2004 RNC Protesters Win Class Certification

[harvey007]

Source: Courthouse News Service

MANHATTAN (CN) - Nearly seven years after originally filing their class action complaint, protesters of the 2004 Republican National Convention won class certification for a suit that says about 1,800 people had their rights violated in a sweep of mass arrests.

Read more: http://www.courthousenews.com/2011/05/20/36734.htm

[snot]

1. Better late than never.

But in First Amendment cases, late is huge.

" . . . Napoleon . . . said that it wasn't necessary to completely suppress the news; it was sufficient to delay the news until it no longer mattered."
-- attributed by PRWatch to Martin A. Lee & Norman Solomon, Unreliable Sources: A Guide to Detecting Bias in News Media (New York: Lyle Stuart, 1991), p. xvii.

[Doctor_J]

2. It's now 2011. This should make it crystal clear that legal

channels are useless in this fight.

[Downtown Hound]

3. Were it not for the efforts of independent media like IWitness Video

and the Glass Bead Collective, many of those arrests might have been prosecuted and the people convicted. Video from both organizations exonerated the protesters and proved the the cops were lying (some of them under oath. No perjury charges were ever filed).

Both organizations were raided by Ramsey County Sheriff's officers prior to the 2008 RNC and had all their equipment seized and confiscated, effectively keeping them from reporting on the protests. No charges and no criminal activity was ever found on the part of any of the members of either two organizations.