The lawsuit, filed Wednesday by the American Civil Liberties Union, also includes claims from a protester who had been detained and forced into an unmarked police vehicle, encapsulating a set of disturbing episodes that drew scrutiny to the federal response to the city, where advocates demonstrating against police brutality have clashed with law enforcement for 90 straight days.
Christopher David, the veteran, had been making his first appearance at one of the protests when he saw a group of camouflaged authorities deploy tear gas on some protesters and knock others to the ground, the lawsuit says.
After he calmly approached the officers to ask them "what they were doing and why they were not honoring their oath to support the Constitution," he was pepper-sprayed twice in the face and struck five times with a baton, breaking his hand in two places, according to the lawsuit.
"I swore an oath to defend the Constitution," David said in a statement Wednesday. "If unchecked, the flagrant violations of our civil liberties in Portland will undermine our freedoms all across the country."
The lawsuit is the first to be filed on behalf of David and other veterans who said authorities unlawfully used excessive force to deprive them of their protest rights. It also marks the first claim by a protester who was arrested and placed in an unmarked van, Mark Pettibone, who says federal officers abused his Fourth Amendment protection against unlawful search and seizure, and is asking a judge to strike his arrest.
President Donald Trump and acting Homeland Security Secretary Chad Wolf are listed as defendants in the suit along with 200 unnamed federal law enforcement officers. CNN has reached out to the Justice Department for comment.
A spokesman for the US Marshals Service, whose officers were involved in the incident with David, said last month that the officers had "deployed less-than lethal force to address individuals who refused to obey lawful commands to stop advancing on them."
Dozens of federal law enforcement officers from the Department of Homeland Security and Marshals Service have also been injured as they've staged inside and around a complex of federal buildings that has been regularly laid siege to by rioters.
While Trump has seized on the standoffs as part of his campaign to highlight spurts of violence amid this summer's massive civil rights movement, the tactics of the federal officers in Portland have also drawn outrage and reinforced the basis of the demonstrations.
Scenes of protesters like Pettibone being taken by unidentified authorities into unmarked vehicles have circulated widely online.
In the lawsuit, lawyers write that Pettibone hadn't committed any crimes when several men wearing camouflaged military garb jumped out of a dark-colored minivan to detain him. He was "firmly led" into the van and driven into a nearby courthouse where federal officers searched his backpack and attempted to question him after reading him his Miranda rights.
Pettibone was released after being held in a cell for more than an hour, according to the lawsuit.
"I still haven't fully come to terms with what it means that I was kidnapped by my government," Pettibone said in a statement. "People need to know what happened to me and the government needs to be held accountable so that what happened to me doesn't happen to someone else."
Legal experts have questioned the officers' ability to arrest and interrogate protesters not known to have committed a crime, and the independent inspector general of the Department of Homeland Security has announced that he is reviewing the arrests.
Meanwhile, Homeland Security officials have defended the use of unmarked vehicles saying that protesters have targeted and attacked police vehicles amid the nationwide riots.
"viral" - Google News
August 26, 2020 at 06:12PM
https://ift.tt/34D4S71
Navy veteran at center of viral Portland protest video sues Trump administration - CNN
"viral" - Google News
https://ift.tt/2BCxygM
Shoes Man Tutorial
Pos News Update
Meme Update
Korean Entertainment News
Japan News Update
Bagikan Berita Ini
0 Response to "Navy veteran at center of viral Portland protest video sues Trump administration - CNN"
Post a Comment