Chattanooga 3 Get Suspended Sentences

Full SF IMC Coverage of Chattanooga 3

(Chattanooga, Tenn.) -- In a surprise ruling, a Criminal Court judge today gave three black anti-police brutality activists suspended sentences for disrupting a 1998 meeting of the Chattanooga City Council.

Before sentencing Lorenzo Komboa Ervin, Damon McGee and Mikail Musa Muhammad (Ralph P. Mitchell)--known as the \"Chattanooga 3\"-Judge Rebecca J. Stern told the three men, \"I believe your motivations were good. Your method was wrong, but your message was right.\"

Calling Ervin the leader of the disruption, Stern gave him a 60-day suspended sentence and ordered him to do 10 days of community service. McGee and Muhammad each received 30-day suspended sentences and five days of community service. In addition, Stern ruled that the three activists must pay court costs.

Muhammad was also convicted of resisting arrest. He will service his sentences concurrently.

The Chattanooga 3 were convicted Jan. 11 of disrupting the May 19, 1998, meeting of the city council. Several hours before the meeting, the Coalition Against Police Brutality, to which Ervin, McGee and Muhammad belonged, organized a march on city hall in which over 150 people protested the police killings days earlier of two black men, Kevin McCullough and Montrail Collins.

Leaders of the coalition arranged with then City Council President David Crockett for Ervin, one of the coalition\'s leaders, to present his proposal for community control of the Chattanooga police to the city council.

Over 100 people attended the city council meeting to support Ervin\'s proposal. However, when it came time for Ervin to speak, Crockett would not allow it. After Ervin went to the speaker\'s podium and began reading a statement denouncing police brutality, he was arrested. McGee and Muhammad, who were at the podium with Ervin, were also arrested.

Under Tennessee\'s disruption law, it is a misdemeanor offense to make a verbal utterance or take a physical action that disrupts a lawful meeting.

Interviewed after today\'s hearing, Ervin said that he expected Stern to give him the maximum prison sentence for disruption, six months, and was surprised that he received a lighter suspended sentence. He attributed the suspended sentences given to him, McGee and Muhammad in part to a rally Saturday attended by some 50 supporters of the three black activists held in front of the office of Hamilton County Sheriff John Cupp.

One of the people at the rally was from Brighton, England. Other activists came from Washington, D.C., Philadelphia, Asheville, N.C., Kalamazoo, Mich., Kentucky and Atlanta.

The rally received extensive television coverage, Ervin said, and as a result, \"it was a completely different courtroom today than when we were tried last month.\"

In a four-page written statement that he gave to Stern and the press, Ervin described the Jan. 9-11 trial of the Chattanooga 3 as \"...a kangaroo court trial, a political show trial, to satisfy the desire of local officials for revenge [against me]....

In 1987, Ervin and other members of a local civil rights group formerly known as Concerned Citizens for Justice filed a federal voting rights discrimination lawsuit. As a result of the lawsuit, the Chattanooga City Council was created in 1990, and the first blacks were elected to local government since 1911.

The Chattanooga 3 will appeal their convictions and will take their case to the U.S. Supreme Court if necessary, Ervin said. \"The suspended sentences were only a partial victory. The disruption law is dangerous and undemocratic. The fight of the Chattanooga 3 will not be over until this law is declared unconstitutional.\"

Prior to sentencing, Ervin, McGee and Muhammad each addressed the court.

\"There should be no sentences. We are civil rights activists, not disrupters,\" McGee said. \"We went to the city council meeting to petition the government to investigate the police killings of Kevin McCullough and Montrail Collins and to stop the rampant police beatings and killings of black and poor people in this city.\"

In a written statement that he gave to Stern, McGee included the names of the 42 people who have been killed by Chattanooga police since the early 1980s. In his statement, Muhammad said, \"I am not begging the court for anything. I had a right to stand up against injustice. The legal and moral thing for you [Stern] to do is not give me any sentence.\"

Ervin said \"there was no criminal intent\" to disrupt the city councill meeting. \"We made arrangements to speak. The law [First Amendment] says that the people have a right to redress their grievances to government officials.\"

The Chattanooga 3 case was Ervin\'s second conviction for disruption. In 1993, Ervin and seven other civil rights activists, known as the \"Chattanooga 8,\" were arrested for disrupting a police memorial service in downtown Chattanooga. Ervin and one other protester were convicted in 1994.

\"The disruption law should be called the Ervin law,\" Ervin said, drawing laughter in the courtroom. According to Professor Dwight Aarons of the University of Tennessee College of Law, there have only been two disruption cases in Tennessee since the state legislature amended the disruption law in 1989. Ervin was a defendant in both cases.

Earlier this month, the Tennessee Supreme Court said it would not consider Ervin\'s appeal of his 1994 disruption conviction. Ervin said that he will appeal the case in either federal district court or the U.S. Supreme Court.