St. Louis County Charges Journalists Who Covered Ferguson Protests With Trespassing
from the bad-move dept
Just about a month ago, we noted that prosecutors in St. Louis County were, somewhat ridiculously, still considering charging two reporters, Wesley Lowery of the Washington Post and Ryan Reilly of the Huffington Post, with "trespassing" charges for their coverage of the Ferguson protests. As you may recall, we also wrote about when they were first arrested, as they were gathering up their things in the local McDonald's after the police ordered them to leave. Here were their tweets at the time -- along with the tweets of a few other reporters on the scene, including one in which police admitted the arrest was a mistake:A court summons dated Aug. 6 — just under a year after Lowery’s arrest — was sent to Lowery, 25, ordering him to appear in a St. Louis County municipal court on Aug. 24. The summons notes that he could be arrested if he does not appear.Meanwhile, it seems noteworthy that this comes just days after St. Louis County "settled" a lawsuit filed against it by another journalist, Trey Yingst, who had been arrested while covering protests in Ferguson in November. In that case, the county agreed to pay Yingst $8,500 and drop all charges... and evidence showed that the police flat-out lied about why they had detained Yingst -- using the same excuse they had used against Lowery and Reilly.
“Charging a reporter with trespassing and interfering with a police officer when he was just doing his job is outrageous,” Martin Baron, executive editor of The Post, said in a statement Monday. “You’d have thought law enforcement authorities would have come to their senses about this incident. Wes Lowery should never have been arrested in the first place. That was an abuse of police authority.
Given that, you would think that prosecutors would shy away from immediately going after journalists where there was pretty strong evidence that they, too, were detained for bogus reasons, but apparently "reason" doesn't exist in the prosecutor's office in St. Louis County. I would imagine that both Lowery and Reilly will have pretty strong defenses, and that St. Louis County may end up handing over more taxpayer funds to both of them before this is over. Also, Reilly says he's spent the last year trying to find out the name of the St. Louis County police officer who slammed his head into the wall -- and figures that now that he's being charged, he might actually be able to find out who it was.A Reason magazine reporter, along with other witnesses, also supported Yingst’s account. And video of the incident, posted that night on Twitter, shows police in skirmish formation approaching Yingst on the sidewalk.
The St. Louis County Police Department, however, tweeted after the incident that Yingst was detained for “failure to disperse” and had “refused” orders from commanding officers to leave the street. A police report echoes the description of events in that tweet.
In the police department’s account, Yingst was standing in the street with protesters and impeding the flow of traffic when ordered to move to the sidewalk. It was then that Vollmer ordered Yingst -- three times, by his account -- to return to the sidewalk. But Yingst refused to do so, according to the report, and only “slowly walked backwards onto the sidewalk” as the police formation approached.
“The whole police report was basically made up,” Yingst said.
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Filed Under: arrests, ferguson, journalism, missouri, protests, reporting, ryan reilly, st. louis county, trespassing, wesley lowery
Companies: huffington post, washington post
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These are the people who are charged with enforcing our laws. They should all absolutely know BEST.
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Re:
...but you need these laws to build your roads.
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Cops: We don't like our illegal activities being made public knowledge - ya hear?
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Response to: Anonymous Coward on Aug 11th, 2015 @ 5:28am
Not to negate the officer's actions to kickstart this whole debacle.
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Re: Response to: Anonymous Coward on Aug 11th, 2015 @ 5:28am
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Re: Response to: Anonymous Coward on Aug 11th, 2015 @ 5:28am
they also waited a year, to be safely outside the statute of limitation in regards to retaliatory rules. If they charged them to close to time they were let go, and found that journalists did nothing wrong. The journalist would have solid case of retaliation by government officials.
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If they have nothing to hide ...
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Wow-prosecutors should be sacked
Note to self: Avoid St. Louis, period. The rules of law and common sense do not apply there.
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Re: Wow-prosecutors should be sacked
And the people responsible for hiring the people who have just been sacked, should also be sacked.
Ni.
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Re: Wow-prosecutors should be sacked
There is no way that crazy people could possibly do a worse job than those in power in the St. Louis PD.
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Re: Re: Wow-prosecutors should be sacked
Uh, I think it may be too late. That ship has done sailed.
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Winning in court isn't the goal
The point isn't to win in court, it's to show that anyone that refuses to properly grovel, and especially anyone that makes them look bad, will be run through the wringer. It's to show what happens to people that they don't like, and make it abundantly clear that they don't mind losing in court if that's what it takes to 'punish' people. Why should they after all, even if they lose it's not like they are the ones paying out.
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Making a counterexample
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Re: Making a counterexample
No. While a nice idea, there is about a zero to nill chance that this would result in anyone but the reporters facing any real negative consequences.
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In my fantasies...
In reality this will get cataloged in the minds of angry people across the US and will contribute to the sum of outrage that causes one to pop off, travel somewhere and shoot some officers that had nothing to do with this case.
I truly hope I'm being overly cynical.
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Learn something new....
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however, with the events continuing as they are within Ferguson, there could be more charges against more people on the anniversary of that fateful day. one person according to news reports, has been shot already. perhaps what the police etc are really trying to do is just whatever the hell they want but not have anything reported??
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They have obviously learned very little. They are just doubling down on excessive and intimidating policing. This one, they are very unlikely to win either in the courts or in the court of public opinion.
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Tresspass
Do we know yet who the cop was that filed the report?
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Response to: Anonymous Coward on Aug 11th, 2015 @ 6:47am
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My Thought Too
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I get the feeling the police know the law they just choose not to follow it as they know they will not be called out on it
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Trespassing?
Did the McDonald's manager or employees ask the reporters to leave? If it was just the police telling them to leave I don't see how that could be considered trespassing at all.
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Re: Trespassing?
In my neighborhood repeated refusal to leave can get you arrested and charged with burglary, not just trespassing.
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Failure to disperse
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Letting the police get away with this.
We're hostages.
There's fifty of us (or so) and about five bank robbers with big guns.
They don't control the situation by moral authority, or righteousness, but by the fact they have big guns. And if you do anything to piss them off, they'll totally shoot you.
When they're not watching you, you might have an opportunity to turn the situation around, to do something that destabilizes their stranglehold.
I'm not going to blame you for not acting. Big guns in my face freak me out too. In the meantime they keep promising that they're not after our money, just the bank's and that if we cooperate with them, everyone will live. I'm not sure I believe them, especially after one of them took a hostage's Twinkie.
If we could coordinate and mob them, we could totally overwhelm them. But some of us are going to die, especially the first ones who take action.
And no-one outside the bank seems to know or care. It's up to us.
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Re: Letting the police get away with this.
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Nothing, because they're white
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Some day this nation will have to choose...
Right now the white male pride is winning.
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Gotta say, this prosecutor's got balls
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