Despite the fact that city authorities have temporarily dropped a case against Oak Park resident Julie Bass for growing a vegetable garden in her front yard after the story received nationwide attention, Bass has now been hit with a new criminal charge for owning unlicensed dogs, clear evidence says Bass that she’s the victim of a vendetta.
After Oak Park City failed in its bid to charge Bass with violating a local ordinance for using her front garden to grow organic vegetables, no doubt put off by gargantuan media attention on the case, they are now pursuing Bass for a similarly ludicrous misdemeanor that carries an identical penalty, 93 days in jail, for owning unlicensed dogs.
However, Bass dogs are fully licensed, the city is merely reinstating an earlier charge that Bass has already complied with.
This tells us two things – one that the city is blatantly pursuing a malicious vendetta against Bass for making a mockery of their petty ordinances, and two that enforcement officials must have been spying on her before the unlicensed dog charge was invented.
Having dropped the garden case because of the “heat of the spotlight,” Bass’ attorney Solomon Radner calls the newly reinstated dog charge “a very dirty move,” adding that he wouldn’t be surprised if both charges were pursued once media attention has waned.
“Charges are dropped for the time being,” Radner said. “Based on the games the city has been playing, I would not put it past them to drop the charges just to get the media off their back.
Writing about the new development in the case on her blog, Bass explains how the dog charges are “just plain malicious” and evidence of the fact that local authorities have been spying on her house.
“The idea of the code guy snooping in our backyard or, worse, peering into the windows of our house is creepy- to say the least,” writes Bass.
“But back to why it is malicious: the only way for the code official to determine whether or not our dogs were licensed was to go through the city records and check. Why would he have been looking this up? Please remember that the dogs were clearly on our property and in our control at all times, so this is not a case of the city finding a dog and checking to see if they have it on record. The ONLY reason i can think of why they would have been checking on our dogs is to have more ammunition against us.”
Bass says the new charge is merely an effort to “dig up other dirt on us” as a punishment for the embarrassment the garden fiasco caused city officials, emphasizing the fact that the dogs are in fact licensed already.
“Because almost a month to the day after we paid for the dog licenses, the prosecutor decides to reinstate the ‘no dog license’ charges that we had already taken care of….and it happens to be on the same day that they quietly and sneakily dismissed the garden charge for now at least,” she writes.
Bass also emphasizes how the original charges pertaining to her vegetable garden have not been dropped completely.
“We weren’t actually cleared of any wrongdoing. the charges have not been settled in a way that gives us any assurance at all of them not coming back the second the media spotlight is off of oak park,” she writes.
Bass’ case has become a nationwide bellwether for the resistance to big government and highlights how Americans are being gelded into subservience by a tyranny of bureaucracy and micromanagement. Sustained media spotlight needs to be maintained on the issue in order to prevent authorities from running roughshod over Bass once the heat is off.
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