The trial of journalist Andrea Sahouri began on Monday with a police officer saying he had no choice but to arrest her during anti-racial justice protests last year in Des Moines, Iowa, because she was not in the area. left after using pepper spray.
Sahouri, a public safety reporter for the Des Moines Register, is according to the US Press Freedom Tracker, one of the 116 journalists arrested or detained during the discussion of Black Lives Matter protests following the death of George Floyd broke out. trial. She is charged with failure to distribute and interference with official acts, both misconduct.
“This is a case about a journalist who was arrested for doing her job,” defense attorney Nicholas Klinefeldt said during the opening arguments.
The case is widespread condemnation by journalist and freedom of the press advocacy groups. At least 11 other journalists are still facing charges related to incidents that took place during Black Lives Matter demonstrations. Sahouri is the first journalist to be arrested during a protest whose case has been executed since Jenni Monet was acquitted of entering the charges in 2018 while discussing the protests against an oil pipeline at the Standing Rock indigenous reserve, according to the US Press Freedom Tracker.
“When reporters are arrested, assaulted or otherwise prevented from doing their job, it is not an attack on just one journalist or a media company,” the Register’s editorial staff wrote last month. “It is an attack on everyone’s rights to be informed and to hold those in power accountable for their actions.”
Police Sahouri and her then boyfriend, Spenser Robnett, sprayed with pepper spray and arrested, who said that he had accompanied her to safety reasons, when she was a demonstration outside covered a Des Moines mall. Robnett is accused of trying to pull her away from the arresting officer and is being tried along with her. If convicted, they could face both fines and stinkings in jail.
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The prosecution team told jurors on Monday that the criminal case depends on ‘three fairly simple questions’ whether Sahouri and Robnett were told to break up, whether they split up and whether they were trying to pull away from the arresting officer.
Prosecutors allege that Sahouri and Robnett refused to distribute law enforcement orders – issued 92 minutes before her arrest – after some protesters began vandalizing businesses and throwing objects at officers at the Merle Hay Mall in Des Moines, claiming that her role as a journalist does not give her special status to stay in the area.
Protesters gathered at the mall as it was the last place Abdi Sharif, a teenager from a Somali immigrant family, was seen alive before disappearing in January 2020. His body was discovered in a river in May. Police have ruled the death as a suicide, which his family can hardly believe. Des Moines police also said they acted ‘tirelessly’ in the investigation, which criticized Sarif’s family and activists as listless. The Des Moines Black Liberation Movement demanded a more thorough investigation last year.
Luke Wilson, the officer who made the arrest, detained Sahouri outside a Verizon Wireless store across the street from the mall. At the stand Monday, Wilson said he used a “fogger” to distribute pepper spray to a group of people outside the Verizon store to have them distributed, and then arrested Sahouri because she was still there.
“Once she’s not gone, I should be arrested because she did not break out,” Wilson said. When Robnett tried to pull Sahouri out of his grasp, Wilson said he sprayed more pepper spray to ‘retain control of the situation and control me. To retain Sahouri. ‘
In a video that Sahouri arrested that night, she said she told police several times that she was a reporter for The Register. According to her, however, the police deliberately took me, sprayed pepper spray on my face and then put me in a zipper and in the back of a cop car.
Wilson said he arrives at a chaotic scene in which people throw stones and water bottles at police and does not realize he did not activate his body camera. He also said he was wearing a gas mask and riot gear and Sahouri did not hear that she was a member of the media.
Prosecutors tried to stop Sahouri’s defense team from discussing her work as a reporter, arguing that it was irrelevant and that police believed she was one of the protesters, according to court statements. In a police report, an officer described Sahouri as ‘dressed very comfortably and had many other subjects on this date’.
The trial is set to resume on Tuesday morning.
