Washington DC police has charged with felony six journalists who covered anti-Donald Trump protests during the Presidential swearing-in, The Guardian newspaper reported.
If convicted, the journalists could get 10 years in prison and be slapped with a $25,000 fine.
The journalists were covering the violent anti-Trump protests that occurred in the US capital, even as Trump was being sworn in as the US’s 45th President on Friday.
The charges the journalists face are under the very strict Washington DC law against rioting.
The six journalists appeared in court Saturday and were released to await further hearings in February and March, according to court filings, The Guardian reported.
None of the arrest reports for the six journalists makes any specific allegations about what any of them are supposed to have done wrong, The Guardian reported. All the journalists have denied any wrongdoing.
The six journalists are a documentary producer, a photojournalist, a live-streamer, a freelance reporter, a journalist for news site Vocativ and a journalist for Russia Today.
“These charges are clearly inappropriate, and we are concerned that they could send a chilling message to journalists covering future protests.
We call on authorities in Washington to drop these charges immediately,” said Carlos Lauria of the Committee to Protect Journalists, an independent, nonprofit organization dedicated to the global defense of press freedom.
The Guardian reported that Jack Keller, the documentary producer, said he was charged and arrested Friday morning for about 36 hours.
This, despite him telling officers that he was covering the demonstrations as a journalist.
“The way we were treated was an absolute travesty,” said Keller to The Guardian. Keller’s editor, Annabel Park, told the British newspaper: “It is a maddening and frustrating situation.
These are people who were there observing and documenting.”
In all, more than 200 people were arrested on Friday, after property was vandalized in the US capital in the hours around Trump’s swearing-in as president. Police said that six officers suffered minor injuries.
Washington DC’s metropolitan police department “indiscriminately targeted people for arrest en masse based on location alone and unlawfully used teargas and other weapons” said the The National Lawyers’ Guild, America’s oldest and largest progressive bar association.
“These illegal acts are clearly designed to chill the speech of protesters engaging in First Amendment activity,” Maggie Ellinger-Locke, of the Guild’s DC branch, said in a statement. She was referring to the US’s right to free speech.
Before using the sweeping term “anti-media” against Trump, it would have been prudent for the correspondent to explain the other side of the story too. On Friday, masked activists ran through the streets of DC smashing store and car windows, Reuters reported.
They carried black anarchist flags and signs that said, “Join the resistance, fight back now.”
Police used pepper spray and chased them down a major avenue, a Reuters eyewitness reported.
