Before the Law
Six-year legal saga over WTO arrests gets a trial Jan. 8

By CHRIS MILLER
Contributing Writer

December 1, 1999, Day Three of the “Battle of Seattle”: Protests over the World Trade Organization grip and pound the commercial heart of the city.

Tens of thousands of protesters threaten to disrupt the globalization summit, filling downtown with graffiti, shattering store windows, lighting dumpsters afire, and eliciting clouds of tear gas from the riot police.

Former Chief of Police Norm Stamper and then-Mayor Paul Schell call in the National Guard to establish a perimeter of checkpoints and barricades. They cordon off an area stretching along Boren Avenue, Seneca Street, Fourth, and Lenora.

No one is to be allowed into this free-speech-free zone, with a few exceptions: the press, residents, employees and business owners working there, emergency and public safety personnel, and shoppers. The order is never announced, however, to 147 people seated in the middle of Westlake Park.

The 147 are arrested en masse, summarily shepherded into busses, and stashed for as much as three days in a temporary holding pen at Sand Point Naval Station.

This is the setting for Robert Hickey et al. v. the City of Seattle, a six-year, civil rights, class action lawsuit that will go to trial in the Ninth Circuit of U.S. District Court on Jan. 8. The judge’s ruling could set a precedent for the treatment of protestors and tighten the leash on preemptive arrests — that is, whenever in the course of a civil protest people are hauled off to jail on circumstantial evidence.

A summary judgment ruling by Judge Marsha Pechman on Dec. 13 said the city lacked probable cause for the arrests, a violation of the Fourth Amendment. For one, contrary to arrest records, the police never gave orders for the crowd to leave the park. Nor did they make any effort to determine that none of the 147 arrestees met the exceptions to Schell’s free-speech free-zone rule. One of the arrested, for example, was an accredited member of the press.

The City countered in its Dec. 18 brief that to substantiate the claim that the arrests were made without probable cause, the plaintiffs must show “that the City’s policy, custom, or practice itself caused the constitutional deprivation, rather [than] the discretionary act of a non-policymaking official.”

The plaintiffs contend in their brief that Chief Stamper had ratified arrests, arrests ordered by Captain Jim Pugel, who also was a “policymaker by delegation.” Furthermore, they argue, the First Amendment rights of the 147 were stamped out because the City detained them until the WTO convention had concluded.

Judge Pechman’s Dec. 13 ruling asked if it is necessary to try the case on both Fourth and First Amendment grounds, a question to which the city’s lawyers promptly answered, No, in its brief, in an attempt to limit compensation.

The judge has asked both parties not to comment to the press.

[Its day in court]

The Jury trial for Hickey et. al. v. City of Seattle begins 9 a.m. Monday, Jan. 8, in the U.S. Courthouse at 700 Stewart St. downtown.