I suspect the civil charges are gonna tear philadelphia a new a-hole. Apparently, so did the city, which took out some sort of "civil rights violation insurance"....
gr at luminousvoid.net http://www.luminousvoid.net
For those who don't know: Kate Sorensen is a longtime, dedicated nonviolent activist with ACT UP/Philadelphia who has played an important role in building coalitions with the broader movement against corporate globalization. -Bob Lederer
>From feedmag.com:
>
>
>Daily | 03.14.01
>Five Years in Prison for Talking on a Cell
>Phone
>Jeff Sharlet on the strange trials of the
>Republican Convention protestors
>
>LAST MONDAY, when a Philadelphia jury found activist
>Kate Sorensen guilty in the first felony trial to emerge from
>last August's Republican Convention, they probably didn't
>realize they were issuing a historical verdict. The jury found
>Sorensen guilty of only a misdemeanor -- chatting on a cell
>phone, a.k.a. "criminal mischief" -- but the prosecuting
>attorney, a man accustomed to trying murderers, claimed
>victory. The win sends protestors "a strong message," he
>said, and he planned to make it even stronger by pressing
>for up to five years of prison time. But the real message
>seems to be that the movement which sprang into
>mainstream consciousness with the Battle in Seattle has
>only become more established: the courts, not just the
>cops, are finally taking it seriously.
>
>Despite a penchant in the press to harp on the notion that
>they're a bunch of kids blindly in love with the sixties, the
>protestors have more or less effectively carried their causes
>-- stopping or reforming globalization, overhauling the
>prison system, canceling third-world debt -- to Washington,
>Prague, Philadelphia, and dozens of other cities here and
>abroad. Using terms that didn't exist in the sixties to fight
>problems that ballooned in the nineties, the new
>movement is a product of its times, a point Philadelphia's
>D.A. is the first official to have really savvied. After Seattle
>and even Washington, most of the jailed protestors were
>processed quickly and quietly. Charges were reduced or
>dropped, fines were paid, and prosecutors beamed,
>confident that they'd made it all go away. But in
>Philadelphia, where more than four hundred protestors
>were arrested before and during the Republican National
>Convention, the new American Troubles may well be tying
>up the courts for months or even years.
>
>While Philadelphia police beat a slow retreat from their
>claims that puppet-making was a cover for bomb-throwers,
>that jailed protestors hurled shit, that a zookeeper
>transporting rare animals was part of a plot to attack the
>conventioneers with snakes and other creepy-crawlies, a
>legal collective for the protestors has been preparing a
>counter-assault of civil suits. In a move that favors the
>activists' resolve, the press is switching sides. Local papers
>parroted police claims last summer only to get egg on their
>faces when the police later admitted that not only had
>those charges been unfounded but that they'd also lied
>about their illegal undercover surveillance. Now The
>Philadelphia Inquirer has outed some of the undercover cops
>(several of whom, if scores of protestors are to be
>believed, were so enamored of the sixties themselves that
>they rather insistently sought to score free love as well as
>information). The Inky's tabloid sister, The Daily News,
>announced that the private committee set up by the city to
>woo the convention had actually taken out an insurance
>policy for civil-rights violations. Graham Co., allegedly one
>of the insurers, didn't return my calls about just how one
>goes about writing a policy on illegal detention, censorship,
>and cover-ups. The local press hasn't reported anything
>more, but we can only expect so much from these
>hardworking, ink-stained wretches: Their employer,
>Philadelphia Newspapers, Inc., owner of both the Inquirer
>and the News, gave $288,365 to the committee that
>bought the insurance.
>
>Lawyers for the protestors have had no better luck tracking
>down the facts -- so far. That seems likely to change once
>the outstanding criminal cases are through. The city
>charged forty-one protestors with felonies. Most charges
>were drastically reduced or, as in the case of a man
>charged with possession of a transparent plastic squirt gun,
>thrown out. But the city's D.A., Lynne Abraham -- a political
>star with a bigger-than-Philly rep -- seems determined to
>win the remaining cases, ten more following Sorensen's.
>Winning would mean putting people like William Beckler
>behind bars. Beckler's a soft-spoken recent law school
>graduate who's so slight in frame that he seems half-man,
>half-bird. He weighs 130 pounds, but a muscle-bound
>police officer nearly twice his size claims Beckler
>overpowered him and jumped up and down on his back.
>
>Jamie Graham, currently appealing a misdemeanor
>conviction, might seem at first glance a likelier candidate to
>assault a cop. He's sturdier than Beckler and wears a Philly
>police patch on the crotch of his jeans. But in court, the city
>claimed that Graham's main assault was against himself.
>According to the prosecutor, the cracked rib and torn-up
>face that put Graham in the hospital were part of
>protestors' plans to make police look bad by flinging
>themselves to the ground and scraping their faces back
>and forth across the pavement. Graham, Beckler, and
>Sorensen will likely join what looks to become a massive
>and diverse array of legal action against city government.
>By the time the felony trials are over, Beckler believes,
>Pennsylvania's weak sunshine laws will have finally cast a
>ray of light on that most unusual insurance policy. But it's
>not likely that any insurance will be enough to cover the
>embarrassment of a down-on-its-luck Democratic city
>caught actually planning to beat up and illegally detain
>protestors on the behalf of Republican fat cats.
>
>The protestors' legal collective echoes the sixties in one
>important regard: the potential of courtroom dramas to
>make more noise than 100,000 demonstrators. In 1969,
>Abbie Hoffman and the Chicago 7 ju-jitsued the charges
>against them for disrupting the '68 Democratic convention
>into an exposé of a government with little respect for
>freedom of speech. With that lesson in mind, and with a
>long-term strategy of criminal defense and civil offense,
>the latest Left may well be about to seize a more lasting
>place in the landscape of power.
>
>Jeff Sharlet is a senior writer for The Chronicle of Higher
>Education and an editor of killingthebuddha.com.
>Other articles by Jeff Sharlet
>
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