PCACP flags near Frist are not protected 'free speech'

The article in last Tuesday's 'Prince' reporting possible "vandalism" of the death penalty awareness flag displays outside the Frist building throughout the week is a dramatization almost as deserving of applause as was the recent production of "The Fix." The uprooting of a certain percentage of the 846 flags with a death penalty message on them was reported on in a way befitting of a felony offense.

The truth is, the act performed on the flags was not a crime or tort in any sense, and its treatment as such is indicative of a campus that luckily flourishes virtually free from the fetters of criminality. This safe environment is essentially what inflates such trivial incidences on campus into major Public Safety crises. The silliness of such a small event being treated like a possible act of vandalism is outweighed only by the silliness of the medium which the Princeton Coalition Against Capital Punishment choose to use in trying to get out their message: 846 flags haphazardly peppered on the above-Frist lawn.

If the PCACP chair thinks that the act was a "suppression of free speech," as he claims in the article, I would remind him that free speech is not the freedom to get out your message in any form fathomable to the human imagination. For instance, sound-trucks may not roam this serene campus, blasting messages encouraging attendance for certain politically-charged lectures. Similarly, I do not feel that PCACP should have been granted the right to trounce the above-Frist lawn with its sea of flags, blocking people who like to walk on the green grass and preventing precepts from having their seasonal basking-type outdoor sessions.

For these reasons, the University should not have allowed such a display in the first place and should have instructed PCACP to present their message through another forum, perhaps through campus newspapers, posters and emails. Even if Princeton was a public university, such a restriction would not be a suppression of free speech since there are numerous alternative ways in which PCACP could have presented the same exact message — this is what American legal jurisprudence would call a "time-place-manner restriction."

As for the vandalism argument, I do not believe that those tiny flags are protected fixtures of private property even if they were originally purchased by PCACP. In planting them on University grounds which are usually heavily traversed upon, PCACP implicitly relinquishing their right to a strong sense of ownership of those flags. What if someone felt that since there were so darn many of those flags, perhaps they were put out there so that passersby may pick one up as a souvenir of sorts for Death Penalty Awareness Week. All I am trying to say is that the act of uprooting of some dinky little expendable flags is no key-scratching of a parked Jaguar.

Aside from the legal analysis, the display of the 846 flags certainly tested the limits of creative shrewdness and capacity for irritability-provocation. In doing so, PCACP legitimately opened itself up to such partial uprooting of its flags. The planters of such flags should have at least had the foresight to expect such an action before deciding to take it upon themselves to restructure the landscape above the Frist center. I am surprised that Princeton, which takes such great pride in its most strict rules governing the preservation of its pristine grounds, allowed for such a display.

PCACP's army of dinky flags remained standing throughout the week. If the people who think those flags are a type of absolutely protected free speech then it follows that all campus groups should have a right to exercise similar obstructive and in-your-face methods of advertisement.

Maybe the pro-capital punishment camps should rival the flags of PCACP with a much greater arsenal of flags representing the number of victims actually killed by the people who underwent capital punishment. I, though, would vouch for less obstructive, more settled ways of getting out the message.