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Seattle WTO arrested may sue
Can someone with any information about similar legal progress against the city of San Francisco for mass antiwar arrests please update us? It was pretty much the same situation. Police can't legally arrest and hold everyone on the sidewalk without cause
Judge: WTO arrests lacked cause
By Christine Clarridge
Seattle Times staff reporter
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Seattle police who arrested World Trade Organization protesters four years ago had no probable cause to do so, a federal judge has ruled, possibly leaving the city vulnerable to damages from a class-action lawsuit.
U.S. District Judge Marsha Pechman ruled Monday that police had no probable cause when they arrested 157 protesters at First Avenue and Broad Street on Dec. 1, 1999, during a WTO conference in Seattle.
Lawyers for the protesters contended that the city violated their clients' First Amendment and Fourth Amendment rights with the arrests, according to Victoria Ni, an attorney with Trial Lawyers for Public Justice.
The First Amendment guarantees the right to free speech, and the Fourth Amendment protects citizens from unreasonable searches and seizures.
According to Ni, the protesters and onlookers were trapped, herded and arrested by the Seattle Police Department outside of an area that had been established as a no-protest zone during the convention.
According to court documents, the protesters contend that they were forced down the street and arrested by police, who made no effort to separate protesters from innocent bystanders.
In addition, lawyers for the protesters claim that every person arrested was booked into a holding center at Naval Station Puget Sound at Sand Point using the same photocopied arrest warrant, which contained inaccurate information.
For example, all the forms were signed by one police lieutenant who later acknowledged that he had not made a single arrest himself.
The judge said, however, that her ruling should not be interpreted to invalidate all mass arrests by police.
The city claims that members of the group were arrested for pedestrian interference only after they failed to disperse. Attorneys for the city could not be reached late yesterday.
The class-action lawsuit originally was filed in October 2000 on behalf of about 600 people. The claims of most of the original plaintiffs were dismissed in fall 2001 when U.S. District Court Judge Barbara Rothstein ruled the city had the right to create and enforce a no-protest zone during a state of emergency. City officials created the zone after some protesters clogged the streets and damaged some property.
But that ruling did not affect the claims of the 157 current plaintiffs, who were outside the no-protest zone at the time of their arrest, according to an assistant to Steve Berman, the protesters' lead attorney, who was brought in by Trial Lawyers for Public Justice.
Pechman took over the case after Rothstein left the court this year to head a national center for judicial education and research in Washington, D.C.
A trial is scheduled for next month, when protesters will have to prove the arrests were part of an official city policy, Ni said.
"We're going to show that the arrests were ratified and approved by the mayor or the chief of police," she said.
If the judge agrees, the issue of damages will be raised, she said. Ni wouldn't speculate on the amount of damages that might be sought.
"They were jailed for three to five days in substandard conditions, then released and never convicted of any crime," she said.
By Christine Clarridge
Seattle Times staff reporter
E-mail this article
Print this article
Search archive
Seattle police who arrested World Trade Organization protesters four years ago had no probable cause to do so, a federal judge has ruled, possibly leaving the city vulnerable to damages from a class-action lawsuit.
U.S. District Judge Marsha Pechman ruled Monday that police had no probable cause when they arrested 157 protesters at First Avenue and Broad Street on Dec. 1, 1999, during a WTO conference in Seattle.
Lawyers for the protesters contended that the city violated their clients' First Amendment and Fourth Amendment rights with the arrests, according to Victoria Ni, an attorney with Trial Lawyers for Public Justice.
The First Amendment guarantees the right to free speech, and the Fourth Amendment protects citizens from unreasonable searches and seizures.
According to Ni, the protesters and onlookers were trapped, herded and arrested by the Seattle Police Department outside of an area that had been established as a no-protest zone during the convention.
According to court documents, the protesters contend that they were forced down the street and arrested by police, who made no effort to separate protesters from innocent bystanders.
