Lemon Law

Pam Bondi is living every corrupt regime’s dream: jailing reporters and getting boss-points for her target choices. But as usual, the administration trashes our best history and the Constitution.

A time we were thankful a reporter was on the job and wasn’t arrested for it. North Carolina Digital Archives.

Marvin Sykes was a devout member of his Baptist church for 73 years, belonged to the Lions Club for 50 years, and enjoyed gardening. The county extension agent named him a master gardener. In retirement, he ran the local Better Business Bureau and volunteered to teach people how to invest.

In college, he played tennis, sang in the a cappella choir, and managed business matters for the campus newspaper. He went to grad school. After World War II (Navy intelligence), he returned to his native North Carolina, where he covered cops and city hall and ran the business desk for the afternoon Greensboro Record.

In 57 years of marriage that lasted until his death, Marvin and Jamie raised a daughter and three sons and had four grandkids. When he died in 2004, he was 88 years old

At age 44, literally his middle age, Marvin Sykes became a criminal—at least in the perverse view of Donald Trump, Pam Bondi, and whatever corrupted or invertebrate prosecutors haven’t yet worked up enough self-respect or karmic fear to walk out of this sorry movie.

Here’s what Sykes did:

He knew in advance that agitators planned to enter private property without the owner’s permission to disrupt the normal order of business—but did nothing to tip off the authorities so they could stop it.

To make matters worse, he even entered the private property himself with the trespassers, also without an invitation.

Then, as he had obviously planned to do in advance, he spread and amplified their disruptive message while claiming the protection of the First Amendment.

In other words, he did what the independent reporters Don Lemon (whom Trump hates, no coincidence) and Georgia Fort did that got them arrested this week after covering a protest in a Minneapolis church.

Here is the opening of what Sykes wrote:

A group of 20 Negro students from A&T College occupied luncheon counter seats, without being served, at the downtown F.W. Woolworth Co. Store late this morning -- starting what they declared would be a growing movement.

The group declared double that number will take place at the counters tomorrow.

Employees of Woolworth did not serve the group and they sat from 10:30 a.m. until after noon. White customers continued to sit and get service.

Clarence Harris, Woolworth manager, replied “No comment” to all questions concerning the “sit-down” move about Woolworth custom, and about what he planned to do.

Today’s 20-man action followed the appearance at 4:30 p.m. yesterday of four freshmen from Scott Hall at A&T who sat down and stayed, without service, until the store closed at 5:30 p.m.

Student spokesmen said they are seeking luncheon counter service, and will increase their numbers daily until they get it.

The story continues; read it here.

Sykes’ story, dated Feb. 2, 1960, is one of the most important in American civil rights history: the first on the Greensboro sit-ins by students from the HBCU North Carolina A&T and others. He was there as a reporter and did his job.

Under Bondi’s Lemon Law—her grotesquely unconstitutional shredding of the First Amendment—Sykes would have been arrested for covering the sit-in. Over weeks and months, Greensboro police arrested scores of students. The paperwork said trespassing, but really the students were arrested for challenging the way of things.

The eventual result of the sit-ins and other protests, magnified by reporters’ exposure of official and unofficial white supremacist violence, wasn’t just the freedom to have a hot dog and a Coke at Woolworth’s. It was the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965—a fundamental reordering of American justice that underscored the Warren Court’s unanimous message in Brown v. Board of Education in 1954: that the 14^th Amendment means what it says.

Those laws and assurances are no longer secure because some, including the current Supreme Court majority, the current administration, and others, oppose that reordering of justice. The court majority seems overtly hostile to both laws and their core principles. No one can seriously think it would issue Brown today.

This administration, which deeply fears and therefore vehemently opposes voting rights, seems bent on picking off, one by one, the amendments most aligned with official fairness and personal liberty: 14^th, Fourth, First.

This is a crucial context for understanding the prosecution of Lemon and Fort. It is much more than reporter harassment or Trump’s personal hatreds, although they certainly play a role as Bondi scans for targets. It is part of the effort to overturn that vision of a more just nation.

When American injustice has had the upper hand, exposure protected by the First Amendment has often helped level the field. Today it’s likely to be an independent or amateur journalist breaking a story. This is why so many police and federal agents don’t want witnesses taking video. But the constitutional protection is exactly the same.

The temptation that the administration offers is to judge the worthiness of First Amendment protection by the worthiness of those it protects. I don’t agree with the arrest, but I don’t like Don Lemon misses the constitutional point. Mainstream, popular views rarely need the First Amendment. At the far edge we reach Trump’s This person displeases me, so they’re terrible and should be jailed. When the hacks in the DOJ hear that, they get busy earning star stickers for their annual reviews.

But stripping a few political or cultural outliers of their rights is always a warmup for cutting a wider swath.

Lemon and Fort will walk on this. Their indictment by a spoon-fed grand jury is unlikely to hold up past the prelims.

Bondi and other toadies know this but don’t care. It’s just practice for a show trial.

In countries that have perfected the show trial over decades, like Russia, China, and scores of their lesser emulators, the outcome is preordained and predictable and invariably favors the strongman state. The show trial maintains a pretense of fairness and law-and-order while really just settling scores and trying to scare the next dissenter.

In the United States in 2026, the administration isn’t good enough at it yet or doesn’t face a compliant enough judiciary to produce Putin-level show trials. The Justice Department is already 1-for-6: Benighted grand jurors indicted the reporters, but the government probably didn’t tell them that a federal magistrate, a senior federal district judge, and a federal appeals court had already needed just moments to see there was no case. Two other magistrates flatly refused the government’s request to require bonds and restrict their travel. So far, the Lemon and Fort prosecutions are the jurisprudential version of Melania.

But that’s no comfort. The toadies are working on it daily: finding new targets and zealot judges to try them. Perhaps there’s a new item on the judicial nominee questionnaire: Do you hate Don Lemon a little, a lot, or a whole lot?

Unless the courts, politicians, journalists, and mostly the public stand up, there will be other cases, other charges that, like this one, don’t even pretend at the show trial’s fairness part—just the score-settling and scaring parts.

For the source material on Marvin Sykes, see this brief biography and his obituary