North Huntingdon man accused of recording police, disrupting meeting, endangering official ordered to stand trial

A North Huntingdon man will face further prosecution on police accusations that he illegally recorded video in the township police lobby, put an officer in danger and disrupted a township commissioners’ meeting.

Nicholas A. Carrozza, 36, maintained that he was exercising his rights in all three misdemeanor cases against him.

While District Judge Henry Moore ruled Thursday during preliminary hearings that prosecutors had presented enough evidence to hold the charges over for trial, he said testing the validity of state law or constitutional rights wasn’t a matter for his courtroom.

“This is not the proper forum,” he said.

Carrozza represented himself during Thursday’s hearings that took place over two and a half hours.

He was first charged in late July by North Huntingdon police with conspiracy and defiant trespass after authorities said he and another man recorded video in the department’s lobby on July 26 and 27. There are signs prohibiting such recording and police repeatedly warned them that it was not allowed, testified Officer Joseph Riley.

Upon testifying in his own defense, Carrozza admitted to recording video in the lobby.

“I told them I will not abide by that sign because it is a violation of my constitutional rights,” he testified.

Carrozza said he and his co-defendant went to the police station July 26 to talk to officers about crime in the township. After they began recording, police handed them case law indicating it was prohibited. Carrozza testified that he later determined the case law didn’t apply to the situation and returned the following day. That’s when police took his phone and other equipment, he said.

After cross-examination, Deputy Attorney General Aaron McKendry added a count of tampering with evidence. Carrozza testified that he started a remote process to wipe data from his phone after police confiscated it.

Moore warned Carrozza before he decided to testify that prosecutors could use anything he said against him in the future.

In the second case, Carrozza is accused of disrupting a July 16 township commissioners meeting. Members of the public are permitted five minutes to address commissioners.

North Huntingdon police Detective Cpl. Matthew Benick testified he watched a video recording of that session that showed Carrozza using his five minutes to criticize the board and police officers. After that five minutes was up, Benick said Carrozza refused to leave the podium and kept talking about grievances.

“When you broke the rules, you were asked to leave,” Benick said on cross-examination. “You were past your five minutes and you were disorderly and disruptive.”

“To your knowledge, is there a time limit on the First Amendment right to freedom of speech?” Carrozza responded.

He argued that he left willingly when a police officer at the meeting stood up to escort him out.

“They do not have a right to criminalize my participation,” he said.

McKendry argued that Carrozza has become a spectacle at township commissioners meetings.

“It goes towards his agenda,” he said. “It is not any benefit to the public conversation.”

In the third case, state police accuse him of endangering a public safety official. Trooper Kasey Frank testified Carrozza posted a video to Facebook that showed him talking and then panning to a photograph of a township police officer with two family members.

Frank said the video showed the picture for 18 seconds. During the recording, Carrozza asked viewers to give the officer a “big ole middle finger” if they saw him in public, according to court papers.

Carrozza testified that he made the video after he had been unsuccessful in getting in touch with the officer. He pointed to a Supreme Court decision that ruled the gesture when directed to a police officer is protected by the First Amendment.

But McKendry argued that the officer was not uniformed in the picture displayed during Carrozza’s video.

“It is passing from that nature of his public persona and going into a private life,” McKendry said.

Carrozza is free on nonmonetary and recognizance bonds. He is not permitted to have contact with the officer involved in the endangerment case or township police unless there’s an emergency.