Prolonged Civil Rights Trial
Bari and Cherney filed a federal civil rights suit claiming that the FBI and police officers falsely arrested the pair and attempted to frame them as terrorists so as to discredit their political organizing in defense of the redwood forests.
In 1997, the law enforcement officers named in the civil rights suit were sued for conspiracy to violate Bari and Cherney's First and Fourth Amendment rights. On 15 October 1997, Federal judge Claudia Wilken dismissed FBI supervisor Richard Wallace Held, who had been prominent in the agency's COINTELPRO effort, from the case on the grounds that he had no duty to oversee the daily duties of his subordinate agents.
In 2002, a jury in their federal civil lawsuit found that Bari's and Cherney's civil rights had been violated. As a result of the jury's verdict, three FBI agents and three Oakland Police officers were ordered to pay a total of $4.4 million to Cherney and to Bari's estate. The award was a response to the defendants' violation of the plaintiffs' First Amendment rights to freedom of speech and freedom of assembly, and for the defendants' various unlawful acts, including unlawful search and seizure in violation of the plaintiff's Fourth Amendment rights. At trial the FBI and the Oakland Police pointed fingers at each other.
- "Oakland investigators testified that they relied almost exclusively on the F.B.I.'s counterterrorism unit in San Francisco for advice on how to handle the case. But the F.B.I. agents denied misleading the investigators into believing that Ms. Bari and Mr. Cherney were violence-prone radicals who were probably guilty of transporting the bomb."
While neither would admit wrongdoing, the jury found both liable finding "both agencies admitted they had amassed intelligence on the couple before the bombing." This evidence supported the jury's finding that both the FBI and the Oakland police persecuted Bari and Cherney for being bombed instead of trying to find the true perpetrators in order to discredit and sabotage Earth First! and the upcoming Redwood Summer, thereby violating their First Amendment rights and justifying the large award. Simply, instead of looking for the actual terrorists, they persecuted the victims of that terror because of their political activism.
- "Investigators were lying so much it was insulting.... I'm surprised that they seriously expected anyone would believe them.... They were evasive. They were arrogant. They were defensive, " said juror Mary Nunn.
Read more about this topic: Judi Bari, The Car Bombing and Its Aftermath, Aftermath
Famous quotes containing the words prolonged, civil, rights and/or trial:
“At length, having come up fifty rods off, he uttered one of those prolonged howls, as if calling on the god of loons to aid him, and immediately there came a wind from the east and rippled the surface, and filled the whole air with misty rain, and I was impressed as if it were the prayer of the loon answered, and his god was angry with me; and so I left him disappearing far away on the tumultuous surface.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“I’ve never been afraid to step out and to reach out and to move out in order to make things happen.”
—Victoria Gray, African American civil rights activist. As quoted in This Little Light of Mine, ch. 3, by Hay Mills (1993)
“The Civil rights of none shall be abridged on account of religious belief or worship, nor shall any national religion be established, nor shall the full and equal rights of conscience be in any manner, or on any pretext, be infringed.”
—James Madison (1751–1836)
“A man who has no office to go to—I don’t care who he is—is a trial of which you can have no conception.”
—George Bernard Shaw (1856–1950)