You are cordially invited to attend the Photography is a First Amendment Right fund raiser Saturday afternoon in Dania Beach.

A portion of the proceeds will go toward my mounting legal fees as I prove my innocence against the five Miami police officers who arrested me after photographing them against their wishes.

A portion will also go towards the Society of Professional Journalists Legal Defense Fund, which aids reporters and photographers nationwide in defending the freedom of speech and press guaranteed by the First Amendment of the United States Constitution.

The event, which is free and open to the public, will be held Saturday from 1 to 5 p.m. at Grace Cafe and Galleries, 49 North Federal Highway in Dania Beach.

I will provide several photos to be featured in a silent auction and I will also perform some spoken word poetry.

North Carolina freelance photojournalist Carter Rabil was arrested April 26th after refusing a police order to move back as he was filming an accident scene involving a fatality.

Now the State Bureau of Investigations is investigating the Smithfield Police Department to determine whether they acted improperly.

Rabil’s video shows Smithfield Police Captain Bruce Gentry ordering him “away from the crime scene”, which is clearly on the other side of the intersection.

All Gabriel Lopez-Bernal needed was for a police officer to harass him and he would have earned the Triple Crown Photo Frisk Award.

After all, the Miami blogger says he was harassed by both a rent-a-cop and a U.S. Marshal on Monday for the sole crime of standing on a public sidewalk and photographing the Federal Courthouse Building in downtown Miami.

In fact, he came close to being harassed by a police officer after a civilian pedestrian who had walked into his picture frame became irate at being photographed and reported him to the police. Apparently, this woman is unaware of all the public surveillance cameras in downtown.

The officer only shrugged, destroying a golden opportunity for Lopez-Bernal to win the Triple Crown Photo Frisk Award that day, which traditionally goes to photographers whose First Amendment rights are violated by three different levels of authority during a single photo shoot. Unfortunately, the award has declined in value in recent years after a surge of intolerance against photographers made it almost too easy to win.

Had he really wanted to win that award, he could have simply photographed that officer, but he had better things to do than spend a night in jail, which would probably have affected his upcoming confrontation with the U.S. Marshal (motto: Don’t let me catch you having a bipolar episode on a commercial airliner).

Lopez-Bernal, a Miami native and UF student, operates Transit Miami, which he describes as “a local website dedicated to discussing the transportation and urban planning problems that face our region.” In other words, he does what three decades of corrupt politicians have failed to do.

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Ever since I was charged with nine misdemeanors after photographing police against their wishes, many people I’ve talked to within the legal community have said that it is virtually impossible for a judge to grant a defendant’s request for a deposition if that defendant is facing only misdemeanor charges.

A deposition is a pretrial process that allows attorneys to gather evidence in order to prepare for the trial.

Under normal circumstances, an attorney files a request for deposition to the judge, then if granted, the attorney subpoenas witnesses and asks them a series of questions. A court reporter records the entire interview and a transcript becomes part of the case file.

But because this can become a timely and costly process, most judges deny depositions in misdemeanor cases.

Fortunately, that did not happen with my case, which is the reason my trial, originally scheduled to begin today, was postponed.

But I’ve been known to let things slide, including copyright violations of my photos by a certain blogger who probably wouldn’t be stuck in traffic if he knew how to stand up for his rights.

This post is for you, Rick, in the hopes that you realize that dissent is sometimes the purest form of patriotism.

Not that you’ll be surprised, but this was not the first time I’ve been called an arrogant prick. And it won’t be the last. Hell, my own friends have called me that only for me to take it as a compliment.

That is how I titled the first thread I posted on Democratic Underground two days after I had been released from jail. I posted it in DU’s Photo Group forum, a subsection of the extensive liberal website that has more than 100,000 registered members. The DU Photo Group is where liberal photographers congregate and for the most part, avoid political discussion.

I had just posted another thread with photos and comments about the Anna Nicole Smith media circus that I had attended the afternoon of my arrest, which is why I started the thread on my arrest with the word “then”. Had I known the thread would end up taking the blogosphere by storm, I would have been more grammatically correct.