DC Settles Trump Inauguration Day Protest Lawsuits For $1.6M

WASHINGTON, DC — The D.C. government will pay $1.6 million to settle two lawsuits that alleged Metropolitan Police Department officers unlawfully detained more than 200 protesters in mass arrests the day of Donald Trump’s presidential inauguration in January 2017.

The demonstrators — represented by the ACLU of the District of Columbia and Jeffrey L. Light — alleged that D.C. police violated the constitutional rights of journalists, legal observers and protesters by indiscriminately rounding them up in downtown Washington on Jan. 20, 2017.

The city agreed to pay $605,000 to six defendants represented by the ACLU and nearly $1 million to about 200 others who were arrested and held up to 16 hours without food, water or restrooms, in a class-action case brought by Light.

The two lawsuits charged that former Metropolitan Police Department Chief Peter Newsham and more than two dozen MPD officers engaged in or supervised constitutional violations, including mass arrests of demonstrators without probable cause, unlawful conditions of confinement for detainees and use of excessive force.

Newsham recently was appointed chief of the Prince William County Police Department after retiring from the MPD.

“It speaks volumes that the District has chosen to settle rather than defend MPD’s obviously unconstitutional actions in court,” Light said Monday in a statement. “Today’s settlements provide some measure of compensation for all the people who were unconstitutionally arrested and confined for exercising their rights on Inauguration Day four years ago.”

The two lawsuits charged that, in response to vandalism and property damage caused by a small number of protesters, MPD officers rounded up, or “kettled,” more than 200 protesters — including many who had broken no laws — and detained them without access to food, water, or restrooms for up to 16 hours.

Officers also deployed pepper spray, flash-bang grenades, concussion grenades and stingballs — explosive devices that release smoke, rubber pellets and a chemical irritant within a radius of about 50 feet — against protesters and others both on the street and inside the kettle, without warning and in circumstances where there was no threat of harm to officers or the public, the lawsuits alleged.

At least seven journalists were among the people arrested. Mass arrests in 2000 and 2002 led to lawsuit settlements against the MPD in the millions of dollars. As part of the legal settlements, new policies were implemented that were supposed to prohibit kettling.

The lawsuits brought after the police actions on Jan. 20, 2017, asserted that MPD officers violated the First, Fourth and Fifth Amendments and D.C. law. The ACLU-DC represents demonstrators Elizabeth Lagesse, Milo Gonzalez and Gwen Frisbie-Fulton, photojournalist Shay Horse, and legal observer Judah Ariel. The other lawsuit is a class action filed on behalf of more than 100 demonstrators.

The Jan. 20, 2017, defendants were prosecuted by Jennifer Kerkhoff and Rizwan Qureshi from the D.C. U.S. Attorney’s Office. The prosecutors claimed that everyone at the protest was involved in a felony criminal conspiracy because they did not leave when windows were broken.

Two trials of arrested protesters and street medics ended with no convictions delivered by either jury. After repeatedly failing in court, prosecutors eventually dropped all the remaining charges in July 2018. Before the case was thrown out, each individual Inauguration Day defendant faced up to 80 years in prison.

"MPD’s unconstitutional guilt-by-association policing and excessive force, including the use of chemical weapons, not only injured our clients physically but also chilled their speech and the speech of countless others who wished to exercise their First Amendment rights but feared an unwarranted assault by D.C. police,” said Scott Michelman, legal director of the ACLU of the District of Columbia.

“The contrast between the over-policing of constitutionally protected speech on Inauguration Day 2017 and the under-policing of a violent invasion of the U.S. Capitol earlier this year starkly demonstrates law enforcement’s institutional biases," Michelman said. "A diverse group of protesters with a left-wing message was subjected to a mass arrest without cause, whereas armed white insurrectionists with a right-wing message stormed Congress, and the police let them walk away.”

D.C. Police have paid out more than $40 million since 2016 to settle police misconduct lawsuits. Two of the MPD officers named as defendants in the lawsuits settled Monday are also defendants in a case the ACLU-DC filed last summer over the crackdown against protesters on June 1 near Lafayette Square, the ACLU said.

The D.C. Office of the Attorney General has agreed it will not oppose motions to expunge the arrest records of plaintiffs in both lawsuits. As part of the settlement in the ACLU-DC case, MPD will issue a formal directive modifying the procedures for processing of arrestees to avoid subjecting them to long waits for basic necessities such as access to restrooms and water.