May Day 2000 arrestees convicted

The first chapter closed yesterday on an historic case involving New York State's 150-year-old "mask law," says attorney Ron Kuby. Fourteen anarchists who had been arrested on May Day 2000 for "masquerading in public" at a march for undocumented workers' rights received a verdict of guilty from Judge Ellen Coyne of Manhattan Criminal Court. She sentenced them to two days' community services - prosecutors had asked for 15 - and fines of $60 apiece, plus 15 days in jail if they don't complete the community service.

Kuby says the case is the first-ever prosecution and conviction under the mask law, which was enacted in the 1840s to help authorities suppress uprisings by tenant farmers in the Hudson Valley. The farmers often conducted midnight raids on landlords disguised in women's clothes or as Indians, earning the nickname "the Calico Indians." Since then, it's occasionally been used to justify arrests - in the late 1960s and early 1970s, for example, when New York police wanted to get drag queens off the streets - but had never before traveled as far as a trial.

An appeal by the May Day defendants is certain by some time before May; the judge granted them a stay of their sentences until then.

Coyne acquitted the 14 of unlawful assembly, but convicted them of "loitering while masked." She did not explain the reasoning behind her decision, however, which might have provided the defendants with some guidance on how to argue their appeal. Kuby says he'll be basing his appeal – as he did his arguments in this trial – partly on a novel decision another judge handed down earlier in the case, in denying Kuby's motion to dismiss. Judge Gregory Carro said that while the state can prohibit mask wearing "to prevent identification during lawless activity," the prohibition doesn't hold when masks are worn "as a necessary correlation for freedom of association," which is protected by the First Amendment.

Civil rights lawyers will watch the outcome of the appeal closely, because other cities including Philadelphia, Quebec City and Windsor, Ontario have adopted their own mask laws in the two years since the anti-World Trade Organization actions in Seattle. The defendants in the May Day case had the right to wear masks, Kuby argues, since they had a reasonable expectation that the police would target them if they revealed their identities. He'll also be asking that the appeals judge declare the mask law unconstitutional.

That reasonable expectation came from the behavior of police at other protest events, such as the actions against the International Monetary Fund and World Bank in Washington, DC weeks before May Day 2000. There, police had photographed and videotaped activists to build profiles of them, and at the May Day trial, the chief in charge of the arrests admitted that the NYPD and other departments had been cooperating on profiling "Seattle-type" activists in the crowd.

Adding another level of irony to yesterday's convictions was the fact that the arrests took place on May Day itself - the worldwide workers' holiday that became a tradition after the Haymarket bombing trial of the 1880s. Eight anarchists were unjustly convicted of having plotted the bombing at a labor rally in Chicago on May 1, 1886 and four were executed for the crime.

The prosecutor urged the judge to consider "the fact that they are sympathetic to anarchist tenets" in imposing her sentence yesterday - without elaborating on what those tenets are. Her statement brought to mind the early years of the twentieth century, when people who supported anarchist ideals were assumed to be “undesirable.” Congress passed three separate laws between 1900 and the end of the First World War aimed at keeping anarchists out of the US and deporting those already here.