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HOMEOWNER ASSOCIATIONS MUST RESPECT FREE SPEECH
In an appeals court decision last week, new rights are provided for more than one million residents of private communities governed by homeowners associations in the state.

"For the first time anywhere in the United States, an appellate court has ruled that such private communities are 'constitutional actors' and must therefore respect their members' freedom of speech," said Rutgers Law Professor Frank Askin, lead counsel in the case. "The court recognized that just as shopping malls are the new public square, these associations have become and act, for all practical purposes, like municipal entities unto themselves."

The case involved the 10,000-resident community of Twin Rivers in East Windsor, where the rights to post political signs on members' lawns, to equal access to the community newspaper run by the Board of Trustees, and to equitable access to the community room for meetings for dissidents. The complaint raised claims under the free speech protections of the New Jersey Constitution.

The opinion by the appellate panel relied heavily upon earlier decisions of the New Jersey Supreme Court which held that privately owned and operated shopping malls were public forums under the State Constitution, and had to allow non-profit advocacy groups to gather petitions and distribute educational material on mall property.

Building on those cases, the court held that private residential communities could no more deny free speech to its residents to discuss public issues than municipal governments.

The case is a national landmark and was awaited by homeowners groups across the country in hopes of emulating a similar decision.

VETERANS AFFAIRS NURSE ACCUSED OF SEDITION OVER POLITICAL VIEWS

The U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs investigated a federal employee who published an editorial critical of the Bush administration in a local newspaper. The ACLU is demanding an explanation.

In her letter to the weekly Alibi, Laura Berg, a clinical nurse specialist, criticized the Bush administration's handling of Hurricane Katrina and the Iraq War, noting that, "as a VA nurse working with returning…vets, I know the public has no sense of the additional devastating human and financial costs of post-traumatic stress disorder." She urged readers to "act forcefully to remove a government administration playing games of smoke and mirrors and vicious deceit."

In September 2005, VA Information Security employees seized Berg's office computer because they claimed "government equipment was used inappropriately…during government time for drafting an editorial letter." No evidence was recovered to support that belief.

"The VA had no reason to suspect Laura Berg used government resources to produce her editorial," said ACLU of New Mexico Executive Director Peter Simonson. "She signed the letter as a private individual. From all appearances, the seizure of her work computer was an act of retaliation and a hardball attempt to scare Laura into silence."

In a November 9th memorandum to Berg, Mel Hooker, Chief of Human Resource Management Service at the VA, conceded that no evidence was found implicating the use of Berg's work computer in the writing of the editorial. However, he justified the investigation by saying "the Agency is bound by law to investigate and pursue any act which potentially represents sedition."

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