The city of Baton Rouge last month approved a $1.17 million settlement for two journalists and a dozen protesters who sued the city over mass arrests that took place during a protest over the fatal police shooting of Alton Sterling in July 2016.
The Metropolitan Council did not respond to a request for comment, but one of the plaintiffs’ attorneys, William Most, said the settlement was approved a day before attorneys were scheduled to give closing arguments in a federal civil rights trial in the Middle District of Louisiana.
Sterling, 36, was fatally shot by two Baton Rouge Police Department (BRPD) officers in 2016, and the 14 plaintiffs were arrested during a subsequent protest of police violence in the city.
Police officers told protesters to clear the streets at the intersection of East Boulevard and France Street. The plaintiffs complied, according to the Most & Associates law firm, but police made mass arrests anyway.
“Each of the 14 plaintiffs was arrested by BRPD, strip-searched and imprisoned in the East Baton Rouge Parish Prison,” the law firm’s news release states. “One of the plaintiffs was only 17 at the time – but BRPD still put her in an adult prison where she too was strip-searched and detained.”
The settlement will not be the end of litigation surrounding events related to Sterling’s death, according to Most.
“There is at least one more protester lawsuit pending, which is scheduled to go to trial next year,” he told the Louisiana Record in an email.
The trial included acknowledgements by Baton Rouge police officers that their names had been forged on affidavits, that arrests were made due to the content of the plaintiffs’ speech and that a sonic weapon called a Long Range Acoustical Device (LRAD) had been used on protesters.
“Our clients are people of conviction who stood against police brutality and should have felt safe in America to do so,” another of the plaintiffs’ attorneys, John Adcock, said in a prepared statement. “Our hope is that … (the) settlement will create lasting change in how Baton Rouge responds to future protests.”