For First Amendment and civil liberties fans, it’s the most wonderful time of the year. It’s time for the New England Muzzle Awards, that Fourth of July tradition in which I highlight outrages against the First Amendment that took place in the six-state region during the previous 12 months.
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It’s something I started doing in 1998 for The Boston Phoenix and then later moved to GBH News after the Phoenix folded in 2013. (Here’s the complete archive.) After leaving GBH, I skipped 2023, but since then have been writing up individual Muzzles throughout the year rather than waiting for an annual roundup. So welcome to the 27th annual edition.
This year I thought I would try something different. Rather than simply listing the Muzzles I’ve awarded since July 2025 (although I’m still doing that), I asked Claude AI for some additional candidates. I did not ask Claude to write them for me, and I’m relying on citations from reliable news sources. I simply used Claude as a more sophisticated way of searching than what DuckDuckGo or Google offers these days. So I’ll start with a few that I’m presenting here for the first time.
Kudos, as always, to my friends Harvey Silverglate, who conceived of this annual feature all these years ago, and Peter Kadzis, who edited all 25 editions that appeared in the Phoenix and at GBH News. They were inspired by the Jefferson Muzzles, which no longer are awarded. Here in New England, though, their spirit lives on.
James Talarico speaks at a rally in Texas. Photo (cc) 2025 by H. Michael Karshis.
If you lean left and have ever “liked” a liberal social media post, you and your email inbox are probably familiar — oh, so familiar — with ActBlue, a platform that serves as a fundraising platform for Democratic candidates. And it’s only worse if you’ve actually donated to a candidate — something I don’t do because I’m a journalist.
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But if you’ve wished that ActBlue would just go away, be careful. Ken Paxton, the floridly corrupt Republican Senate candidate from Texas, wants you to believe that he’s coming to your rescue. Acting in his capacity as his state’s attorney general, he sued ActBlue in December 2023. Now he’s trying to use that suit as a cudgel in his campaign to defeat his Democratic opponent, James Talarico. So far, that suit isn’t going anywhere.
Boston Globe reporter Amanda Milkovits, left, talks about her reporting with WPRI-TV (Channel 12) anchor Kayla Fish.
When police officers arrest someone and charge them with a crime, they are required to provide the public with information on that person’s name, address and the charges being brought. That’s a basic part of the public records law in Rhode Island and most other states.
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But the Rhode Island attorney general’s office has come up with a mind-boggling exception: if someone is arrested and not charged, then the police are under no obligation to make that information public. According to Boston Globe reporter Amanda Milkovits, that’s the alleged loophole being invoked (sub. req.) in the case of James Barsoum, who was arrested by Pawtucket police last September in Central Falls. As Milkovits writes:
Last fall, Pawtucket police officers went into a neighboring city without alerting the local police, tackled a resident in his home, seized his dog, booked the man, and put him in a jail cell. He was released hours later without being charged with a crime — and without an explanation.
The official who has come up with this novel interpretation of the public records law is Special Assistant Attorney General Patrick Reynolds, who explained that he was rejecting the Globe’s request for records related to Barsoum’s arrest because even though “there is a public interest in what transpired here, and that the mistaken arrest of a member of the public is highly concerning,” that is outweighed by “privacy interests” guaranteed by a law sealing records when a person has not been charged with a crime.
So come on down, Patrick Reynolds, and claim your New England Muzzle Award. It is well-deserved.
As for Barsoum’s “privacy interests,” keep in mind that he’s been interviewed (sub. req.) about his ordeal, allowed himself to be photographed (with his dog, by the way) and filed a complaint about his arrest. Keep in mind, too, that Central Falls police complied with the Globe’s public-records request, including providing bodycam video. It’s only the Pawtucket police who are holding back, and the AG’s office is letting them get away with it.
