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Journalist Andrea Sahouri’s trial began Monday with a police officer saying he had no choice but to arrest her during last year’s racial justice protests in Des Moines, Iowa, as she did not had not left the area after deploying pepper spray.
Sahouri, a public safety reporter for the Des Moines Register, is one of 116 journalists arrested or detained while covering the Black Lives Matter protests that erupted after George Floyd’s death, according to the US Press Freedom Tracker, but she is the first to be taken on trial. She is accused of non-dispersion and interference in official acts, two offenses.
“This is a case involving a journalist arrested for doing her job,” defense attorney Nicholas Klinefeldt said in oral argument.
The case became widespread conviction by the journalists And freedom of the press advocacy groups. At least 11 other journalists still face charges related to incidents during the Black Lives Matter protests. Sahouri is the first journalist arrested while covering a protest whose case has been tried since Jenni Monet was acquitted in 2018 of trespassing charges while covering protests against an oil pipeline in the Standing Indigenous Reserve Rock, according to the US Press Freedom Tracker.
“When journalists are arrested, assaulted or prevented from doing their job, it is not an attack on a single journalist or a media company,” the Register editorial board wrote last month. “It is an attack on everyone’s right to be informed and to hold those in power accountable for their actions.”
Police sprayed cayenne pepper and arrested Sahouri and her then-boyfriend Spenser Robnett, who said he accompanied her for security reasons, on May 31 as she covered a protest outside a shopping center Monks. Robnett is accused of trying to get her away from the arresting officer and is tried with her. If found guilty, they could both face fines and jail time.
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The prosecution team told jurors on Monday that the misdemeanor case revolved around “three fairly simple questions”: whether Sahouri and Robnett were ordered to disperse, whether they had dispersed and if they had tried to get away from the arresting officer.
Prosecutors accuse Sahouri and Robnett of refusing law enforcement orders to disperse – issued 92 minutes before his arrest – after some protesters began vandalizing businesses and throwing objects at officers around the center commercial Merle Hay in Des Moines, and they argue that his role as a journalist was not the case. t give it special status to stay in the region.
Protesters gathered at the mall because it was the last place Abdi Sharif, a teenage boy from a Somali immigrant family, was seen alive before disappearing in January 2020. His body was found in a river in May. Police ruled the death a suicide, which his family finds it hard to believe. Des Moines police also said they acted “relentlessly” in the investigation, which Sarif’s family and activists criticized as lackluster. The Des Moines Black Liberation Movement demanded further investigation last year.
Luke Wilson, the arresting officer, detained Sahouri outside a Verizon Wireless store across from the mall. At the stand on Monday, Wilson said he used a “fogger” to deploy pepper spray at a group of people outside the Verizon store to disperse them, then took Sahouri into custody because ‘she was still there.
“Once she’s not gone, I have to stop her because she hasn’t dispersed,” Wilson said. When Robnett tried to pull Sahouri out of his grip, Wilson said, he sprayed more pepper spray to “keep the situation under control and keep Ms. Sahouri in control.”
In a video Sahouri recorded in police custody that night, she said she told police on several occasions that she was a reporter for the Register. However, she said, “the police deliberately took me away, sprayed pepper spray on my face and then put restraints on me and in the back of a police car.”
Wilson said he arrived at a chaotic scene in which people were throwing stones and water bottles at police and did not realize he had failed to activate his body camera . He also said he was wearing a gas mask and riot gear and did not hear Sahouri say she was a member of the media.
Prosecutors had tried to prevent Sahouri’s defense team from discussing her work as a journalist, arguing it was irrelevant and police believed she was among the protesters, court records show. In a police report, an officer described Sahouri as being “dressed very casually and had the appearance of many other subjects on that date.”
The trial is scheduled to resume Tuesday morning.
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