Ejected at ’04 Convention, a Protester Gets $55,000
By COLIN MOYNIHAN
Published: November 15, 2008
During President Bush’s acceptance speech in Madison Square Garden at the 2004 Republican National Convention, a San Francisco woman briefly interrupted the proceedings by standing on a chair and unfurling a banner that accused the president of lying.
That protest set into motion a chain of events that has ended in one of the more unusual legal resolutions connected to the four days of the convention, during which more than 1,800 demonstrators and bystanders were arrested, most of them in street protests. Hundreds of them subsequently sued the city, saying they had been arrested unlawfully or detained in holding cells without access to lawyers.
As of September, the city had paid about $1.5 million to settle 142 lawsuits arising out of the convention. The payout total rose by $55,000 on Friday, when the San Francisco woman, June Brashares, 44, an events planner, peace advocate and a member of the protest group Code Pink, reached a settlement in a lawsuit in which she said she had been injured while being ejected from the Garden and had been falsely prosecuted.
But unlike the other cases, which were settled after allegations of misconduct by city police officers or other city employees,
the defendants in the Brashares case were not under the city’s control. They were two convention volunteers from California, a Republican group in California and the Republican National Committee.
Yet the city’s Law Department represented them anyway because of an indemnification agreement under which the city assumes the cost of defending any lawsuit arising from the 2004 convention that names the Republican National Committee.more...
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/11/16/nyregion/16settle.html?_r=2&adxnnl=1&oref=slogin&ref=nyregion&adxnnlx=1226811274-NHxxZrheE5KKjicTYVAa5Q&oref=slogin
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