As Potter reports, the case against Amy Meyer was dropped after a great deal of media and social media attention.
As he orginally reported, “Meyer wanted to see the slaughterhouse for herself. She had heard that anyone passing by could view the animals, so she drove to Dale Smith Meatpacking Company in Draper City, Utah, and from the side of the road she could see through the barbed-wire fence. Piles of horns littered the property. Cows struggled with workers who tried to lead them into a building. And one scene in particular made her stop.”
“A live cow who appeared to be sick or injured being carried away from the building in a tractor,” Meyer told Potter, “as though she were nothing more than rubble.”
As she witnessed this, Meyer did what most of us would in the age of smart phones and YouTube: she recorded, says Potter.
When the slaughterhouse manager came outside and told her to stop, she replied that she was on the public easement and had the right to film. When police arrived, she said told them the same thing. According to the police report, the manager said she was trespassing and crossed over the barbed-wire fence, but the officer noted “there was no damage to the fence in my observation.”
Meyer was allowed to leave. She later found out she was being prosecuted under the state’s new “ag-gag” law.
This is the first prosecution in the country under one of these laws, which are designed to silence undercover investigators who expose animal welfare abuses on factory farms. The legislation is a direct response to a series of shocking investigations by groups like the Humane Society, Mercy for Animals, and Compassion Over Killing that have led to plant closures, public outrage, and criminal charges against workers.
According to Potter, writing on April 30, 24 hours after he broke the story, Draper City prosecutor’s office dropped all charges.
The charges were dismissed without prejudice, which means there’s a possibility of them being filed again, but her attorney says this is highly, highly unlikely — especially after the massive outpouring of outraged after yesterday’s article. To give you an idea: Potter’s article made it on the front page of reddit.com today, and in a few hours hundreds of thousands of people visited this website.
Meyer and her attorney have been bombarded with media calls. The Salt Lake Tribune ran a story based on Potter’s article, as did Democracy Now. Local reporters even came to her home, attempting to follow up on this story.
Check out Potter’s report HERE and his website and book, Green is the New Red, that focus on the threats to civil liberties and envronmentalists posed by new laws and the efforts to class no-violent protests as “terrorism.”
