State Indicts Lightbody for Assault on Ciarlone

In a major turn of events in the local assault case against Charlie Lightbody from 2012, state officials have indicted him in Boston’s Suffolk Superior Court – removing the ‘he said/he said’ controversy from the lower District Court to the higher State Court.

Lightbody is being charged with a felony charge of assault and battery on a person over 60 with bodily injury. The charges stem from a confrontation on Broadway Revere Oct. 12, 2013 in which pro-casino advocates and anti-casino advocates were holding rallies on opposite sides of the busy street.

Lightbody was coordinating the anti-casino rally, and Suffolk Downs employee and union leader Louis Ciarlone was present at the pro-casino rally. The men engaged in a confrontation in which several different accounts were recorded by several different witnesses. Ciarlone was injured with a broken nose in the melee, and Lightbody was shown to have surface injuries on his face.

At the time, both men were to be summonsed to Chelsea Court to face a hearing before a magistrate.

Ciarlone’s charges never made it to that court however, despite a recommendation by the arresting officer and the officer in charge to do so.

Lightbody was arrested, and he has maintained throughout that his arrest was politically motivated because of his very public anti-casino stance. This week, he maintained that the incident had nothing to do with casinos and has been dragged into a higher court to punish Lightbody for exercising his free speech.

“There is no question in my mind that dressing up the altercation with Mr. Ciarlone as a Superior Court indictment is politically motivated. This was nothing more than a dispute on a street corner between two people over foul language spoken in front of an innocent child and it had nothing to do with casinos whatsoever.”