FREE TO TWEET

Judge: Release Occupy Tweets

Rules they are part of free speech.

A Criminal Court judge in New York ruled on Monday that Twitter had to release an Occupy Wall Street protester’s tweets, saying that “what you give to the public belongs to the public.” Judge Matthew A. Sciarrino Jr. indicated that although private speech is protected, the same did not apply to public comments made on Twitter. Brooklyn writer Malcolm Harris was arrested with about 700 protesters in November 2011, and in January, the district attorney’s office subpoenaed Harris’s tweets. Harris’s lawyer tried to quash the subpoena—as did Twitter—but Sciarrino declared the tweets contain important information about whether police led protesters off the pedestrian paths and into the bridge’s roadway, a key point prosecutors believe Harris plans to make at the trial over his arrest.