NEW JIM CROW ON TRIAL IN NEW HAMPSHIRE FEDERAL COURT
“LIVE FREE OR DIE” IS THE GRANITE STATE’S OFFICIAL MOTTO
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The New Jim Crow is being put on trial in a New Hampshire federal courtroom, under a historic decision allowing a civil rights lawsuit filed there to proceed.
The suit alleges its unconstitutional for the “Live Free or Die” state to block a former felon from being issued an occupational fishing guide license.
Landya B. McCafferty, New Hampshire’s chief federal judge, OK'd the suit in a court order dated Mar. 28. She rejected some of the suit's legal claims, but not all. The precedent-setting decision found outdoor guiding protected by the First Amendment.
The plaintiff in the case, her decision says, “alleges that his work as a guide would allow him to 'speak, share and teach,' encouraging his clients to be 'fully[]realized and happy human being[s].'”
Quoting from the legal complaint in the case, Chief Judge McCafferty found outdoor guiding protected by the First Amendment because, in part, the complaint alleges "going off-grid, and off-line, can be a radical, even revolutionary act and protest against the Digital Age status quo.”
The lawsuit was filed in 2023 by The Free Lance's publisher, JB Nicholas, this reporter’s partner. Nicholas applied for a New Hampshire fishing guide license in 2022, but the state agency responsible for issuing guide licenses, the Fish & Game Department, rejected his application because he was convicted of a felony and sentenced to prison in 1991.
Released in 2003, Nicholas went back to school and graduated from New York University in 2006. The native New Yorker has worked as an independent journalist since. He has been officially credentialed as a journalist by the NYPD since 2006. He completed the parole portion of his 19-year sentence in 2009. He was even credentialed as a journalist by the US Secret Service more than a dozen times.
Nicholas covered an event at the White House in 2012: Pres. Barack Obama awarding the Presidential Medal of Freedom to Bob Dylan.
Pres. Barack Obama awarding Bob Dylan the Presidential Medal of Freedom in the White House, May 29, 2012. Photo credit: JB Nicholas.
Today, the 54-year-old lives in an Adirondack mountain town on the Canadian frontier. He won a similar lawsuit against New York. Officials there issued him an outdoor guide license on Dec. 5, 2023.
Like Chief Judge McCafferty, the federal judge in that case, Glenn T. Suddaby, found guiding to be protected by the First Amendment. Judge Suddaby went further and also found guiding was protected by the Fourteenth Amendment. After that decision, Letitia James, New York’s Attorney General, agreed to settle the case.
Nicholas lost a third lawsuit against Maine for denying him a guide license there. A federal appeals court in Boston approved Maine's two-track, Apartheid-like regime for deciding guide license applications from former felons. Appeals to the next and final level, the Supreme Court, are by permission only. Nicholas’s application is pending.
A New Hampshire regulation bars former felons from being issued guide licenses. The constitutionality of that regulation is what's at issue in his lawsuit.
Laws like New Hampshire’s, barring former felons from obtaining occupational licenses, are part of the New Jim Crow. 77 million Americans with criminal records are trapped in social-economic slavery by a web of federal, state and local laws that make it nearly impossible for them to find good jobs.
The Digital Age supercharged the New Jim Crow. It traps everyone. It makes sure poor people stay poor—whatever their race.
"That is a moral outrage," the Chairman and Chief Executive of JP Morgan & Chase, Jamie Dimon, declared in a 2021 New York Times Op-Ed.
Col. Kevin Jordan, the New Hampshire Fish & Game Department's chief law enforcement officer, discussed waiving the regulation and allowing Nicholas to test for a guide license with the head of the agency and the New Hampshire Guides' Association. They opposed the move, Jordan said in an email to Nicholas on Mar. 14, 2023.
"Everyone has agreed that we should not waive any rules to allow for this under the current situation," Jordan wrote in the email.
While Col. Jordan was barred by New Hampshire regulations from issuing Nicholas a guide license, he wasn't gagged from speaking his mind.
"I am sorry Jason, I wanted to find a way to work around this, I just cannot," he candidly admitted. "I have no doubt you have worked hard to achieve good things after this incident years ago and I applaud your determination to get back on track. You have done an outstanding job."
The next step in the lawsuit is for the parties to gather evidence to support their claims and defenses in preparation for trial. A court conference in Concord, the New Hampshire state capital, is scheduled for May 1.
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