ARCHIVES

By Chet Donnelly

The crackdown on college antics continued Tuesday as former Daily Texan Columnist Ed Fluegel was sentenced to a year in prison for eating garlic. Attorney General Travis Barton called Fluegel's action "pure nonsense," but he praised the judge for "send[ing] a message to deviants who flout our state's laws."

Fluegel, a Classics senior who planned to write a column about the many archaic laws still on the books in Austin, went to the steps of the Capitol on February 2 with a copy of an 1909 statue prohibiting public garlic eating. He demanded to be arrested, showing the statue to three Capitol Police officers as he began to consume a clove of garlic. According to Fluegel, three of the Capitol Police laughed and left.

Within a few minutes, however, four Texas Rangers appeared, handcuffed him, and led him off to a patrol car. By this time he had eaten almost the entire bunch of garlic that he had brought. Fluegel said the Ranger who handcuffed him told him, "You think that's funny? That's sick." The Rangers, Fluegel said, took more than two minutes to comply with Fluegel's urgent request for a glass of water.

The statue Fluegel had unearthed made public garlic-eating a Class C Misdemeanor, but Fluegel was charged with a more severe crime. An even older law, passed in 1873, made garlic-eating on the Capitol grounds during a legislative session a Class A Misdemeanor carrying a possible one-year jail term.

Fluegel was visibly agitated after the sentencing. He agreed to speak to the Daily Texan, he said, "against my lawyer's advice." He said he choose to do so because his public aid lawyer, Antonio Seguin, is a "shithead."

"I was guilty!," said Fluegel, "That was the whole point of this thing. So I said to him [Seguin], I should plead guilty! I'm guilty, how about I plead guilty? This guy is some big shot corporate lawyer with no criminal clue, he tells me no, no, plead not guilty, they're going to dismiss it all, these guys screwed up arresting you, this is all some joke. So now the judge thinks I'm some dickhead because of that 'not guilty' and I now I get to go to prison."

The jury took less than five minutes to return a guilty verdict.

Judge Harlan Rimbord said during the sentencing that "civil disobedience in the service of some higher cause may sometimes be laudable, but when it is used merely to pointlessly mock the government it is despicable." He said to Fluegel, "What you have done degrades the law as you intended, but it has also degraded the civil disobedients of the past with more noble purposes, and, Mister Fluegel, it degrades yourself." He concluded by saying, "if you are going to mock the government by breaking the law, you deserve to accept the consequences."

Fluegel will remain in jail while an appeal is filed. Before sentencing, the prosecuting attorney, Louis Pourt, asked the judge that Fluegel be required to serve his full sentence with no possibility of early release. Pourt claimed that garlic as described in the old statute was a "controlled substance" for which there should be "zero tolerance." During the sentencing, Rimbord stopped his speech to Fluegel and turned to Pourt, dismissing his argument against early release. Rimbord said to him, "And you don't need to start in with this same sort of inane mockery, now!"

The later statute, as enacted into law in 1909, includes garlic-eating in a list of activities considered inappropriate for a public place, including "conspicuous drunkenness," "hurling obscenity," "sodomy," and "wife-flogging." The law has never been amended or revised.

If Fluegel does not win his appeal, he will be eligible for parole in six months.