D.C. awarded $7,000 and $10,000 each to protesters who claimed they were wrongly arrested in a 2002 World Bank protest. The settlement, reached three weeks ago, gives hope to George Washington University students filing a similar suit and may motivate some AU students to question police misconduct in inauguration protests.
The recently settled case is one of five filed against the police and local and federal governments in connection with the International Monetary Fund and World Bank demonstrations of Sept. 27, 2002, in which about 400 were arrested.
Two of these cases have been settled so far, both in favor of the plaintiffs.
An investigation is also under way to determine if there were any wrongful arrests or other forms of police misconduct at the Jan. 20 counter-inaugural demonstrations involving AU students.
"[The police] came down really fast and really hard," said Travis McArthur, a freshman in the School of International Service who participated in a demonstration after a concert on Jan. 20. "They did not give us time to disperse."
J20 Legal, an activist group, is investigating police behavior from Inauguration Day. The organization selected Susan Dunham and Dan Schember of the law firm Gaffney and Schember to serve as legal advisers to protesters arrested that day.
Dunham and Schember, along with lawyers from the American Civil Liberties Union, serve as counsel in Diamond v. District of Columbia, one of the three remaining cases concerning the 2002 World Bank protests.
"We are investigating certain events that people have called us about to determine whether or not it is feasible to file a civil suit against the government," Dunham told The Eagle. "It's very preliminary."
She said she received many calls from arrestees seeking legal advice shortly after Inauguration Day.
Of particular interest to Dunham and Schember is a non-permit street march that took place around 11:30 p.m. Jan. 20 that resulted in nearly 70 arrests.
After a show featuring political punk band Anti-Flag, a group of about 200 people, including McArthur, poured out of a church in Columbia Heights and began marching down Columbia Avenue in the middle of the street, an Eagle reporter witnessed.
Their destination was an inaugural gala event, which they never reached. After being followed by a squad car and a police helicopter, metropolitan police in riot gear stopped the group in Adams Morgan.
The police ordered members of the crowd to get in a line and started arresting the demonstrators. Among the 70 people arrested were students Carniel Klirs, a sophomore in the College of Arts and Sciences, and McArthur.
Klirs and McArthur attempted to flee the scene, but were cornered in an alley by the police and then arrested, they said.
The apparent tactic of the police was to "box us in and keep us from escaping," he said. Neither Klirs nor McArthur said they remember hearing an order to disperse from the police.
Klirs said police forced him to kneel on an icy sidewalk for more than two hours, first waiting for a police vehicle to transport them to jail, then for the police to search, document and handcuff the demonstrators individually.
Though he said it was a very uncomfortable experience, he does not consider it to be abuse on the part of the police. "It was more due to their incompetence than any malicious intent," Klirs said.
McArthur said he would consider participating in legal action.
"I am thinking about cooperating with the lawyers," he said. "These [potential] lawsuits are going to protect our rights in the future."
Dunham said she could not comment on the inauguration protests at this time, but she did offer historical context on protester-police relations in D.C.
Since the 1970s, relations between protesters and police in D.C. have been governed by regulations put in place by a series of court orders following lawsuits brought against the government for wrongful arrests at anti-Vietnam War protests, she said.
The most important regulation is the requirement of probable cause before making an arrest. Police must determine that there is reason to arrest each individual in a group, and they cannot simply arrest a person because he or she is among those who may have committed a crime. It was the violation of this requirement that resulted in so many lawsuits following the IMF and World Bank protest in 2002, Dunham said.
Richard Bennett, professor of justice, law and society at AU, offered an analysis of the law mostly consistent with that of Dunham, with a few distinctions.
Unlike the plaintiffs in the GW and Diamond cases, the demonstrators arrested in Adams Morgan, as described to Bennett, were doing something illegal by marching without a protest permit, he said.
If their arrests were challenged in court, the principal issue would be whether or not the police gave the demonstrators enough of an opportunity to break up the march, he said.
In some cases police give an order to leave the area and will move the group through a clearly marked exit, Bennett said, but they are not legally required to give this order before making arrests.
"If an officer sees you doing something illegal, they can arrest you without warning you to stop," he said. "This may not be always be wise, but it is certainly not against regulations."
However, if police do give an order to clear out, protesters who fail to do so risk arrest.
"When a person refuses the lawful order, they're impeding justice," he said, "If a person does not respond, the police have probable cause."
Eagle Staff Writer Mary Specht contributed to this report.
