How Can You Tell if a Lawyer Is Angry?

NEW YORK —  The line leading into 1st District Court in Hempstead was long and frustrating, but it was the punch line in a lawyer joke that got two men arrested.

“How do you tell when a lawyer is lying?” Harvey Kash, 69, of Bethpage, N.Y., said to Carl Lanzisera, 65, of Huntington, N.Y., as the queue wound into the Long Island court. “His lips are moving,” they said in unison, completing one of many standard lawyer jokes.

But while that rib and several others on barristers got some giggles from the crowd, the attorney standing in line about five people ahead wasn’t laughing.

“ ‘Shut up,’ the man shouted,” Lanzisera said. “ ‘I’m a lawyer.’ ”

The attorney reported Kash and Lanzisera to court personnel, who arrested the men and charged them with engaging in disorderly conduct, a misdemeanor.

“They put the handcuffs on us, brought us into a room, frisked us, sat us down and checked our driver’s licenses to see if there were any warrants out for our arrest,” Lanzisera said Tuesday. “They were very nasty, extremely nasty.”

The men are founders of Americans for Legal Reform, a group that uses confrontational tactics to push for greater access to courts for the public and to monitor how well courts serve the public. They said their rights to free speech were violated.

But Dan Bagnuola, a spokesman for the Nassau County courts, said the men were causing a stir and that the exercise of their 1st Amendment rights to free speech was infringing on the rights of others.

“They were being abusive and they were causing a disturbance,” Bagnuola said. “They were making general comments to the people on line, referring to them as ‘peasants,’ and they were causing a disturbance. And they were asked on several occasions to act in an orderly manner not to interfere with the operation of the court.”

Bagnuola said he did not have the name of the lawyer who complained to officers.

Kash said he and Lanzisera were merely saying out loud that the public was being treated like peons or peasants while attorneys, who waved their security passes to court officers and didn’t have to wait in line, were treated like kings.

Kash and Lanzisera were given desk appearance tickets and were due back in court -- as defendants -- next month.