Iowa Journalist's Trial for Covering Protest Tests US Media Freedom
An Iowa reporter has gone on trial after being arrested in 2020 while covering a Black Lives Matter protest. Des Moines Register journalist Andrea Sahouri is being charged for failure to disperse and interference with official acts, while international pressure on prosecutors increases. Sahouri’s case is seen as a key test of media freedom in the United States, carefully watched and tracked by reporters groups.
On the night of May 31, 2020, police pepper-sprayed, arrested, and detained Sahouri while she was reporting on a Black Lives Matter protest, despite insistently identifying herself as a journalist.
Prosecutors ignored calls by journalism and human rights groups to drop the charges, The Associated Press noted as the trial began March 8. Sahouri faces fines, jail time and a criminal record if convicted.
Journalist groups worry the verdict would open the door for reporters to be kept away from covering protests by police telling them to disperse, the US Press Freedom Tracker reporting as many as 117 arrested in 2020 as protests raged.
Only 13 still face charges, the press freedom group's Managing Editor Kirstin McCudden saying it's "surprising and unknown" why Sahouri's case is proceeding despite the hullabaloo over her arrest.
Prosecutors in the office of Polk County Attorney John Sarcone pressed forward with the case against Sahouri and her former boyfriend, Spenser Robnett, who faces the same charges.
They are on trial in a courtroom at Drake University in Des Moines as part of a program for law students, with the events being broadcast. The case is becoming a cause célèbre in a country where freedom of the press is enshrined in the Constitution.
Employees in the Gannett newspaper chain, which owns USA Today and the Register, packed social media with support for Sahouri.
Columbia Journalism School, where Sahouri graduated in 2019 before joining the paper, expressed solidarity, promoting hashtags #StandWithAndrea and #JournalismIsNotACrime.
Amnesty International's Americas Director Erika Guevara-Rosas said, “The charges against Andrea Sahouri represent a clear violation of press freedom and fit a disturbing pattern of abuses against journalists by police in the USA. It’s deeply troubling that the prosecutor would push these bogus charges all the way to trial.”
Sahouri was assigned to cover a protest after the death in Minnesota of George Floyd, a black man declared dead after a white officer put his knee on his neck for some nine minutes. The responsible officer is due to go on trial on March 9.
Des Moines protesters threw water bottles and rocks at police, broke store windows and vandalized a Target store before police sprayed tear gas, Sahouri reporting details live on Twitter.
She was running from gas when Robnett was hit in the leg with likely a tear gas canister or rubber bullet and stopped to check him before going on when police officer Luke Wilson cuffed her hands with zip ties and fired pepper spray in her eyes.
Wilson said he didn't know Sahouri was a journalist until Robnett and another Register reporter told him. She wasn't wearing credentials but identified herself as a journalist.
Carol Hunter, the Register's Executive Editor, told USA TODAY it's helping her fight the charges because they "see it as a fundamental principle ... that a reporter has a right to be at a protest scene to be able to observe what is going on and to report."
David Ardia, a law professor and Co-director at the University of North Carolina's Center for Media Law and Policy, told USA Today the case is sending a signal, whether intentional or not, to other reporters: ‘Don't cover protests in Des Moines.'”