“Police in this state can break into your house, wrongfully arrest you, and never have to explain themselves to the communities they serve,” Justin Silverman, the executive director of the New England First Amendment Coalition, told the Globe. “Think about that: So long as charges aren’t brought, arrests can occur in secrecy and the police reports can be permanently sealed or destroyed. It’s a situation ripe for abuse.”
Bunker Hill Monument. Photo by John S. Moulton, taken between 1860 and 1889, is part of the Boston Public Library Collection.
You could call the Trump regime’s campaign against so-called woke ideology an ongoing effort to muzzle our nation’s history. From the start of his second term, the National Park Service has engaged in a rampage of censorship, targeting historical sites in Philadelphia, Georgia, New York and elsewhere.
Now Trump has come for Boston. On Wednesday, Jake Spring reported in The Washington Post that the park service “has ordered the removal of three quotes” at the Bunker Hill Monument. Thus has the National Park Service earned a New England Muzzle Award. Spring writes:
The site includes panels with quotes from historic figures or writings that reflect on the 200-year-old monument. A visitor at the site complained to park staff about a quote related to women’s suffrage as being “woke” feminist ideology, the people familiar said, and the visitor later sent an email complaint.
The Boston Globe’s Tonya Alanez and Chloe Pisani on Thursday added to (sub. req.) the Post’s reporting, writing that they had confirmed the story with U.S. Sen. Ed Markey’s office. The Globe reported that one of the three quotes to be removed was from an 1846 letter by G.B. Stebbins to The Liberator, William Lloyd Garrison’s anti-slavery newspaper:
As we drew near to Boston, there stood Bunker Monument, towering up towards the heavens, as if in silent, bitter mockery of the millions of slaves guarded by the professed lovers of Liberty, who reared its lofty column.
Another, addressed to “Our Irish Societies,” appeared in The Pilot, the newspaper of Boston’s Roman Catholic Archdiocese, in 1875:
Now that a public orator has declared that foreign-born men have no association with the men of the Revolution, it is our duty to show that in love of freedom and loyalty to the republic, the citizens of foreign birth take no second place.
The third quote that was removed was from a letter to the Globe written in 1971 by two members of Vietnam Veterans Against the War.
It seems significant that the three quotes pertain to the rights of Black people and immigrants as well as an antiwar message — all at odds with Trump’s racist, anti-immigrant, war-mongering administration.
The government’s officially sanctioned vandalism coincides with another act of vandalism at Boston’s Museum of African American History. Malcolm Gay reports (sub. req.) in the Globe that decorations to be used in Juneteenth celebrations had been set on fire.
Ironically, the investigation is being led by the Boston Police Department — and the National Park Service.
Boston Mayor Michelle Wu. Public domain photo taken in 2022 by Joshua Qualls.
Are text messages to and from government officials public records? You might think it’s complicated. On the one hand, texts are in written form, like emails, and those are unquestionably a matter of public record. On the other hand, texts resemble conversations in that they tend to be informal, used to express fleeting thoughts.
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In fact, though, it’s not complicated. Text messages are public records, period. And so I’m handing out a New England Muzzle Award to Boston Mayor Michelle Wu, whose office claims it can’t comply with a request by The Boston Globe to produce text messages that she says she’s exchanged with developers. As the chief executive of the state’s largest city, Wu and her staff surely know better.
Gov. Maura Healey, left, with Lt. Gov. Kim Driscoll. 2023 photo in the public domain.
Six years ago, then-Massachusetts Gov. Charlie Baker, a moderate Republican, earned a New England Muzzle Award — then hosted by GBH News — for proposing a change in the public-records laws so that access to birth, death and marriage records would not be available to the public for many decades. The delay would have amounted to 90 years in the case of birth and marriage records and 50 years after a person’s death.
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Fortunately, the bill didn’t pass. But now Baker’s successor, Gov. Maura Healey, a liberal Democrat, is back with a similar bill. As The Boston Globe put it in an editorial (sub. req.) on Thursday:
In a state that already has a dreadful reputation for its lack of transparency and will probably face a ballot question over the exemptions from the state’s public records law accorded the governor’s office and the Legislature, this is simply the wrong law at the wrong time.
