Ian Smith, the former co-owner of Atilis Gym in Bellmawr, N.J., told Newsmax that Tuesday's dismissal of 80-plus charges for defying the state's COVID lockdown four years ago was a "small victory" but "extremely significant."
Winslow Township dropped all charges on Tuesday with prejudice, meaning they cannot be filed again. Though the municipal case is separate from the state case against Smith and co-owner Frank Trumbetti, Smith told "Carl Higbie FRONTLINE" that the local case was the basis for the hefty punitive measures.
"Thank you for all the times that you had us on," Smith told Higbie. "This is a little bit of a small victory but it's extremely significant. It's our first major victory. And it is sort of the ground floor that the state built a lot of its punitive measures on, so it does open the door to a lot of possibilities. So just wanna thank you for always giving us a little bit of a voice when we needed to show the world what was happening."
Smith opened the doors to his gym in May 2020 in defiance of state-ordered closings of non-essential businesses, which Smith claimed was arbitrary. He was ordered to pay $165,000 in fines for violating public health emergency rules levied by Democrat Gov. Phil Murphy and state Health Commissioner Judith Persichilli.
"Well, there's still a lot of that big looming stuff. There's an appeal that's been sitting on a desk for two years. But all of these punitive measures came from what was essentially a court order by a judge, and Gov. Murphy went to this lackey of a judge, Judge Robert Lougy, who … ruled in Murphy's favor," Smith said.
"They were silly municipal charges and they said, 'Look how bad these guys are. Look at what they're doing, and here's my executive order, and here's the Health Department shutdown, Judge. Please … enforce this matter.' So that's where all of the really scary punitive measures came from," Smith recounted.
"So this victory at the local level ... gives us a lot of hope as to see where we can go from here, now that we have a big part of what the state said was wrong, gone."
Asked for his advice to business owners who are instructed to shut down their business: "Just don't do it," Smith said. "If we all do it, they won't have enough crappy judges and politicians to enforce it. And everybody knows that."
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Mark Swanson ✉
Mark Swanson, a Newsmax writer and editor, has nearly three decades of experience covering news, culture and politics.
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