The U.S. Supreme Court on Monday allowed a lawsuit against a Black Lives Matter activist, which was filed by a Louisiana police officer, to proceed.
The officer was injured during an incident in 2016, and observers say this decision to move forward with the suit could make it more difficult for violent protesters to get away with harming police in the future.
“In declining to hear DeRay Mckesson’s appeal, the justices left in place a lower court’s decision reviving a lawsuit by the Baton Rouge police officer, John Ford, who accused him of negligence after being struck by a rock during a protest sparked by the fatal police shooting of a black man, Alton Sterling,” Reuters reported.
In 2023, the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in New Orleans rejected Mckesson’s assertion that his rights to free speech and assembly under the U.S. Constitution’s First Amendment protected him from the negligence claim.
Reuters added:
The Baton Rouge protest was one of numerous demonstrations in the United States in 2015 and 2016 arising from incidents involving police and black individuals. These predated the massive racial justice protests that flared in various cities in the United States and abroad following the 2020 murder of George Floyd, a Black man, by a white police officer in Minneapolis.
The 5th Circuit’s decision to allow Ford’s lawsuit could make it easier to sue protest leaders for the illegal conduct of an attendee…
Baton Rouge police officer “Ford was among the officers assigned to make arrests of protesters on a public highway. He was struck in the face by a rock or piece of concrete hurled by an unidentified person, losing teeth and suffering head and brain injuries, according to his lawsuit,” Reuters reported.
Blane Salamoni, the officer who fatally shot Sterling on July 5, 2016, was promptly suspended and later terminated from the Baton Rouge Police Department. A civil rights investigation by the Justice Department into the incident concluded on May 3, 2017, after finding insufficient evidence to support federal criminal charges.
According to the investigation, Sterling, who was selling illegal bootleg CDs, resisted officers’ commands and physically struggled with them during the attempted arrest.
Seconds after the struggle commenced, Sterling was tased by another responding officer, Howie Lake, but he managed to resist its effects. During the altercation on the ground between Salamoni and Sterling, Salamoni observed a gun in Sterling’s pocket and alerted Lake that Sterling was reaching for it just as the initial shots were fired.
