By Steve Plunkett
Resident Martin O’Boyle, a perennial legal foe of the town, has claimed another court victory in his long-running battle with Gulf Stream, but the state is appealing the outcome.
A County Court jury last August decided O’Boyle was guilty of resisting a police officer without violence but not guilty of disorderly conduct at Town Hall after a 2015 budget hearing had ended. County Judge Ashley Zuckerman thanked the jurors and sent them home, then agreed with a defense motion to acquit O’Boyle of resisting.
The judge did not elaborate on her decision, according to the transcript of the trial.
“Upon review of the applicable case law and, while always mindful and respectful of the jury, the motion for judgment of acquittal as to the resisting is granted,” Zuckerman said.
O’Boyle’s attorney, Michael Salnick, had argued that the disorderly charge, on which jurors found his client not guilty, was a “precursor” to the resisting charge.
“I don’t know how legally the resisting can survive,” Salnick said. But prosecutor Nicole Bloom said the case was about resisting a lawful order to leave Town Hall, not about resisting an arrest.
“If this was resisting the arrest for disorderly conduct then perhaps we would be in a different situation, but that’s not where we are,” Bloom said.
Fort Lauderdale attorney Fred Haddad is representing O’Boyle in the case and has until March 1 to file his brief with the 4th District Court of Appeal.
What Gulf Stream called a disturbance happened as people were leaving a Sept. 22 budget hearing in the commission chambers. In a probable cause affidavit Sgt. John Passeggiata said O’Boyle “attempted to deface public property by writing with a marker on a poster displayed in Town Hall.”
Passeggiata said he tried to get O’Boyle to stop and leave the building but O’Boyle answered with a loud obscenity. Then-Police Chief Garrett Ward intervened and also was targeted with obscenities. After puffing up his chest and shoulders in “a combat stance,” O’Boyle knelt in a doorway to keep police from escorting him outside, the sergeant said.
“Meeting attendees were passing through the lobby and subject to Mr. O’Boyle’s tirade of obscenities and his disruptive and disorderly behavior,” Passeggiata wrote.
The incident took place after town commissioners approved a budget raising taxes 38% and earmarking $1 million for legal fees to fight lawsuits from O’Boyle and then-resident Chris O’Hare over public records requests. O’Boyle and O’Hare at that point had made about 1,700 requests for records over a three-year period and filed dozens of lawsuits.
Many of the lawsuits have been settled, won by Gulf Stream or withdrawn. O’Boyle was the victor in a federal case accusing him of racketeering and in a public records case involving police radio communications. The amount of legal fees the town will pay O’Boyle’s attorneys in the police radio case is also being appealed.
The two sides have also skirmished over large cartoons of commissioners that O’Boyle painted on the sides of his Hidden Harbour home and about an oversized dock he wanted to build.
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