McDonough, who has a doctorate in organic thermochemistry and goes by "Doc Justice" online, then directed his comments toward then-city councilman Elvis Maldonado.
"The last point I would like to hit off with is, Mr. Maldonado, I'd appreciate it if you got something to say to me, you come say it to my face. You don't have to talk about me behind my back in public and talk to other people," said McDonough.
That was when Homestead police officer Garland Wright ordered McDonough out of Homestead City Hall, a three-story, 84,000-square foot building that had been completed two months earlier at a cost of $26.5 million, which McDonough and his friends refer to as the "Taj Mahal" because of its "monstrous size and outmoded architecture." On his way out, McDonough declared, "I'm going to sue your dumb ass," a pledge he would eventually keep.
The encounter marked the start of yet another chapter in a more than decade-long legal crusade that McDonough has pursued against Homestead law enforcement and city officials. Along the way, he's lodged allegations of unlawful arrests, retaliatory harassment, and an unwarranted anal-cavity search.
After getting booted from city hall, McDonough returned the following month to attend a council meeting, but as McDonough recalls it, he barely made it through the door when Wright ordered him off the premises, telling him he was banned from city hall. The officer suggested McDonough write some kind of letter to regain access, never explaining what the document must say or to whom it should be addressed.
He complied with Wright's order, but as he was walking back to his car, he turned to the officer and flipped him off with his middle finger, telling him, "I'm leaving buddy, bye-bye."
Within seconds, McDonough was arrested on charges of trespassing and disorderly conduct, the latter of which is a catch-all charge frequently used by police to arrest activists exercising their First Amendment rights, according to the ACLU. In their report, the cops accused McDonough of grabbing his genitals as he flipped the cop off to the horror of bystanders — an allegation he denies and was not supported by video camera evidence.
Years deep into McDonough's lawsuit over the fracas, a federal appeals court in January ruled that police had no right to arrest McDonough for flipping the cops off, regardless of whether he grabbed his groin while doing it. The three-judge panel also ruled that the city could not permanently ban him from attending city council meetings over his past confrontations.
The victory was short-lived, however.
On February 29, the appeals court vacated the decision and agreed to rehear the case with a full panel of judges after the city filed a petition arguing its trespass order against McDonough was valid. (The city's petition did not challenge the ruling that McDonough's arrest was unconstitutional.)
For McDonough, it was a familiar development. Many of his tussles with the City of Homestead have taken long, labyrinthine paths through court, replete with thousands of pages of filings and years of legal head-butting over constitutional case law.
The activist has been relentless in his opposition to Homestead police practices in the past 12 years, engaging in countless administrative and courtroom skirmishes over public records requests, civil rights claims, and governmental transparency. While some Homestead city staffers have at one point or another deemed him a nuisance (and, possibly, the bane of their existence), McDonough has a reputation in the First Amendment activism community as a stalwart litigator for free speech rights.
McDonough's attorney, Alan Greenstein, says his client's pending appellate case with the City of Homestead has major implications in the arena of free speech at government meetings.
"This is precedent because I am unaware of any case in the 11th Circuit where a person was banned from speaking at a council meeting based on behavior at a previous meeting," Greenstein, a criminal and civil rights attorney and professor at the University of Miami, tells New Times.
Homestead Town Hall
City of Homestead photo
The Birth of Doc Justice
A Virginia native who attended the University of Miami, McDonough became a police accountability activist in 2012 following a confrontation with a Homestead cop who lived down the street from him. As tensions rose between McDonough and local police, he was arrested various times on charges that never stood up in court, including felony stalking and witness tampering. He has repeatedly filed civil rights lawsuits, but twice the Southern District of Florida based in Miami threw out his complaints, leading to successful appeals. "I'm not the guy who takes threats against my rights from government officials sitting down," he tells New Times.
McDonough says it all started on October 29, 2012, five days after Homestead police officer Alejandro Murguido, his neighbor, allegedly ran him off the road in his patrol car, causing him to almost crash into an oncoming vehicle. McDonough approached Murguido, who was standing in his front yard with his gardener, and asked him to slow down for the safety of the children in the neighborhood, including his three children.
But Murguido responded by calling the police on him, resulting in a dozen officers from the Homestead and Miami-Dade Police departments detaining him for 90 minutes and pledging to arrest him for trespass if he walked on Murguido's block again. The cops claimed McDonough had acted in a threatening manner.
McDonough contacted the internal affairs division of the Homestead Police Department to file a complaint against Murguido — after which point Murguido had him arrested on felony stalking charges, which were dismissed in court, McDonough says.
The more the police tried to shut him up, the more he continued speaking up, criticizing cops in an online forum called LEO Affairs frequented by police, where he began posting under the moniker Doc Justice. As McDonough began investigating Murguido through public records requests, he learned the then-66-year officer had a long history of disciplinary action against him at other police departments, including the Hialeah Police Department.
