When he went for ice cream, he broke his county’s new COVID-19 curfew. Now he’s suing
Jesse Shows swears he wasn’t looking for a constitutional fight over COVID-19.
But his priorities changed Friday night, when he says he took a break from his family quarantine in Bryson City to drive to nearby Sylva in search of a Cookout burger and a tub of Turkey Hill ice cream.
At 10:05 p.m. on the trip home, when Shows guesses he was less than two miles from his house, he was blue-lighted by Swain County Sheriff’s Deputy Sgt. Wayne Dover on U.S. 19 near Slope Road.
Shows, 40, says he wasn’t speeding or swerving. And he wasn’t texting on his cell phone.
Instead, Dover told him, Shows had violated Swain County’s new 10 p.m. to 6 a.m. COVID-19 curfew that had gone into effect two nights before.
Shows said he was flabbergasted.
“What curfew?” Shows asks the deputy in a video of the stop captured by a camera in Shows’s car. “There’s no such thing in the United States.”
Dover, according to footage, assures him that there is, and he later reminds Shows that the county already had been placed under a state of emergency due to the pandemic.
Shows appears unconvinced.
You can’t have a curfew unless you have something like rioting, he tells the deputy. “Have you seen any rioting around Swain County? I haven’t seen any riots.”
The two men continue to argue, civilly enough, over whether the curfew is constitutional. Shows tells the deputy that it is not.
“Actually, you’re wrong,” Dover replies.
“I betcha I’m right,” Shows says.
“I betcha you’re wrong,” Dover answers back, getting the final word before walking back to his cruiser to write out a ticket.
By the time Shows drove off, he had been charged with a Class 2 misdemeanor, punishable by up to 60 days in jail and/or a $1,000 fine.
By now, with his Turkey Hill Strawberries and Cream turning soft, Shows says he was running hot.
On Monday, he filed a lawsuit in Asheville federal court, calling on a judge to stop Swain County Sheriff Curtis Cochran from enforcing the curfew, which had passed Tuesday during an emergency meeting of the Swain County commission at the request of Cochran and others.
Shows, who last week argued constitutional law on the side of a darkened mountain four-lane, will represent himself.
Swain County is tucked in the folds of the Appalachian Mountains along the Tennessee border, due west of Asheville. As of Tuesday morning, the county reported no cases of COVID-19 among its 14,250 residents.
But Cochran told the commissioners last week that the peak threat to North Carolina will stretch into early May, and that the county needed “to limit movement as much as possible,” according to the Smoky Mountain Times.
One commissioner, Kenneth Parton, voted no, saying he doubted a curfew would make much difference to folks already ignoring the stay-at-home order. Besides, he said, the ban on activity could disrupt the early-morning plans of fishermen and turkey hunters.
Contacted by the Observer on Tuesday, Cochran said he had not heard of Shows’s lawsuit and declined further comment.
Reached by phone a few hours after he filed his complaint, Shows said he supports limits on his personal freedoms to fight the coronavirus, but only if they are backed by science. To him, a curfew is futile.
“Six feet apart from each other? That makes sense. No more gatherings of 20 or more? That makes sense,” he said. “Those are all encroachments of our liberties, but we are in a state of emergency.
“What I do object to is Chicken Little measures — ‘the sky is falling! the sky is falling!’ This a perfect example of the Board of County Commissioners feeling like they have to do something but not taking the time to check if it’s appropriate.”
Which brings him back to Friday’s traffic stop.
“I was not a bigger risk at 10:05 p.m. to spread the virus than I was at 9:45,” Shows said. “I was driving alone, maintaining my social distancing. I was about to be home.
“Then this deputy pulls me over. Now he’s interacting with me. He creates this interaction that wasn’t needed in the first place.”
Not to mention Shows’s upcoming court date, which because of the statewide shutdown of the courts due to the pandemic, won’t take place until after June 1. He said he hopes the federal courts, which are operating on a limited basis, will act beforehand.
Whether they will rule in his favor is another matter. Cities as large as Miami and St. Paul, Minn., as well as smaller cities and towns in multiple states, have put temporary curfews in place to limit activity and slow the spread of the coronavirus.
When asked last month if he was considering a curfew for the country’s largest city, New York Mayor Bill de Blasio said, “Everything’s on the table.”
Shows is a manager at a large western North Carolina employer that he chooses not to name and which has temporarily closed due to the virus. Because he normally works a 4 p.m. to 2 a.m. shift, he says he likes to do a lot of things when most folks already are in bed.
“Late at night, what I like to do — without the threat of prosecution — is walk down the road for some exercise or go down to the nearby convenience store to get a soda and a pickle,” he said.
“All that is legal at 9:59 p.m. But at 10:01, it is not.”
This story was originally published April 14, 2020 at 1:45 PM.
