Original Coverage & Source Attribution: tucson.com
Ramifications of the dispute between Myers and the Walkers have extended beyond the harassment and stalking case.
Last January, Matthew Walker petitioned the Arizona Supreme Court to clamp down on YouTubers recording in courtrooms without permission. The high court is slated to consider tightening those rules in December.
Challenge to constitutionality of Arizona law planned
Pima County Deputy Attorney Rachel Stiles asked for 1.5 years in prison for Myers followed by two years of probation, but Metcalf said he did not believe Myers could comply with probation and instead opted for three years in prison.
Myers’ total time in prison likely will work out to about a year and nine months because of the time he’s already served in jail, according to his attorney Mark Resnick.
Resnick said he was “disappointed but not surprised” at the ruling, and stressed that all of Myers’ activity post-probation was pure speech. He said ambiguity in the probation conditions left Myers with the choice to either stay quiet and remain safe or speak and wait to see if he got in trouble.
“That’s just not how a free society works,” Resnick said. He told Metcalf that Myers should have every right to talk about his case, his victim and the ways he thinks he was wronged by the criminal justice system.
At the sentencing hearing, Myers said he had tried to comply with the probation and spent months speaking with legal experts to understand the boundaries of what he could and couldn’t say. He argued his circumstance was difficult to navigate because his conditions limited what he could say but didn’t outright ban him from speaking about his case.
He believed his videos complied with the conditions, he said, but he also thought that if they didn’t, the probation officers would have warned him, he said.
