Arrested for Cursing at a Public Meeting?

What Happened

On January 28, 2025, Carolyn “Carolina” Rodriguez signed up to speak at a Tarrant County Commissioners Court meeting. On the agenda that day was a vote on stricter meeting rules, including a rule against swearing. She used her allotted comment time to read off a list of swear words in protest of that rule.

County Judge Tim O’Hare ordered her out. On her way out she shouted an expletive and “It’s not against the law!” She was arrested.

In June 2025 a six-member jury found her guilty of hindering a meeting by disorderly conduct, and she was sentenced to 18 months of probation. On October 22, 2026, the Court of Criminal Appeals granted her petition for discretionary review and said oral argument will be permitted. Her brief is due November 23, and the district attorney’s office has said the State will respond thirty days after that.

For anyone following along: the case is No. PD-0423-26 in the Court of Criminal Appeals, on review from No. 02-25-00258-CR in the Second Court of Appeals. The trial court was County Criminal Court No. 9 in Tarrant County, cause number 1857880.

According to the reporting, part of her petition argues three things: that her free speech rights were violated, that the meeting was not hindered in any way, and that profanity is not disorderly conduct absent a threat of violence. In the court of appeals she raised four issues, and the court rejected every one of them.

What the Court of Appeals Held

This is not untouched ground. On April 23, 2026, the Second Court of Appeals in Fort Worth affirmed the conviction in an opinion by Justice Kerr, joined by Justices Birdwell and Wallach. The court later granted a motion to publish it, so it is now citable authority in Texas.

The holding that matters is this one: Section 38.13 does not implicate the First Amendment at all, because it regulates conduct rather than speech. Nothing in the statute requires speech, the court said, and it could be violated by nonexpressive conduct, giving as examples clanging two cymbals together, blowing a loud whistle, or assaulting someone. The court reached that conclusion by analogy to the Texas harassment statute, which the Court of Criminal Appeals has repeatedly held does not implicate the First Amendment either. Having placed Section 38.13 outside the First Amendment, the court applied rational basis review, identified a legitimate state interest in uninterrupted government operations, and upheld the statute on its face.

On the as-applied challenge, the court turned to the testimony of Deputy Chief Craig Driskell. Rodriguez pointed to his concession that he would not have arrested her if she had said thank you for your time on her way out. The court read his testimony as a whole, including his explanation that he still would have arrested her for hindering the meeting if she had been yelling and disruptive the whole way out, and concluded that she was arrested for her conduct and not for the content of her words.

The court did find one error. The State conceded that the jury charge definitions of intentionally and recklessly left out the result-of-conduct language this offense requires. The court held the error harmless, because the defense at trial was about whether the meeting was hindered rather than about her state of mind. It rejected the unanimity complaint and the request for a freedom-of-speech instruction, and it affirmed.

That conduct-versus-speech line is what the Court of Criminal Appeals has now agreed to examine, and it is a larger question than one meeting in Fort Worth. The same reasoning would put every noise-based offense beyond the reach of the First Amendment no matter what the noise said.

The Charge

The offense is Penal Code 38.13, “Hindering Proceedings by Disorderly Conduct.” It is in Chapter 38, Obstructing Governmental Operation, and is a Class A misdemeanor, punishable by up to a year in jail and a $4,000 fine.

It has two ways to commit it:

Subsection (a). A person commits an offense if he intentionally hinders an official proceeding by noise or violent or tumultuous behavior or disturbance.
Subsection (b). A person commits an offense if he recklessly hinders an official proceeding by noise or violent or tumultuous behavior or disturbance and continues after explicit official request to desist.

The phrase “official proceeding” is defined at Penal Code 1.07(a)(33) as any type of administrative, executive, legislative, or judicial proceeding that may be conducted before a public servant. A commissioners court meeting fits.

The Word the Case Turns On

Each subsection requires that the defendant hinder the proceeding. Not annoy it. Not offend it. Not violate its rules. Hinder it.

That is the heart of the appeal, and it is a sufficiency argument before it is a constitutional one. At trial, Commissioner Alisa Simmons, a sitting member of the court, testified that she did not believe Rodriguez’s conduct hindered the commissioners court from conducting its business. If the meeting was never actually impeded, then no matter how offensive the words were, an element of the offense is missing. Profanity is the noise. Hindering is the crime.

The prosecutor argued the case was about conduct rather than speech, that the rules were in the speakers’ packet, and that shouting disrupted the meeting. Deputy Chief Craig Driskell testified that the yelling was loud enough to be heard inside the courtroom and that it interfered with the next speaker. The audiovisual recording of the meeting was in evidence. A jury agreed.

Which is exactly why the Court of Criminal Appeals granting review is significant. It suggests at least some members of that court think the question deserves an answer beyond the one a county jury and an intermediate appellate court have given it. The court also set the case for oral argument, which it does not do in every case it takes.

What the First Amendment Says About Profanity

The short answer is that profanity, by itself, is protected speech. That has been settled for more than fifty years.