The Globe observes that Healey, in her announcement touting the legislation, emphasizes one of its few positive aspects — the end of references to “out of wedlock” on birth and marriage certificates. The rest of it, though, would deprive researchers of information they need to do their work in areas such as public health and genealogy. And she has stacked the deck in favor of passage by making it part of a budget bill that must be approved and for which debate is limited.
As I wrote in 2020, these records have been freely available to anyone who asks for them since the early Puritan era. Investigative reporter Jenifer McKim of GBH News said on Twitter at the time: “As MA governor [Baker] works to make birth, death records secret, thinking of the stories I’ve written and produced with the help of these key, currently public, documents, including suicides at colleges and universities.”
And in a 2020 interview with the Chelsea Record, Ryan Woods, executive vice president of the New England and Genealogical Society, said, “Unequivocally it was a surprise to us. There had not been any public discussion about this until it appeared in the budget.”
This is not Gov. Healey’s first time around with the Muzzle Awards. In 2015, when she was the state attorney general, I singled her out for defending a 1946 state law that criminalized political lies aimed at influencing an election, as if that were even theoretically possible.
In 2018, also a time when she was AG, she won another Muzzle, this one for upholding rulings that public information should, in some cases, remain private. Then-Globe reporter Todd Wallack, now with The Washington Post, documented a number of Healey’s attempts to suppress public records. His most startling finding: Healey’s office had upheld a ruling by the Worcester district attorney that records pertaining to the 1951 murder of a state trooper should not be made public. Healey’s decision reversed a ruling by Secretary of State Bill Galvin’s office and denied a friend of the murder victim the opportunity to follow up some leads on his own. The friend had since died.
Massachusetts has one of the worst reputations in the country with regard to public records. All too often, Maura Healey has been part of the problem rather than part of the solution.
Dartmouth College. 2007 public domain photo by Kane5187.
When the police arrest someone, the public has a right to know the reason. That’s why virtually every public-records law in the country requires that the police release basic information about those they’ve taken into custody, including name, address and the charges filed against them. And as long as there’s no danger of compromising an investigation, the police are required to release more detailed information as well.
But apparently that’s not how they conduct business in the town of Hanover, New Hampshire. Because when two student protesters at Dartmouth College were arrested in October 2023, the town refused to release the reports. The Valley News, the local newspaper serving that area, took the town to court. And when a state judge in August 2024 ordered the town to produce the records, local officials not only dragged their feet for a few more weeks but they also refused to pay The Valley News’ legal fees, which is required under state law.
Last week, the town lost that case as well. And thus we present town officials in Hanover with a New England Muzzle Award for gross interference with the public’s right to know. Here’s how the state Supreme Court put it in a 3-0 decision:
Having concluded that this lawsuit was necessary to enforce compliance with the Right-to-Know Law and that Hanover knew or should have known that its blanket denial violated that law, we necessarily conclude that Valley News is entitled to an award of reasonable attorney’s fees and costs under RSA 91-A:8, I. [That’s a reference to the state’s Right-to-Know Law.]
After the records were released in September 2024, John Lippman of The Valley News reported that they revealed the two students were arrested “at the behest of college officials who wanted them cited for criminal trespass.” The students had set up a tent as part of pro-Palestinian protests aimed at pressuring Dartmouth to divest from investments “that are complicit in apartheid and its apparatuses.” Lippman wrote:
Although the demonstration was peaceful, Hanover police prepared for the students’ arrests as if they were undertaking a major police operation by dividing into double-officer teams called “arrest team 1” and “arrest team 2” which were staged behind Parkhurst Hall, out of sight of the protesters.
The students were charged with misdemeanor offenses. According to Alesandra Gonzales of The Dartmouth, the two students were found guilty and, in February 2025, were sentenced to 20 hours of community service each plus a $310 fine that could be satisfied through that service.
