The Pima Post

PIMA COUNTY — Walk the superior-court calendars long enough and a pattern emerges that would make a first-year ethics student blush. Defendants charged with grave violence sometimes leave with probation, treatment, and second chances. Lane Myers — YouTuber, council gadfly, serial filer of civil-rights claims — leaves with a cell and a bond set at zero.

Advocacy reporting on FreeLaneMyers.com frames the disparity in plain English: speech is treated as more dangerous than blood. Myers' city-council "booing" arrest, courthouse filming scrapes, and probation conditions that allegedly criminalize discussion of the Walker family have produced more jail time, they argue, than many cases involving actual victims of violent crime.

No serious newspaper claims every violent defendant walks free. The charge is comparative: when the machinery of the state is aimed at a political irritant, the gears suddenly mesh. When the defendant is a friend of the process, the gears slip into mercy mode.

Judge Metcalf's no-bond posture, as described by Myers' supporters, is the flashpoint. A justice system that cannot distinguish between a nonviolent critic and a public-safety threat has already chosen its real client — institutional pride.

This page will keep publishing the comparison until someone in elected leadership can explain, on the record, why the man who booed at council is more dangerous than the man who put someone in the ground.

PYONGYANG / TUCSON — In a development that surprised no one who has ever been told to put the phone away in a Pima courtroom, sources deep inside a completely imaginary Ministry of Justice confirm that North Korea's model kangaroo courts have opened an exchange program with southern Arizona.

"We used to think we invented the closed proceeding," a fictional attaché told The Pima Post. "Then we discovered a desert jurisdiction where cameras are treated like contraband and the public record is a choose-your-own-adventure. Kim Jong Un is taking notes."

The Dear Leader is pictured above, fountain pen poised over materials stamped NO RECORDINGS ALLOWED — a playful collage on a deadly serious point: when courts ban the sunlight of recording, power prefers the dark.

Pima County officials were not asked for comment on this satire, because satire does not file public-records requests. Real policy, however, does. Citizens who care about open courts should keep asking why the most contested free-speech cases seem to prefer the shadows.

Next week in this space: a completely fair comparison of Pyongyang traffic courts and Tucson plea mills. Spoiler — the traffic courts may have better coffee.

TUCSON — In a chamber famous for arrests over booing and for rules that chill public comment, city leadership assembled for what can only be described as the most on-the-nose book club in Arizona history: a group hold of George Orwell's 1984.

The image is satire. The civic habits it mocks are not. When a free-speech activist can be funneled from a council gallery into the criminal process, when speech about public employees becomes a probation tripwire, the novel stops being assigned reading and starts being operating software.

Mayor-centered governance that treats dissent as disorder will always find a statute flexible enough to punish the dissenter. Advocates tracking the Myers matters argue that is precisely what happened after council disruption charges and related city prosecutions — matters they say were later dismissed when fought.

We print the photo op because pictures persuade. If elected officials do not like the comparison to Oceania, they have a simple remedy: open the meetings, drop the retaliatory filings, and stop confusing quiet rooms with healthy democracy.

Until then, The Pima Post will keep the paperback on the newsroom shelf — spine out, where everyone can see it.