LAW OFFICES

SNOOK & HAUGHEY, P.C.

408 East Market Street, Suite 107

Post Office Box 2486
Charlottesville, Virginia 22902
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Telephone: (434) 293-8185, ext. 230
Fax: (434) 295-0698
E-Mail Address: jlsnook@snookandhaughey.com

J. Lloyd Snook, III Bonnie J. Lepold

Sheila C. Haughey (Also admitted in California,
New York and New Jersey)
Samantha E. Freed
(Also admitted in Maryland)

June 10, 2010

John W. Whitehead, President Also sent by e-mail to staff@rutherford.org

The Rutherford Institute
Post Office Box 7482
Charlottesville, VA 22906-7482

Dear Mr. Whitehead:

You sent or delivered a letter to Congressman Tom Perriellos office yesterday,

asking that he try to persuade his landlord, Lisa Murphy, to back off of her previously stated desire
to preserve the rights of her private tenants of the Glass Building. Ms. Murphy has asked that I
represent her for the purposes of responding to your letter.

First, your letter cites part of a sentence from Schneider v. State of N. J. (Town of
Irvington), 308 U.S. 147, 163 (1939). As you no doubt know, Schneider stands for the proposition
that a local government may not keep individuals from passing out literature on the public streets,
because of the special character of public streets. Schneider has nothing to do with whether a private
property owner may exercise her right to control who comes onto her property. You cited the second
part of the sentence; you should have cited the ENTIRE sentence:

But, as we have said, the streets are natural and proper places for
the dissemination of information and opinion; and one is not to
have the exercise of his liberty of expression in appropriate places
abridged on the plea that it may be exercised in some other place.

(Emphasis added.) Ms. Murphy asks that any protestors who wish to disseminat[e] ... information
and opinion use the natural and proper places for doing so public streets.
John W. Whitehead, President
June 10, 2010
Page 2

Second, I note that you must be unfamiliar with the location of either Congressman
Perriellos office or of the Free Speech Monument, since you seem to think that the Free Speech
Monument is some two miles away from his office (see fn. 2). In fact, the two are about 850 feet
apart as the crow flies, and if one were to walk from one to the other, it would require walking about
400 yards. When I walked that distance recently, it took me about four minutes.

I would note that Congressman Perriello will surely not be in local office on June 16,
2010, because the House of Representatives will be in session. I suspect that he is not likely to be
in the Glass Building office on June 14 either. If the goal of the protest is to be seen by
Congressman Perriello, then, the Glass Building parking lot would seem to be a singularly
ineffective place to hold the protest. If the goal of the protest is to impart information or opinion to
his staff, I understand that Congressman Perriellos staff will be happy to make an appointment for
any Tea Party members who wish to speak with them. If the goal of the protest is simply to be seen
by the Congressmans staff, without a specific desire to communicate any substantive information
to the staff, the sidewalk on Garrett Street, roughly 100 feet away from the front door to the office,
is visible to the staff working in his office, and is the kind of public place that Schneider
contemplates as a natural and proper place for the dissemination of information and opinion.

If the goal of the Tea Party protest (or, for that matter, any protest of the CCPJ) is to
stage a media event, that goal would seem to be better served by locating the protest at the Free
Speech Monument, a block away from the studios of WVIR. If the goal is to be seen and noticed
by the public, the foot traffic past the Free Speech Monument at noon on a weekday is easily 100
times greater than the foot traffic in the parking lot at the Glass Building.1

My purpose here is not to tell the Tea Party members how to carry out whatever goal
they have, but to point out that there are public places that would seem to be much better suited to
any goal than the private property of the Glass Building parking lot. I would hope that their and
your energy might be used to figure out a way to fulfill those goals without trespassing on private
property, rather than by trying to figure out a way to embarrass Congressman Perriello, or to bring
pressure on Ms. Murphy to permit very significant disruptions to the private property interests of the
businesses at the Glass Building.

