Just about a month ago, we noted that prosecutors in St. Louis County were, somewhat ridiculously, still considering charging two reporters, Wesley Lowery of the Washington Post and Ryan Reilly of the Huffington Post, with “trespassing” charges for their coverage of the Ferguson protests.
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Lowery has been ordered to appear in court and said to the Post, “I maintained from the first day that our detention was illegal and unnecessary”.
Wesley Lowery, a reporter on The Washington Post’s national desk, and Huffington Post justice reporter Ryan J. Reilly were covering the nightly unrest that followed the fatal shooting of 18-year-old Michael Brown by Ferguson Police Officer Darren Wilson in August 2014.
Reilly said Monday that he had not received a court summons but was expecting to be charged as well.
Marty Baron, the executive editor of The Washington Post, called the charges against Lowery “outrageous”. “You’d have thought law enforcement authorities would have come to their senses about this incident”. A crime was committed at the McDonald’s, not by journalists, but by local police who assaulted both Ryan and Wesley Lowery of The Washington Post during violent arrests. “That was an abuse of police authority”. Both Lowery and Reilly were taken to the Ferguson police station and held for an hour-and-a-half before being released. He is also charged with interfering with a police officer’s performance of his duties because, the summons alleges, he failed to comply with “repeated commands to immediately exit” the restaurant.
The St. Louis County Police Department, however, tweeted after the incident that Yingst was detained for “failure to disperse” and had “refused” orders from commanding officers to leave the street.
Interestingly, the same county had just days left to bring Lowery and Reilly up on charges. Each count carries a possible $1,000 fine and up to a year in jail.
When asked to comment on the charges, a spokesperson for the St. Louis County executive did not respond, reported The New York Times. A reporter for the Los Angeles Times contacted then-Ferguson Police Chief Thomas Jackson about the arrests. They said they were treated roughly once police realized they were attempting to report the encounter.
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In a July 15 Huffington Post interview, Lowery said that obstacles he and Reilly have faced in trying to obtain basic information about their cases provide “a window into a larger systemic issue”.
