![]() "Some people might not be comfortable in crowds, but we have to ask ourselves, does that mean they shouldn't participate at all in public dialogue and politics?”Įnamorado’s brand of activism manages to bridge the gap between people who only engage with activism through social media and those who want to physically be on the streets, said Zepeda-Millán, but it's unclear if one leads to the other. “Social media provides an additional form of civic engagement," said Chris Zepeda-Millán, chair of labor studies at UCLA. Like Mckesson, Enamorado would often issue calls to his hundreds of thousands of social media followers to join protests, reaching people who might not otherwise hear about violence against street vendors or excessive uses of force by police. "That isn't a 1st Amendment issue," said Chemerinsky, who joined in a legal brief to overturn the lower court's ruling in the Mckesson case.Īdvocating for the use of force or violence does not remove someone's right to free speech, but there has to be some proven specific intent, Chemerinsky added. ![]() “We think this is a horrible line of argumentation that would have a devastating and chilling effect on protesters,” Sykes said.Įrwin Chemerinsky, dean of the UC Berkeley Law School, is not familiar with the evidence against Enamorado, but he says there is no 1st Amendment protection "for engaging in assault." The 5th Circuit Court of Appeals upheld a lower court’s ruling, finding that the officer’s lawsuit does not violate the 1st Amendment and Mckesson could be liable for damages the ACLU has appealed the ruling to the Supreme Court. In another example, a Louisiana court ruled that a Baton Rouge police officer hit by a rock during a 2016 Black Lives Matter protest march could sue its leader, DeRay Mckesson, a prominent civil rights activist. Conspiracy, rioting and other charges were filed against protesters even though they might not have been involved with the violence or property destruction that happened afterward. And who can be held liable for those unlawful acts is a difficult question to untangle, Sykes said.Īrter the 2020 murder of George Floyd in 2020, for example, there was a massive uptick in protests across the country against police violence that then resulted in an aggressive crackdown by law enforcement, Sykes said. “Civil disobedience is a time-honored tradition whereby people knowingly and willfully violate laws, whether they believe they’re unjust or to highlight other injustices, and willfully suffer the consequences of violating the law to make their legal point, their moral point and their ethical point,” Sykes said.īut sometimes protests lead to arrests for unlawful actions that followed in their wake. In each case, authorities allege, the activists were staging a protest when the targets of or bystanders to the action were threatened or beaten.Īmerican Civil Liberties Union attorney Emerson Sykes is unfamiliar with the specifics of the case against the Justice 8, but he said that arrests after a protest are nothing new and typically serve their own purpose. The group is accused of intimidating and attacking people in Los Angeles and San Bernardino counties in three separate incidents in September. The six people arrested alongside Enamorado and his partner, Wendy Lujan, 40, were David Chavez, 28 Stephanie Amesquita, 33 Gullit Eder Acevedo, 30 Edwin Pena, 26 Fernando Lopez, 44 and Vanessa Carrasco, 40. He admonished the prosecution for treating the activists as a “roving mob." ![]() ![]() ![]() The conspiracy charge is “whatever the prosecution wants it to be,” defense attorney Dan Chambers said in court. 14 after a multi-agency police investigation, and all but one have remained in jail since then.ĭefense attorneys argue that the San Bernardino County district attorney’s office branded the defendants co-conspirators simply for exercising their 1st Amendment rights and organizing their efforts over social media or text messages. Prosecutors say the members of the group, referred to as the "Justice 8" by their supporters, are too great a threat to the community to be released on bail. Enamorado's brand of activism starts with him highlighting an issue over Instagram or TikTok, then taking to the streets with a bullhorn to escalate his campaign. ![]()
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