The trial of journalist Andrea Sahouri began on Monday with a policeman declaring that he had no choice but to arrest her during last year’s racial justice protests in Des Moines, Iowa, because she did not leave the area after he spread Pepper Spray.
Sahouri, public security reporter for the Des Moines Register, is one of 116 journalists arrested or detained while covering Black Lives Matter protests that broke out after George Floyd’s death, according to the U.S. Press Freedom Tracker, but she is the first to be taken to the trials. She is accused of omission of dispersion and interference in official acts, both contraventions.
“This is the case for a journalist arrested for doing her job,” defense lawyer Nicholas Klinefeldt said during opening remarks.
The case has attracted wide conviction in journalists and press freedom advocacy groups. At least 11 other journalists still face charges related to incidents that occurred during the Black Lives Matter demonstrations. Sahouri is the first journalist arrested while covering a protest whose case went on trial since Jenni Monet was acquitted in 2018 of trespassing charges while covering demonstrations against a pipeline in the Standing Rock Indian reservation, according to the Press Freedom Tracker of USA.
“When reporters are arrested, beaten or prevented from doing their jobs, it is not an attack on a single journalist or a media company,” wrote the Register’s editorial board last month. “It is an attack on everyone’s rights to be informed and to hold those in power accountable for their actions.”
The police applied pepper spray and arrested Sahouri and her boyfriend at the time, Spenser Robnett, who said he was accompanying her for security reasons on May 31, while she was covering a protest outside a mall in Des Moines. Robnett is accused of trying to get her away from the police officer who arrested her and is on trial with her. If convicted, they could face fines and prison terms.
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The prosecution team told jurors on Monday that the misdemeanor case revolves around “three very simple issues”: whether Sahouri and Robnett should disperse, whether they dispersed and whether they tried to distance themselves from the arresting police officer.
Prosecutors accuse Sahouri and Robnett of refusing to disperse law orders – issued 92 minutes before his arrest – after some protesters started vandalizing companies and throwing objects at police officers around the Merle Hay Mall in Des Moines, and argue that their role as a journalist doesn t give her a special status to stay in the area.
Protesters gathered at the mall because it was the last place where Abdi Sharif, a teenager from a family of Somali immigrants, was seen alive before disappearing in January 2020. His body was discovered in a river in May. The police considered the death a suicide, which his family finds difficult to believe. Des Moines police also said they acted “tirelessly” in the investigation, which Sarif’s family and activists criticized as lackluster. The Des Moines Black Liberation Movement called for a more thorough investigation last year.
Luke Wilson, the arresting officer, arrested Sahouri outside a Verizon Wireless store across the street from the mall. At the booth on Monday, Wilson said he used a “nebulizer” to implant pepper spray into a group of people outside the Verizon store to make them disperse and then took Sahouri into custody because she was still there.
“Since she has not left, I am obliged to arrest her because she has not dispersed,” said Wilson. When Robnett tried to get Sahouri out of his grip, Wilson said, he sprayed more pepper spray to “keep track of the situation and keep track of Ms. Sahouri.”
In a video that Sahouri recorded in police custody that night, she said she had told the police several times that she was a reporter for The Register. However, she said, “the police deliberately caught me, sprayed my face with pepper spray and then arrested me in the back seat of a police car.”
Wilson said he came to a chaotic scene in which people were throwing stones and water bottles at the police and that he did not realize that he had not activated his body’s camera. He also said he was wearing a gas mask and riot gear and did not hear Sahouri say that she was a member of the media.
Prosecutors tried to prevent Sahouri’s defense team from discussing her work as a reporter, arguing that it was irrelevant and that the police believed she was one of the protesters, according to the court records. In a police report, a police officer described Sahouri as “dressed very casually and looked like many other subjects on this date”.
The trial is scheduled to resume on Tuesday morning.