In addition, lawyers for the protesters claim that every person arrested was booked into a holding center at Naval Station Puget Sound at Sand Point using the same photocopied arrest warrant, which contained inaccurate information.
For example, all the forms were signed by one police lieutenant who later acknowledged that he had not made a single arrest himself.
The judge said, however, that her ruling should not be interpreted to invalidate all mass arrests by police.
The city claims that members of the group were arrested for pedestrian interference only after they failed to disperse. Attorneys for the city could not be reached late yesterday.
The class-action lawsuit originally was filed in October 2000 on behalf of about 600 people. The claims of most of the original plaintiffs were dismissed in fall 2001 when U.S. District Court Judge Barbara Rothstein ruled the city had the right to create and enforce a no-protest zone during a state of emergency. City officials created the zone after some protesters clogged the streets and damaged some property.
But that ruling did not affect the claims of the 157 current plaintiffs, who were outside the no-protest zone at the time of their arrest, according to an assistant to Steve Berman, the protesters' lead attorney, who was brought in by Trial Lawyers for Public Justice.
Pechman took over the case after Rothstein left the court this year to head a national center for judicial education and research in Washington, D.C.
A trial is scheduled for next month, when protesters will have to prove the arrests were part of an official city policy, Ni said.
"We're going to show that the arrests were ratified and approved by the mayor or the chief of police," she said.
If the judge agrees, the issue of damages will be raised, she said. Ni wouldn't speculate on the amount of damages that might be sought.
"They were jailed for three to five days in substandard conditions, then released and never convicted of any crime," she said.
For more information:
http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/loca...
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Here’s an account of mass arrests which happened last year in San Francisco:
MASS ARRESTS
Some 200 of us were mass arrested on the evening of Friday, March 21st, 2003. This happened on Franklin street between McAllister and Fulton streets in San Francisco.
This was a peaceful, nonviolent antiwar march. I joined this demonstration at Powell & Market streets, and we set out at about 5:30 p.m., marching southwest along Market. The police told us to stay on the sidewalk or we’d be arrested; we obeyed the police order. We stayed on the sidewalk along Market. We were NOT doing civil disobedience and it was NOT my intention to get arrested.
After crossing Larkin, we left Market and turned onto Hayes. The sidewalk on the north side of Hayes, where we passed, was blocked by two or more parked delivery trucks. One of the trucks sat at right angles to the sidewalk, backed into the loading ramp of the Bill Graham Civic Auditorium. It was impossible to get around this truck without walking on the street. At another loading dock of the same building, the sidewalk was blocked by a large, square platform-type object. This object and the parked trucks forced us off the sidewalk and onto the street.
Up ahead of us towards the intersection of Polk, Hayes was blocked by police. It looked like a group of protesters were being surrounded there by police; I saw banners and picket signs behind a line of police, but I couldn’t see exactly what was happening. (Later I learned that several dozen people were mass arrested there.) This was approximately between 5:40 and 6 p.m., on Hayes street between the post office and the Civic Auditorium.
The rest of our demonstration (of which I was a part) turned back and marched north on Larkin, then west on Grove, and turned north again on Franklin street. The police seemed to have left us. However, on Franklin at McAllister the people up ahead of me seemed to come to a stop, and when I got there, I could see a line of police. Then the protesters nearest to the police waved at the rest of us to go back. So I and others around me turned back the way we’d come, heading south on Franklin. But we soon discovered that our retreat had been cut off by police at Fulton Street.
Some 200 of us were packed onto the sidewalk on the east side of Franklin. This sidewalk is 10 feet wide with an iron railing behind it; below the sidewalk is the sunken parking lot of the Veterans Building. I also saw a smaller number of protesters on the sidewalk across the street from us; behind them on their side of the street was the SF Unified School District Administrative Office.
