Burnam, 73, a Democrat who represented Fort Worth in the state House from 1997 to 2015, went to the meeting alongside other citizens and activists to protest a county proposal to cut Election Day voting sites nearly in half.

Then his close friend, Base Mego, was removed from the room by O’Hare for picking up the microphone while testifying — an apparent breach of court decorum, although Mego said he has previously received an accommodation to pick up the microphone through the Americans with Disabilities Act because he has autism and trouble speaking in public.

Burnam said he got so frustrated by Mego’s removal that he walked up and picked up the microphone himself. He didn’t remember any rules against touching or moving the microphone at the time, Burnam said, though he said it’s possible he read them months before and forgot.

“I hadn’t planned on doing it until I got so mad about the way he treated Base,” Burnam said. “Tim was just really rude to him and obviously didn’t know or didn’t care about his ADA request.”

O’Hare then ordered sheriff’s deputies to remove Burnam, who responded by lying on the ground. A viral video showed four deputies carrying Burnam out of the courtroom by his arms and legs before he was arrested. He said he spent about 12 hours in jail and was released around midnight Tuesday.

O’Hare didn’t respond to phone, email or Facebook message requests for comment from The Dallas Morning News Wednesday.

In a video recording of the commissioners’ meeting posted to YouTube, O’Hare said he didn’t want to remove attendees from the meeting but it was necessary to retain decorum.

“My hope is that no one is arrested the rest of this day,” O’Hare said in the recording. “My hope is that we do this in a peaceful, orderly fashion, but again, that will be up to the people coming into the room.”

Commissioners tabled the voting site proposal following hours of public testimony.

Burnam said his decision to lay on the ground was a tactic learned during his decades-long participation in civil rights movements.

“I’ve been an activist my entire adult life, and so I knew exactly what I was doing,” Burnam said. “I thought ‘I’m not going to put up with this,’ so I just sat down on the floor with that mic and made them take it from me.”