In your letter to Congressman Perriello, you profess great sympathy for the private
business owners in the Glass Building, particularly in these difficult times economically. As it
happens, because of the disruptions and noise of the Tea Party protests last November, two of Ms.
Murphys tenants have left. It is not fair to Ms. Murphy or her other tenants that their parking lot
should be blocked by a tour bus carrying protestors, or that her tenants access to their stores or
offices should be obstructed by large crowds of protestors, or that her tenants should have to tolerate

1
If, on the other hand, your real goal is to try to paint Congressman Perriello into a
corner by seeming to be against free speech, please recognize that it is not Mr. Perriellos
decision whether the Glass Building parking lot should become a place for public
demonstrations.
John W. Whitehead, President
June 10, 2010
Page 3

the noise of hundreds of protestors chanting and shouting and disturbing the peaceful enjoyment of
the Glass Building for more than an hour. Since those two tenants left because the business owners
could not tolerate the protests, she has lost tens of thousands of dollars of rental income. She is
deeply concerned about the disruption to the businesses of her remaining tenants.

I have no personal knowledge of the CCPJ activity on May 19, 2010; all I know about
it I learned from watching a video on the Internet shot by former Albemarle Republican Party Chair
Keith Drake, whose interest in the CCPJ skit would seem to have been mainly to set up your letter.
I gather from watching the video that about 20 members of the CCPJ performed a skit that lasted
about 2 minutes. Ms. Murphy did not approve the activity. She had no advance notice that it was
going to happen. If a tenant had complained (none did), she or her agent would have called the
Police. No one has received permission to carry out a demonstration in the Glass Building parking
lot, regardless of which side of the political spectrum they may inhabit. There is no policy of
prohibiting conservative protests and tolerating liberal protests. Ms. Murphys position is, and has
long been, that urged by the Daily Progress editorial board:

The safe thing to do, therefore, is for the landlord to make clear that
no protests or gatherings of any kind can be held on this private
property.

Daily Progress editorial, May 26, 2010, accessed June 9, 2010, at

http://www2.dailyprogress.com/cdp/news/opinion/op_ed/article/now_protest_of_a_protest/56547/

This has been her consistent position, and she has told the Charlottesville Police
Department that it is her consistent position.

Ms. Murphy also has no pipeline to news from the CCPJ. The first that she knew of
the CCPJ demonstration proposed for next week was when she received a copy of your letter to Mr.
Perriello. As her attorney, I would suggest that you would be more persuasive with her if that is
in fact what you are trying to do by sending this letter to Congressman Perriello by contacting her
directly. The fact that you did not do so suggests to us that that was not your intention, but I digress.

Ms. Murphy has notified the Charlottesville Police Department of both the Tea
Partys proposed demonstration on June 14, 2010, and of the CCPJ proposed demonstration on June
16, 2010, and she has asked the Police to respond to any demonstration in the parking lot, regardless
of who it is who is demonstrating. She has notified the CCPJ of her position, and she has told them
that the Police have been notified. I also understand that Charlottesville Chief of Police Tim Longo
has agreed to notify both the Tea Party and the CCPJ that they should keep their protests to the
sidewalks. I note that we have seen no publicity concerning the CCPJ event that mentions what the
members of the CCPJ plan to do, or where they plan to do it. For all we know, they may be
intending to abide by the law and by Ms. Murphys directions to stage no demonstration on her
private property.
John W. Whitehead, President
June 10, 2010
Page 4

Ms. Murphy has no address for the Jefferson Area Tea Party, and she is not sure
how to contact them. She has asked that I ask you to pass this response on to the Tea Party members.
In particular, she hopes that the Tea Party members will also take the advice of the Daily Progress:

Demonstrations, of course, can be held on adjacent public property,

in accordance with law.

While the protests that were the direct cause of her tenants leaving were protests by
the Tea Party members in November, she took the content-neutral position that she didnt care WHO
the protestors were she didnt want them there, she was not required to permit them to be there,
and she didnt intend to permit them to be there. She has taken this position regardless of the wishes
of Congressman Perriello or his staff. You want Congressman Perriello to ask that her other tenants
be subjected to more disruption, noise and inconvenience. Her response to you, as it would be to
Congressman Perriello if he were to make such a request, is simple No.

One of the Tea Partys central tenets is a respect for private property rights, and the
right of private property owners to control the use of their property. Indeed, you recite in your letter
that you fully recognize[] the right of an individual to limit access to his or her private property.
The Glass Building and its parking lot are private property, and Ms. Murphy will exercise her right
to limit access to her private property.

Sincerely yours,

J. Lloyd Snook, III

JLS/mtf