This happened at approximately 6 p.m. The police kept us there, surrounded, but without saying anything to us. We chanted, “Let us go!” “Let us go!” But the police didn’t let us go, and an hour passed before they told us what their intentions were.
I and others within talking distance around me speculated as to what the police had in mind. Even at this point, we didn’t believe they were actually going to mass arrest us because we thought that such extreme police state methods aren’t normally used in this country.
We could see that we were surrounded by large numbers of police and CHP. There appeared to be 3 or 4 police for every protester. In the parking lot behind us, I saw an elderly person being treated by medics. (This may have been the person described on page 21 of the SF Bay Guardian, issue of 3/26/2003.)
Finally, after we’d been corralled there for an hour, a police officer with lieutenant bars on his collars told us over a bullhorn that all of us were under arrest. He said there were two misdemeanor charges, one was failure to obey a police officer’s order, and the other was obstructing traffic. (On the ticket the police gave me later, there are two numbers, presumably of the charges: 641 c PC & 2800 A CVC)
I don’t know what police order I and my fellow protesters allegedly failed to obey because I didn’t hear the police give any order to us while on Franklin street. The very first thing I heard the police tell us was that we were under arrest, and that was after they’d had us there for an hour.
The arrest process took many hours. We were corralled at around 6 p.m. and I was finally put on a jail bus at around 10 p.m.
My companions kept calm. We sang songs and talked, got to know one another. Although it was a tense situation, there was actually a festive atmosphere among us. People around me showed excellent self discipline.
During these 4 hours, I saw only one incident of violence. It was after a couple hours had passed that I saw one person, presumably a protester, out on the street and involved in some altercation with police. I didn’t see how it started, but I did see several police officers began to swing their clubs at the man, who then took off running and dove into our ranks at the place where I was standing.
I tried to step aside, but that was impossible because we were all so tightly packed together. I was knocked off my feet and landed flat on my back, looking upwards as the man fell on top of me, and 3 or 4 police piled on top of him. I was at the bottom of this pile. One cop was swinging his club, and for an instant I thought I was going to get clobbered too. It all happened so fast that I didn’t have time to be frightened.
But then the cop stopped swinging his club, and my companions pulled me out from under the pile. I have the names of about six protesters who saw that happen. Other than that incident, the police generally acted professionally and were respectful in their treatment of us. We were also respectful to them.
One thing I want to add to this account is that I served in the U.S. Marine Corps for four years, from 1959 to 1963, and during that time I was told that as Servicemen we were guarding our “rights and freedom” -- which includes our traditional American right to peaceful protest. It was an incredible shock to discover that our First Amendment rights could be terminated so casually. Two hundred of us were just swept up off the street and stuck in a jail, just like in a police state.
Daniel Borgström
ex-Marine against the War & Occupation
http://www.artwithoutcredentials.com/peacesign
MASS ARRESTS
Some 200 of us were mass arrested on the evening of Friday, March 21st, 2003. This happened on Franklin street between McAllister and Fulton streets in San Francisco.
This was a peaceful, nonviolent antiwar march. I joined this demonstration at Powell & Market streets, and we set out at about 5:30 p.m., marching southwest along Market. The police told us to stay on the sidewalk or we’d be arrested; we obeyed the police order. We stayed on the sidewalk along Market. We were NOT doing civil disobedience and it was NOT my intention to get arrested.
After crossing Larkin, we left Market and turned onto Hayes. The sidewalk on the north side of Hayes, where we passed, was blocked by two or more parked delivery trucks. One of the trucks sat at right angles to the sidewalk, backed into the loading ramp of the Bill Graham Civic Auditorium. It was impossible to get around this truck without walking on the street. At another loading dock of the same building, the sidewalk was blocked by a large, square platform-type object. This object and the parked trucks forced us off the sidewalk and onto the street.
