2009, Michael Hunt apparently showed up at a Los Angeles City Council meeting wearing the KKK outfit, prompting council members to walk out of the chamber in protest and thereby losing a quorum for the session:
