By Mary Turck ,
TC Daily PlanetMarch 19, 2009
Two more protesters were found not guilty Thursday in St. Paul after a four-day jury trial. Ilana M. Radovsky and Gracia Logue-Sargeant were arrested on September 1, the first day of the RNC, at Seventh and Jackson in downtown St. Paul. (That’s the same place where Democracy Now producers were arrested.) They were charged with parading without a permit, disorderly conduct, and unlawful assembly. Judge Michael Fetsch dismissed the parading charges, and the jury found them not guilty of the other two counts.
In January, charges against seven other RNC defendants were dismissed at the end of the prosecution’s case, with the judge finding that there was not enough evidence to send the case to a jury. No defendants have been convicted after trial.
City Attorney John Choi has decided not to prosecute in the cases of hundreds of those arrested during the RNC, but many misdemeanor cases are still pending and the trial of Sean McCoy on misdemeanor charges of parading without a permit and fleeing a police officer is now going on. Some defendants have pleaded guilty. Attorney Bruce Nestor said that the two people acquitted on Thursday were offered deals for guilty pleas that would have resulted in no penalties, but that they refused to plead guilty.
“In terms of the unlawful assembly, the riots, all of the misdemeanors,” said Nestor, “they have a claim to be protesters, just caught up in mass arrests.”
Attorneys with the National Lawyers Guild urged St. Paul City Attorney John Choi to dismiss the remaining unlawful assembly charges.
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Sean Patrick McCoy "came all the way from Missoula, Montana" to protest during the Republican National Convention, going beyond his duties as a volunteer medic to break the law, a St. Paul prosecutor said Wednesday.
"Being a street medic is not simply a free pass," Assistant City Attorney Steve Christie said in his opening statement at McCoy's trial.
But McCoy's public defender told a Ramsey County jury that his case is all about guilt by association and the "illegitimacy of mass arrests."
The police response to the protests was a large operation at tremendous expense, said defense attorney Christopher Champagne. Now the city faces "the necessity of having something to show for it."
Both sides presented opening statements Wednesday in McCoy's trial on misdemeanor charges of unlawful assembly, public assembly without a permit, obstructing traffic and fleeing a police officer. He took part in protests Sept. 1, the convention's first day.
McCoy's case is one of the first from the RNC to come to trial in Ramsey County.
During a previous case, a judge threw out charges against seven defendants after the trial was under way. Other defendants have pleaded guilty or paid a fine. And two defendants arrested Sept. 1 were on trial in another courtroom Wednesday.
McCoy, 33, may benefit from his status as a medic. The jury will see him in a video leading a person in a wheelchair out of a protest area after the person was pepper-sprayed, his attorney said before trial.
At this point, the city is pursuing only a portion of the defendants who were arrested during the four-day convention.
As of Feb. 20, the city attorney's office said it had reviewed 672 cases for prosecution. Of those, 490 cases had been declined or dismissed.
City Attorney John Choi has said that prosecuting the cases was made more difficult because the mass arrests make it hard to pin specific behavior on specific individuals — and some people tried to conceal their identities.
Many residents were outraged, saying that downtown St. Paul looked like a police state during the convention and that the show of force was excessive.
Champagne tried to raise the issue of the many dismissed cases during the testimony of a police commander, but Judge Edward Wilson told him, "Move on from that."
Christie said during his opening statement that there were lawful protests during the convention but that many people "had other ideas."
He talked of the RNC Welcoming Committee, an anarchist group who encouraged protesters to "swarm, seize and stay," Christie said.
"What's their objective? To crash the RNC and to disrupt the RNC," he said.
He said McCoy chose to stick around until the protest got ugly near Seventh and Jackson streets in Lowertown. The police found rocks in his pockets — presumably to throw at the officers — and "when the police caught up with him, he said, 'Oh, s—-.' "
Champagne said the rocks were sentimental stones McCoy had collected in his travels around the country.
In a surprising piece of testimony, the city paused a video of protest activity at a scene that showed a police officer pepper-spraying a protester who was being held on the ground by other officers.
"Is that someone on the ground?" prosecutor Christie asked St. Paul police Senior Cmdr. Joseph Neuberger, who was in charge of the RNC field forces.
"Yes," Neuberger said.
"And yet the officer is spraying immediately into his face — just inches away. Does that strike you as a reasonable use?"
"No, sir," Neuberger said. "That's an inappropriate use."
The video also showed officers spraying liberal gusts of pepper spray from red canisters. Neuberger told the jury that, while pepper-spray may be irritating, it can help protect safety by encouraging people to disperse.
"Ultimately, the goal is to move the crowd rather than injure them," he said.
McCoy appears briefly in the video. He can be seen crossing a street at Seventh and Jackson.
Emily Gurnon can be reached at 651-228-5522.
[The 17-minute video played was actually a segment of part 1 of Terrorizing Dissent, produced by Twin Cities Indymedia and the Glass Bead Collective.]
The state has — once a-gain — had its ass handed to it today in the post-RNC courtrooms of St. Paul.
Of course, this isn’t the half of it. Both McCoy and one of the two defendants in room 1380 were street medics, tasked with treating the victims of police brutality; the other was a videographer, tasked with capturing it on film. These were folks swept up in mass arrests taking place amid the concussion grendades, rubber bullets, and pepper spray — charged with “unlawful assembly” for getting shot at while apparently being told to disperse, and then with “fleeing” for dispersing. This was your RNC.
The jury didn’t buy it on the 13th floor and the judge didn’t seem enthused on the 15th. The 13th floor cases even set something of an important precedent by affirming that providing the name “Jesse Sparkles” didn’t constitute providing false information, since it was absent of an intent to obstruct (no more so than giving the name “Jane Doe” or, for that matter, telling someone to fuck off).
It was, basically, a wonderful day for democracy, and certainly for several brave activists who found themselves on the receiving end of the state’s legal arsenal(s).
McCoy’s trial will continue at least into tomorrow. I’ll continue to report back here and there.
What should be crystal clear at this point, though, is that the state has lost every RNC case it’s tried to bring to trial. Its agents can rest their laurels, such as they are, on the coerced plea agreements they’ve managed, but anyone paying attention knows they look awfully silly at this point. Turns out that when you arrest hundreds of people at a time and then, after the fact, concoct charges for them, the shit doesn’t turn out particularly well.
Not for the defendants, who’ve had to deal with the stress and travel costs. Not for the taxpayers, who’ve footed the state’s bill. Not for the prosecutors, who hopefully will have to answer for these cases for the rest of their careers, such as they might be. And not for the larger body politic, which is seeing critical dissent and egalitarian efforts criminalized by a state apparatus that privileges aggression and brutality in their stead.
With these decisions and acquittals, though, score another few for the good kids.
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