When Things Get Rough for Protesters, These Lawyers Go on the March
Submitted by Reverend Chuck0:Stirring a Cause
When Things Get Rough for Protesters, These Lawyers Go on the March
By David Montgomery
Washington Post Staff Writer
Monday, May 12, 2003; Page C01
The D.C. police want everyone out of 18th Street NW, and they mean now. They're pushing their batons hard against rib cages and backs. They're grabbing shoulders and shoving.
There is panic and confusion in the crowd of 30,000 that has a permit for this recent antiwar march downtown.
"I lost my daughter!" one woman wails. A man is pinned face down on the pavement while an officer strikes him on the head several times with his stick.
The crowd surges away from the batons. But a thin, intense woman dressed in business black charges against the tide, directly at the blue police line. She whips out a camera and starts snapping, until an officer shoves her between two cars.
"If you don't move you will be locked up!" another officer says. "Get her out of here!"
She rushes up to a lieutenant in charge: "Your cops are clubbing people!"
Law school won't prepare you for a workout like this, but it's all in a day's work for a movement lawyer like Mara Verheyden-Hilliard. She and her law partner and husband, Carl Messineo, have become the constitutional sheriffs for a new protest generation. Still in their thirties, they're outpacing established free-speech watchdogs in this "I have a dream" capital of marches, crusades, lost causes and mass arrests. Picture a couple of aspiring William Kunstlers for the post-Seattle pepper-spray generation.
Their Partnership for Civil Justice is handling four key First Amendment lawsuits stemming from protests against corporate globalization, the Bush inauguration and the war in Iraq. The causes vary but the complaints are the same: That the D.C. police collaborate with the FBI and other federal agencies to suppress dissent. And that the police engage in preemptive mass arrests, spying and brutality.
When Things Get Rough for Protesters, These Lawyers Go on the March
By David Montgomery
Washington Post Staff Writer
Monday, May 12, 2003; Page C01
The D.C. police want everyone out of 18th Street NW, and they mean now. They're pushing their batons hard against rib cages and backs. They're grabbing shoulders and shoving.
There is panic and confusion in the crowd of 30,000 that has a permit for this recent antiwar march downtown.
"I lost my daughter!" one woman wails. A man is pinned face down on the pavement while an officer strikes him on the head several times with his stick.
The crowd surges away from the batons. But a thin, intense woman dressed in business black charges against the tide, directly at the blue police line. She whips out a camera and starts snapping, until an officer shoves her between two cars.
"If you don't move you will be locked up!" another officer says. "Get her out of here!"
She rushes up to a lieutenant in charge: "Your cops are clubbing people!"
Law school won't prepare you for a workout like this, but it's all in a day's work for a movement lawyer like Mara Verheyden-Hilliard. She and her law partner and husband, Carl Messineo, have become the constitutional sheriffs for a new protest generation. Still in their thirties, they're outpacing established free-speech watchdogs in this "I have a dream" capital of marches, crusades, lost causes and mass arrests. Picture a couple of aspiring William Kunstlers for the post-Seattle pepper-spray generation.
Their Partnership for Civil Justice is handling four key First Amendment lawsuits stemming from protests against corporate globalization, the Bush inauguration and the war in Iraq. The causes vary but the complaints are the same: That the D.C. police collaborate with the FBI and other federal agencies to suppress dissent. And that the police engage in preemptive mass arrests, spying and brutality.