Up ahead of us towards the intersection of Polk, Hayes was blocked by police. It looked like a group of protesters were being surrounded there by police; I saw banners and picket signs behind a line of police, but I couldn’t see exactly what was happening. (Later I learned that several dozen people were mass arrested there.) This was approximately between 5:40 and 6 p.m., on Hayes street between the post office and the Civic Auditorium.
The rest of our demonstration (of which I was a part) turned back and marched north on Larkin, then west on Grove, and turned north again on Franklin street. The police seemed to have left us. However, on Franklin at McAllister the people up ahead of me seemed to come to a stop, and when I got there, I could see a line of police. Then the protesters nearest to the police waved at the rest of us to go back. So I and others around me turned back the way we’d come, heading south on Franklin. But we soon discovered that our retreat had been cut off by police at Fulton Street.
Some 200 of us were packed onto the sidewalk on the east side of Franklin. This sidewalk is 10 feet wide with an iron railing behind it; below the sidewalk is the sunken parking lot of the Veterans Building. I also saw a smaller number of protesters on the sidewalk across the street from us; behind them on their side of the street was the SF Unified School District Administrative Office.
This happened at approximately 6 p.m. The police kept us there, surrounded, but without saying anything to us. We chanted, “Let us go!” “Let us go!” But the police didn’t let us go, and an hour passed before they told us what their intentions were.
I and others within talking distance around me speculated as to what the police had in mind. Even at this point, we didn’t believe they were actually going to mass arrest us because we thought that such extreme police state methods aren’t normally used in this country.
We could see that we were surrounded by large numbers of police and CHP. There appeared to be 3 or 4 police for every protester. In the parking lot behind us, I saw an elderly person being treated by medics. (This may have been the person described on page 21 of the SF Bay Guardian, issue of 3/26/2003.)
Finally, after we’d been corralled there for an hour, a police officer with lieutenant bars on his collars told us over a bullhorn that all of us were under arrest. He said there were two misdemeanor charges, one was failure to obey a police officer’s order, and the other was obstructing traffic. (On the ticket the police gave me later, there are two numbers, presumably of the charges: 641 c PC & 2800 A CVC)
I don’t know what police order I and my fellow protesters allegedly failed to obey because I didn’t hear the police give any order to us while on Franklin street. The very first thing I heard the police tell us was that we were under arrest, and that was after they’d had us there for an hour.
The arrest process took many hours. We were corralled at around 6 p.m. and I was finally put on a jail bus at around 10 p.m.
My companions kept calm. We sang songs and talked, got to know one another. Although it was a tense situation, there was actually a festive atmosphere among us. People around me showed excellent self discipline.
During these 4 hours, I saw only one incident of violence. It was after a couple hours had passed that I saw one person, presumably a protester, out on the street and involved in some altercation with police. I didn’t see how it started, but I did see several police officers began to swing their clubs at the man, who then took off running and dove into our ranks at the place where I was standing.
I tried to step aside, but that was impossible because we were all so tightly packed together. I was knocked off my feet and landed flat on my back, looking upwards as the man fell on top of me, and 3 or 4 police piled on top of him. I was at the bottom of this pile. One cop was swinging his club, and for an instant I thought I was going to get clobbered too. It all happened so fast that I didn’t have time to be frightened.
But then the cop stopped swinging his club, and my companions pulled me out from under the pile. I have the names of about six protesters who saw that happen. Other than that incident, the police generally acted professionally and were respectful in their treatment of us. We were also respectful to them.
One thing I want to add to this account is that I served in the U.S. Marine Corps for four years, from 1959 to 1963, and during that time I was told that as Servicemen we were guarding our “rights and freedom” -- which includes our traditional American right to peaceful protest. It was an incredible shock to discover that our First Amendment rights could be terminated so casually. Two hundred of us were just swept up off the street and stuck in a jail, just like in a police state.
Daniel Borgström
ex-Marine against the War & Occupation
http://www.artwithoutcredentials.com/peacesign
For more information:
http://www.artwithoutcredentials.com/peace...
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