After last week’s state Supreme Court ruling on legal fees, Valley News publisher Rich Wallace hailed the decision as a blow for governmental transparency:
This ruling affirms a simple but essential principle: the public has a right to know, and that right must be defended. Awarding fees in this case recognizes that transparency should not come at a financial penalty to those willing to stand up for it. We pursued this not just for our newsroom, but for the community we serve — and today’s decision strengthens accountability for everyone.
Shanahan wrote that the town and the police department withheld records because of their “active criminal prosecution of the case” — an argument that clearly did not impress Judge Steven Houran, who ordered that the records be released, or the state Supreme Court.
Eleven months ago, I handed a New England Muzzle Award to Donald Trump’s thuggish immigration czar, Stephen Miller, for the arrest and detention of Rümeysa Öztürk. The Tufts University Ph.D. student’s only offense was to help write an op-ed piece in The Tufts Daily that was critical of Israel and sympathetic to the pro-Palestinian cause.
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Now Roopal Patel, the Boston immigration judge who ended deportation proceedings against Öztürk, has been fired. And thus I’m awarding another New England Muzzle, this one to Teresa Riley, the chief immigration judge who was appointed to her position by the Trump regime. I don’t know whether she was involved in Patel’s firing. What I do know is that Riley has neither resigned in protest nor raised her voice in outrage since Patel was dismissed on Friday.
Patel was actually one of two immigration judges fired Friday who had been involved in high-profile immigration cases. The other, Nina Froes, had ruled similarly that Trump officials had no right to detain Mohsen Mahdawi, a green card holder who’d been involved in pro-Palestinian protests at Columbia University. There’s another New England angle as well — Froes’ court is based in Chelmsford, Massachusetts. The New York Times reports:
Ms. Patel, like many immigration judges interviewed by The Times, said the Trump administration had made it clear that it wanted more immigrants ordered deported.
“It was a pressure I at least tried to actively resist,” she said in an interview. “All people in the United States are entitled to due process, and everyone deserves to have their cases adjudicated fully and fairly.”
According to The Boston Globe (sub. req.), Patel “was nearing the end of her two-year probationary period” when she was fired. “Even though I was expecting it, it was still sort of shocking,” Patel told the Globe. “The consequences are immediate.”
The Globe reports that 113 immigration judges out of more than 700 have been fired since January 2025. The paper quoted Patel as saying:
It’s creating this climate of fear where judges are worried that if they misstep and do something that’s out of line with what the administration wants, they’re more subject to firing. That can erode judicial independence, it can erode due process, and it can make people more likely to be ordered removed from this country.
Unlike most judges, who are part of the independent judiciary, immigration judges are considered members of the executive branch and are appointed by the attorney general. “The judges there need more judicial independence,” Patel told the Times in speaking about her former colleagues.
This is the way repression works. Just as international students learned from the Öztürk and Mahdawi cases that the price of avoiding arrest and detention is to refrain from their First Amendment-protected rights to write and to protest, immigration judges have learned from Patel and Froes that they should place Trump’s agenda above the law if they want to hold onto their jobs.
In June 2023, independent journalist Andrew Quemere filed a lawsuit aimed at forcing Northwestern District Attorney David Sullivan to turn over the names of police officers who had been charged with violating the law.
Sullivan argued that the names should be kept secret, even though, Quemere wrote for his newsletter, The Mass Dump, “prosecutors had published some of the names and case details in online press releases and other self-laudatory documents.” (The Northwestern District comprises Hampshire and Franklin counties as well as the town of Athol, which is in Worcester County.)
Finally, on March 13, Sullivan produced the documents — two and a half months after he’d been ordered to do so by Superior Court Judge Julie Green. For dragging Quemere’s request out for several years, and for delaying the release of the documents even after being told by a judge to turn them over, Sullivan has earned a New England Muzzle Award.
