Videos Challenge Accounts of Convention Unrest

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Tue, 12 Apr 2005 06:55:53 -0700

 

 

#Videos Challenge Accounts of Convention Unrest

 

 

 

 

 

 

<http://www.nytimes.com/2005/04/12/nyregion/12video.html?hp & ex=1113364800 & en=034\

b59d6aece5085 & ei=5094 & partner=homepage>

 

 

Videos Challenge Accounts of Convention Unrest

By JIM DWYER

 

Published: April 12, 2005

 

ennis Kyne put up such a fight at a political protest last summer, the

arresting officer recalled, it took four police officers to haul him

down the steps of the New York Public Library and across Fifth Avenue.

 

" We picked him up and we carried him while he squirmed and screamed, "

the officer, Matthew Wohl, testified in December. " I had one of his legs

because he was kicking and refusing to walk on his own. "

 

Accused of inciting a riot and resisting arrest, Mr. Kyne was the first

of the 1,806 people arrested in New York last summer during the

Republican National Convention to take his case to a jury. But one day

after Officer Wohl testified, and before the defense called a single

witness, the prosecutor abruptly dropped all charges.

 

During a recess, the defense had brought new information to the

prosecutor. A videotape shot by a documentary filmmaker showed Mr. Kyne

agitated but plainly walking under his own power down the library steps,

contradicting the vivid account of Officer Wohl, who was nowhere to be

seen in the pictures. Nor was the officer seen taking part in the

arrests of four other people at the library against whom he signed

complaints.

 

A sprawling body of visual evidence, made possible by inexpensive,

lightweight cameras in the hands of private citizens, volunteer

observers and the police themselves, has shifted the debate over

precisely what happened on the streets during the week of the convention.

 

For Mr. Kyne and 400 others arrested that week, video recordings

provided evidence that they had not committed a crime or that the

charges against them could not be proved, according to defense lawyers

and prosecutors.

 

Among them was Alexander Dunlop, who said he was arrested while going to

pick up sushi.

 

Last week, he discovered that there were two versions of the same police

tape: the one that was to be used as evidence in his trial had been

edited at two spots, removing images that showed Mr. Dunlop behaving

peacefully. When a volunteer film archivist found a more complete

version of the tape and gave it to Mr. Dunlop's lawyer, prosecutors

immediately dropped the charges and said that a technician had cut the

material by mistake.

 

Seven months after the convention at Madison Square Garden, criminal

charges have fallen against all but a handful of people arrested that

week. Of the 1,670 cases that have run their full course, 91 percent

ended with the charges dismissed or with a verdict of not guilty after

trial. Many were dropped without any finding of wrongdoing, but also

without any serious inquiry into the circumstances of the arrests, with

the Manhattan district attorney's office agreeing that the cases should

be " adjourned in contemplation of dismissal. "

 

So far, 162 defendants have either pleaded guilty or were convicted

after trial, and videotapes that bolstered the prosecution's case played

a role in at least some of those cases, although prosecutors could not

provide details.

 

Besides offering little support or actually undercutting the prosecution

of most of the people arrested, the videotapes also highlight another

substantial piece of the historical record: the Police Department's

tactics in controlling the demonstrations, parades and rallies of

hundreds of thousands of people were largely free of explicit violence.

 

Throughout the convention week and afterward, Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg

said that the police issued clear warnings about blocking streets or

sidewalks, and that officers moved to arrest only those who defied them.

In the view of many activists - and of many people who maintain that

they were passers-by and were swept into dragnets indiscriminately

thrown over large groups - the police strategy appeared to be designed

to sweep them off the streets on technical grounds as a show of force.

 

" The police develop a narrative, the defendant has a different story,

and the question becomes, how do you resolve it? " said Clancy, a

member of I-Witness Video, a project that assembled hundreds of

videotapes shot during the convention by volunteers for use by defense

lawyers.

--

 

 

 

Election 2004

The Triumph of the Swill

" The National Government will regard it as its first and foremost

duty to revive in the nation the spirit of unity and cooperation.

It will preserve and defend those basic principles on which our

nation has been built. It regards Christianity as the foundation

of our national morality, and the family as the basis of national

life. "

Adolph Hitler, My New World Order,

Proclamation to the German Nation

at Berlin, February 1, 1933

 

 

Not dead, in jail, or a slave? Thank a liberal!

Pay your taxes so the rich don't have to.

 

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