Occupy Battle Heads to the Courtroom

One of the lesser-known features of the Occupy movement is that attorneys from the National Lawyers Guild have embedded themselves with protesters as observers for the next stage of the fight.

The Associated Press is reporting this week, “Lawyers representing protesters have filed lawsuits – or are planning them – in state and federal courts from coast to coast, challenging eviction orders and what they call heavy-handed police tactics and the banning of demonstrators from public properties.”

“Some say the fundamental right of protest has been criminalized in places, with protesters facing arrest and charges while doing nothing more than exercising protected rights to demonstrate,” the AP report continues.

“When I think about the tents as an expression of the First Amendment here, I compare it to Tahrir Square in Egypt,” said Carol Sobel, co-chairwoman of the National Lawyers Guild’s Mass Defense Committee.

“Our government is outraged when military forces and those governments come down on the demonstrators. But they won’t extend the same rights in this country,” she said. “They praise that as a fight for democracy, the values we treasure. It comes here and these people are riffraff.”

In November, the ACLU and National Lawyers Guild filed a lawsuit against the Oakland Police Department for what they are calling “its egregious constitutional violations against Occupy Oakland demonstrators.”

The suit has been filed on behalf of Timothy Scott Campbell, a videographer who was shot with a bean bag projectile while filming police presence during Occupy Oakland on the night of November 2-3, 2011, and on behalf of other demonstrators subjected to excessive force during recent demonstrations.

“I was filming police activity at Occupy Oakland because police should be accountable,” said Mr. Campbell. “Now I’m worried about my safety from police violence and about retaliation because I’ve been outspoken.”

“Excessive police force is never acceptable, especially when it’s in response to political protest,” said Linda Lye, staff attorney at the ACLU of Northern California.

The lawsuit alleges that police and other agencies violated demonstrators’ Fourth Amendment rights by using excessive force – including “flash-bang” grenades – against demonstrators who posed no safety threat. The suit says officials also violated their First Amendment rights to assemble and demonstrate.

On Wednesday, Oakland’s Mayor Jean Quan announced an independent investigation into the police response.

“We knew from the beginning that we’d have to have an independent look at what happened,” Mayor Quan said at a news conference Wednesday.

The Associated Press reported on Wednesday that the investigation will be conducted by Thomas Frazier, a former Baltimore police commissioner and former San Jose deputy police chief, and other former police officers.

The investigation will take about three months and cost the city up to $100,000, according to KGO-TV – real money as opposed to the $8500 figure that UC Davis complained about in terms of clean up last week.

“If these investigations reveal wrongdoings on the part of our officers, I am committed to taking swift and fair disciplinary actions,” said Oakland Police Chief Howard Jordan.

Meanwhile, in Berkeley, the AP reports, “Yvette Felarca is among those suing campus police and administration officials at the University of California, Berkeley, after officers forcefully dispersed a group of Occupy protesters and others rallying for public education last month.”

Ms. Felarca, a middle-school teacher and organizer with the civil rights organization By Any Means Necessary, which filed the suit, “says she was standing, arms linked with other demonstrators’, before a line of police officers who moved in after some tents were set up on a lawn.”

According to the AP, “She said she was chanting and yelling when a police officer hit her in the throat with his baton. She said she was also hit in her ribs, abdomen and back and watched others bear repeated blows.”

“The brutality was absolutely designed to chill the speech of students in the movement and literally try to beat and terrorize our right to criticize, to think critically and to act on that criticism,” Ms. Felarca said.

According to the AP, the university has called it “disconcerting” that the suit contains “so many inaccuracies.”

According to Carol Sobel, co-chair of the NLG Defense Committee, said a lawsuit is also planned in the case of the pepper-spraying by campus police of peaceful protesters at UC Davis.

Gene Policinski, executive director of the First Amendment Center in Nashville, Tenn., told the AP that “police overreacted to the Occupy movement in some cities, which probably earned protesters some new support. Still, he noted, protesters’ First Amendment rights are not without limitation.”

“We’ve always had to balance our rights,” he said. “No one can really claim you have an unfettered unlimited First Amendment rights. The courts are there to say, wait a minute, that goes too far, or that’s OK. It is part of that give and take. Of course we all wish our rights were never intruded upon.”

Meanwhile, the Partnership for Civil Justice Fund, a Washington DC-based civil rights organization is attempting to find out whether the CIA played a role in law enforcement’s coordinated, nationwide campaign to shut down and evict Occupy movement encampments in cities throughout the country.

In a press release this week, they report, “The CIA is not specifically denying that it has records and documents that would reveal its role in the coordinated crackdown that evicted the encampments in major cities within a short period of time. Rather, the agency asserts that it won’t look for such records and documents.”

“The CIA is apparently asserting that because its involvement in law enforcement’s crackdown of the Occupy movement would be barred by law, it is not possible for the CIA to conduct an effective search for information responsive to our inquiry into its role in the operation,” stated Mara Verheyden-Hilliard, Executive Director of the PCJF. “In other words,” she continued, “because the actions would be illegal, they would also be off the books.”

Far from claiming it does not possess responsive records, the CIA stated in its letter to Ms. Verheyden-Hilliard that because such activities would be barred by law, “our records systems are not configured in a way that would allow us to perform a search reasonably calculated to lead to responsive records. Therefore, we must decline to process your request.”

—David M. Greenwald reporting