The case that Quemere brought turned on several arcane aspects of the law, but the seriousness of the offenses with which the officers had been charged was not in dispute; they included possession of child-sexual-abuse materials, assault and battery, and drunken driving. At issue was that the officers were the subject of so-called Brady disclosures, which prosecutors must turn over to defendants in criminal cases if those officers testify against them. That gives defense lawyers the opportunity to challenge those officers’ credibility.
Sullivan’s office, meanwhile, countered that the officers were protected by the state’s Criminal Offender Record Information law, known as CORI. Judge Green ruled that was not the case, although she also found that the DA’s office did not act in bad faith.
In an interview with The Republican of Springfield, Quemere said he believed that Sullivan was still withholding records:
It’s been four years — 50 months — since my public records request, and the DA’s Office still has not released all of the documents. It’s misleading that they’ve only released the 191 pages, when I know there are more officers who have been investigated for criminal misconduct.
Sullivan, in turn, told The Republican that Quemere had only received records for misconduct that were investigated after 2022 because that’s all he had asked for. “I have never lied, and we’ve been very forthcoming with records,” he said, adding: “We’ve acted in good faith with Mr. Quemere this entire time.”
Clearly, though, the public has a right to know when police officers have been accused — and in some cases convicted — of misconduct. Quemere reports that several of the 13 officers whose names appeared in the newly released Brady records had been convicted of various offenses. And at least six of those cases had appeared in the press before their names were redacted by the DA’s office — which calls into question why Sullivan thought it was so important to try to put the toothpaste back into the tube.
The Lexington Minuteman would not approve. Photo (cc) 2022 by Dan Kennedy.
Kyle York had a simple request. He asked the school department in Lexington, Massachusetts, to provide him with public records in order to bolster his request that the system provide support services for his daughter, who has dyslexia.
But thanks to the state’s notoriously weak public records law, school officials were able to stonewall him by demanding fees that were grossly excessive, essentially daring him to file an appeal. Fortunately for York, those officials were also sloppy — they documented their ruse in an email and included that email in a trove of records that they eventually provided to him without charge, Christopher Huffaker reports (sub. req.) in The Boston Globe.
In his story, he includes an incredibly blatant internal email sent to a school employee by Kristen McGrath, the executive administrative assistant for human resources:
Attached is a spreadsheet and it looks like a pdf of the spreadsheet. The dates are 2019-2025. Can you over estimate the time it would take to compile/copy the invoices requested and let me know when you have a chance? Hopefully, when I let them know the cost they will not want to do it.
Thank you!
Kristen
The subterfuge has earned a New England Muzzle Award for the Lexington Public Schools. As Justin Silverman, executive director of the New England First Amendment Coalition, tells the Globe, “It’s a symptom of our poor public records law that allows those in government agencies, whether it’s a school or some other public body, to play games with the law to withhold records that should be given to the public, and most of the time do so without any kind of accountability.”
York has been fighting for services to help his daughter for some time. In February 2024, Shannon Garrido of The Lexington Observer reported that he was one of a number of parents who were frustrated by what they perceived as a lack of support for their children.
“We probably spent in the last year like $20,000, between advocates, attorneys, [and] private tutors,” York told Garrido at that time.
As Huffaker reports in the Globe, York has received an apology from Schools Supt. Julie Hackett. But the article also notes that the public records law, despite some tightening up in 2016, remain grossly inadequate, with uncertain prospects for anyone who appeals to the secretary of state’s office and the attorney general, plus little in the way of penalties for offending government officials.
This year I thought I would try something different. Rather than simply listing the Muzzles I’ve awarded since July 2025 (although I’m still doing that), I asked Claude AI for some additional candidates. I did not ask Claude to write them for me, and I’m relying on citations from reliable news sources. I simply used Claude as a more sophisticated way of searching than what DuckDuckGo or Google offers these days. So I’ll start with a few that I’m presenting here for the first time.