State Attorney Eyes McDonough
In January 2014, McDonough filed another internal affairs complaint against Murguido, accusing him of retaliating against him for his initial complaints. A month later, Chief Alexander Rolle invited McDonough to his office for a meeting about his allegations against Murguido. The meeting on February 7, 2014, was attended by McDonough, Rolle, a Homestead detective, as well as a friend of McDonough.During the meeting, McDonough began recording on his phone, which he placed on the chief's desk in open view. The recording showed that McDonough handed the chief documents pertaining to Murguido's history of alleged misconduct at the Hialeah Police Department.
However, when McDonough later made a public records request to Homestead for files pertaining to Murguido, those documents were not included. When McDonough persisted in asking why the documents were missing, Chief Rolle claimed he never received them."My legal victories show that average citizens with the facts and law on their side can fight city hall if they are persistent."
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McDonough, in turn, posted a clip from the meeting on his YouTube channel, prompting Miami-Dade State Attorney Katherine Fernandez Rundle to send him a letter threatening to have him arrested under the state's wiretapping law if he continued to record police inside the police department without their consent. The state attorney, who has been criticized for taking a light-handed approach to prosecuting police officers, claimed that Rolle had an expectation of privacy inside his office.
McDonough sued over the state attorney's threat, and although the district court sided with Fernandez Rundle, McDonough prevailed on appeal.
The 11th Circuit ruled that Rolle did not have an expectation of privacy in the meeting because it not only pertained to government business but was also attended by another Homestead police officer as well as a friend of McDonough. "The facts that all attendees of the meeting were either public employees acting in furtherance of their public duties, or members of the public discussing a matter of public interest, undermines any objective expectation of privacy," the 2017 ruling stated.
"With this ruling, we can now record police officers even in a closed-door meeting because, as public officials, they have no expectation of privacy in the performance of their public duties," McDonough says.
"My legal victories show that average citizens with the facts and law on their side can fight city hall if they are persistent," he says.
Coup de Grâce
One of McDonough's most ambitious legal campaigns came in the form of a lawsuit filed in 2016 (refiled in 2017) against the Homestead, Miami-Dade County, and Monroe County police forces and more than 30 officers. McDonough claimed cops had been harassing, doxxing, and threatening him and his wife ever since the 2012 confrontation with Murguido. In the lawsuit, the activist claimed Miami-Dade police once arrested him at his home, threw him into the back of a police car, and subjected him to what police call a "rough ride" or "nickel ride," in which cops slam on the breaks and jerk the cruiser around while a detainee bounces about the vehicle.
Upon his arrival at a Miami-Dade jail after that 2013 arrest, McDonough alleged he was "forced to strip naked, bend over, and manually spread his butt cheeks and cough while a guard was observing. This was in a room with an open door, while people were walking past and observed him in this manner," the lawsuit alleged.
McDonough claims that at the early stage of his dispute with Homestead police, he began suffering panic attacks from the resulting stress. When he visited an urgent care clinic, a doctor wrote him off as delusional and called the source of his swelling angst: the Homestead police, who, upon arrival, made threats to commit him to a mental institution.
The civil case was ultimately dismissed in federal court, with the presiding judge classifying it as a "shotgun pleading," one that lacks enough clarity to allow the defendants to mount a coherent defense. The Monroe County Sheriff's Office had argued that "fused, vague, and ambiguous allegations are common throughout the instant complaint and leave defendants to guess at precisely what the plaintiffs are alleging."
"It certainly is not the court's responsibility to attempt to discern potential causes of action from a hodgepodge of allegations haphazardly strewn together," U.S. District Judge Robert Scola wrote.
Scola noted that the deadline to file some of the claims in the lawsuit had passed.
What's Next for McDonough
The circuit has a majority of conservative judges, which could play in his favor in terms of strict adherence to First Amendment principles. U.S. Circuit Judge Britt Grant, who penned the now-vacated ruling in McDonough's favor in January, is known for rulings upholding free speech rights. (Grant backed McDonough's right to attend Homestead council meetings in spite of officials' perception that he'll be disruptive to city business.)
A central issue in the case is whether city council meetings are considered "limited public forums" or "designated public forums" — a distinction that will influence how much leeway cities have in blocking controversial speakers like McDonough from showing up.
Though Grant denied Wright and another Homestead policeman qualified immunity (a legal protection that shields cops from liability for on-the-job conduct), they will have a chance to re-argue their case in the appeals court rehearing.
Scheduled to submit his briefs by April 16, McDonough is ready to make his free-speech argument once more.
"They might still agree with me. They might change their minds on the First Amendment trespass issue," he says.
