F bomb leads to jail in South Carolina? WTF?

Wow, free speach just went down the shitter in South Carolina.

Danielle Wolf says she was shopping with her family at a Kroger supermarket when her husband squashed a loaf of bread with some other groceries. She apparently use the F word when setting her husband straight over his carelessness. A woman, confronted her accusing her of using that word in front of her children. The cops get called. etc. etc. No one shot though.

The entire incident led to her arrest, being handcuffed and charges of disorderly conduct.

Just had to check, yep, South Carolina is a red state.

I’m sure that’s exactly how it happened.

Cohen v California (as explained by Wikipedia) suggests that a Motion to Dismiss should be granted.

I hate hearing a loud obnoxious potty mouth in public. Especially in front of kids.

It’s not disorderly conduct imho. Arresting someone seems a bit extreme for being obnoxious.

For your information, the Supreme Court has ROUNDLY REJECTED PRIOR RESTRAINT!

I have a curiosity question. The grocery store isn’t a government entity, so if they are the ones filing the complaint, is it still a first amendment violation? It’s a shitty thing to do, but I think it’s different than the wiki case which took place on government property.

This country has gone to pot (in the case of California,LITERALLY) & I’m ashamed to be an American.All our freedoms are slowly being stripped away yet NOW some will wake up.

If you’d taken about 30 seconds to read the police report before your self-righteous pronouncement, you’d see that it is, in fact, pretty much exactly how it happened.

The police report itself basically confirms the story. The only difference between the police report and the newspaper article is that, according to the police report, the woman was reported to be swearing directly at her children. The woman herself says, in the newspaper article, that she was swearing at her husband.

Apart from that, it appears to have happened exactly as the OP described it. Here’s the description of events taken directly from the police report (PDF):

So, basically Woman A swears at (or in front of; it’s still not clear) her children.

Woman B reports this to police.

Woman A is arrested for disorderly conduct.

Whether or not this arrest holds up legally, i think it’s complete bullshit.

Well, what I want to know is -

Did they stop squishing the fuckin’ bread?

Did a random passerby also buy up all the bread to teach someone a lesson?

FTR, I think of both Carolinas as the Buckle of the Bible Belt.

My South Carolina born and bred friend used to like to semi-affectionately refer to his home state as “south of Jesse Helms”* :D.

And was his name Whipple?

Fucking amateurs!

It is actually illegal to curse in public in Trinidad, police here use this law much like police in the USA use disorderly conduct as a catch all arrest whoever I want thing.

Trinidad wtfisms.:smiley:

Obscenity laws used to be enforced a lot more frequently. So if you think cases like this are stripping us of our freedom, then it seems clear that things are getting better rather than worse.

Ah, but anything that makes current times seem worse than past times is Correct, and anything which does the opposite is Liberal Claptrap.

It’s a strange form of Political Correctness which seems to afflict the more conservative members of our society. It stereotypically hits the older, but that isn’t the whole story.

I admit to not really knowing offhand what Simplicio’s political bent is, but it did not seem to me that he (?) was suggesting that this incident was somehow acceptable or “correct.”

He was simply observing—quite correctly, as it happens—that obscenity laws are not enforced with anything like the frequency and rigidity that they used to be.

I’m a left-liberal who has already said that i think it was ridiculous that this woman was arrested for cursing, but this sort of arrest is, in modern times, much more unlikely and unusual that it would have been fifty or sixty years ago.

I was being sarcastic, as I thought my second paragraph made clear. I fully agree with Simplico.

Sorry. I’m in the processor of recalibrating my sarcasm detector.

Well, this is a little early in the case, still.