Can landlord verbally intimidate and threaten retaliatory punishment for speaking at a public hearing?
Question Details:
Four people were planning on speaking in opposition to the landlord at a public hearing. The hearing was held before the County Commissioners. Prior to the meeting the landlord used verbal threats and intimidation in an attempt to influence these people to not testify at the hearing. A signed petition was not handed in because of the landlords menacing manner and one scared person removed their name. One person was singled out of the group and punishment in the in the form of lost privileges previously allowed have been rescinded, more implied. Any laws broken or my civil rights impeded?
This sounds like a situation that cries out for some creative lawyering, depending on exactly what the landlord can be proved to have said and done. I'm not at all sure that this is covered by the civil rights laws, mostly because the landlord isn't a governmental actor. If this was something like a rent control hearing, then if there isn't a law against what the landlord was doing, there should be.
There will always be a tension, in the law, between the rights of landowners and the rights of tenants: neither can be supreme, neither can be ignored.
