Shelley Luther, the Dallas salon owner who was briefly jailed after opening her business while Texas remained in lockdown, could end up serving more time "for defying the court in violating" the city's ordinance.
Luther's lawyer, Warren Norred, told "Breitbart News Sunday" on SiriusXM that although the Supreme Court of Texas ordered his client's release, the court didn't "say we've won, but they've simply said [we've] expressed an argument that may be valid, so the city of Dallas has until four o'clock tomorrow to respond to this, and then the Supreme Court may take action or make some sort of decision."
He added, "This is an ongoing lawsuit. This is a lawsuit by the city of Dallas — a normal, everyday civil lawsuit — where the city of Dallas is saying, 'You're breaking an ordinance, and we have the opportunity to go and sue you in civil court — not criminal — for breaking our ordinance.' We're going to say that ordinance is no good. It's not based on any real law. It's based on imaginary emergency regulations that do not have the force of law, because they break the rules of federalism, and only the Texas state legislature gets to make laws."
Norred said that his client "still has five days of jail, that if this doesn't go right, she'll still be faced with."
He later explained that Luther "would be going to jail not for the violation of the ordinance for staying open, but for defying the court in violating that ordinance. When people say that one politician or another made the difference here, that's just not true. It's always true that a prosecutor can use discretion not to prosecute, [but] his isn't that kind of case. This is a civil lawsuit, and she was put in jail for criminal contempt of violating a court order."
Theodore Bunker ✉
Theodore Bunker, a Newsmax writer, has more than a decade covering news, media, and politics.
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