In Cohen v. California, 403 U.S. 15 (1971), a man was convicted of disturbing the peace for wearing a jacket reading “Fuck the Draft” in a Los Angeles courthouse. The Supreme Court reversed, and the line everyone remembers is that “one man’s vulgarity is another’s lyric.” The Court held the state could not make the simple public display of a four-letter word a criminal offense.

In City of Houston v. Hill, 482 U.S. 451 (1987), the Supreme Court struck down a Houston ordinance that made it unlawful to interrupt a police officer, holding it was substantially overbroad. The sentence from that case has worn well: the freedom of individuals verbally to oppose or challenge police action without thereby risking arrest is one of the principal characteristics by which we distinguish a free nation from a police state. The case came out of Texas, and it was about words directed at government officials doing their jobs.

The narrow exception is Chaplinsky v. New Hampshire, 315 U.S. 568 (1942), the fighting words doctrine, which covers words that by their very utterance tend to incite an immediate breach of the peace. Courts have read that category down to almost nothing over the decades, and a speaker at a podium directing profanity at a public body is a long way from it. That is the point Rodriguez’s third argument makes: profanity without a threat is not the offense.

None of this means a public meeting is a free-for-all. Public comment is a limited public forum, and a governmental body can impose reasonable rules on time, place and manner. What it cannot do is punish a speaker because of the viewpoint expressed, and it cannot use a decorum rule to reach speech the Constitution protects.

The Texas Statute

Government Code 551.007, added to the Open Meetings Act by House Bill 2840 in 2019, gives the public a right to address a governmental body on an agenda item. Subsection (c) lets the body adopt reasonable rules, including time limits. Then subsection (e) says this:

A governmental body may not prohibit public criticism of the governmental body, including criticism of any act, omission, policy, procedure, program, or service.

The statute reaches county commissioners courts. So Texas law already says, in plain words, that a commissioners court cannot forbid the public from criticizing it. The decorum rule being voted on the day Rodriguez was arrested is the kind of rule that provision was written about.

Subsection (e) ends with a carve-out: it “does not apply to public criticism that is otherwise prohibited by law.” A prosecutor can argue that criticism delivered in a way that violates Penal Code 38.13 is criticism otherwise prohibited by law, and the protection falls away. That reading risks swallowing the rule, since any ban on criticism could be enforced by charging the manner of delivery rather than the content.

This Is Not an Isolated Case

Rodriguez is one of several people removed or arrested from Tarrant County Commissioners Court meetings in recent years. Reported reasons have included clapping, insulting commissioners, and running a few seconds past the allotted comment time. The clapping case was dismissed. In 2026 a former state legislator and a Fort Worth activist were each charged under the same statute Rodriguez was convicted under, along with disrupting a meeting. Whatever the Court of Criminal Appeals says about Section 38.13 will land on those cases too.

There is also civil litigation. In September four Tarrant County residents filed a federal suit challenging the decorum policy under the First Amendment and the due process clause, and asking a court to stop county officials from enforcing it. That case is pending and nothing in it has been decided.

County Judge Tim O’Hare and Commissioner Alisa Simmons, who testified at the trial, were opponents in the November 2026 race for county judge, and none of that has anything to do with what Penal Code 38.13 requires. The legal question would be the same if every person involved belonged to the other party.

If You Speak at a Public Meeting in Texas

Most people will never be arrested at a commissioners court. But if you attend these meetings, or you advise someone who does, a few things are worth knowing.

Read the rules before you sign up. A body may adopt reasonable rules on time and manner, and violating them can get you removed even where it could not lawfully get you convicted. Removal and prosecution are different things with different standards.
Removal is not the same as a crime. Being told to leave, and leaving, is not an offense. Section 38.13 requires that a proceeding actually be hindered, not that a chair be annoyed.
Criticism of the body is statutorily protected. Government Code 551.007(e) says a governmental body may not prohibit public criticism of itself. If you are shut down for the substance of what you said about the body, that provision is the first thing to raise, in writing, at the time.
The record is everything. These meetings are recorded. Whether the meeting actually paused, for how long, and what the chair said and when, are facts a video will settle. Preserve it early and ask for the full recording rather than a clip.
Do not escalate after you are told to leave. Whatever the law ultimately says, subsection (b) of the statute is built around continuing after an explicit official request to desist. The safest course is to leave and fight it afterward, which is what appeals are for.
Get a lawyer before the first setting. A Class A misdemeanor carries up to a year in jail, and a conviction on this statute is not a traffic ticket.

The Bottom Line

The question in front of the Court of Criminal Appeals is narrower than the one the headlines ask. It is not whether cursing at elected officials is admirable. It is whether the State proved that a meeting was hindered, and whether a conviction built on the words a speaker chose can stand when the Constitution protects those words and a Texas statute protects criticism of the body hearing them.

Nothing has been decided. Granting review is not a ruling, and the court could affirm. But the statute says “hinders,” and that word is going to do a lot of work between now and whenever the opinion issues. We will update this post when it does.

If you are facing a Texas charge arising out of a protest, a public meeting or a police encounter, our firm can talk with you about the specific facts.

Deandra Grant is the managing partner of Deandra Grant Law, a Texas DWI and criminal defense firm with offices across Dallas-Fort Worth and Central Texas, including Fort Worth.