Sarah Kunstler is the Co-Director of Off Center Media, and the Media Director for the William Moses Kunstler Fund for Racial Justice; she's a Criminal Defense and Civil Rights Attorney in New York; and she's a documentary filmmaker. She produced and directed Tulia, Texas: Scenes From the Drug War, about a small town that wrongfully charged 46 men -- 40 of whom were African-American -- with drug and cocaine charges.

She's the daughter of the famous civil rights attorney Bill Kunstler. Oh, and she has degrees from both Yale University and Columbia Law School.

So the New York Police Department probably picked the wrong peaceful protest to interrupt, in front of the Carlyle Building in Manhattan, 2003.

Because she was just one of a crowd of 52 people protesting the Iraq War, when the NYPD donned riot gear and surrounded the group, cordoned off the area and arrested everyone.

Sarah Kunstler filed a federal civil rights lawsuit in 2004, also known as Kunstler v. City of New York. And, this week, the City has agreed to pay $2 million to settle the suit.

A spokeswoman for the city's Law Department said that there is no "admission of liability on behalf of the city and the individual defendants. Although [the] defendants believe that they would ultimately have prevailed at a trial, the costs of going forward weighed in favor of a settlement at this time."

Kunstler v. City of New York
Synopsis
Kunstler v. City of New York is a multi-plaintiff lawsuit filed against the New York Police Department for unlawfully arresting and detaining peaceful anti-war protesters for excessively long periods of time.

Status
The case was settled in August of 2008 for $2 million.

Description
Kunstler v. City of New York is a multi-plaintiff federal lawsuit filed by the Center for Constitutional Rights (CCR) against the New York Police Department (NYPD) on behalf of protesters who were unlawfully arrested during an anti-war rally in April 2003. It charges that the NYPD unlawfully arrested peaceful protesters and detained them for excessively long periods of time, violating their First, Fourth, and Fourteenth Amendment rights. Fifty-two of the arrestees have joined this lawsuit.

During an anti-war rally on April 7, 2003 in New York, more than 70 protesters were arrested outside the offices of an affiliate of the Carlyle Group, a defense-related investment firm with financial ties to the Bush and bin Laden families. The protestors were illegally arrested, detained for excessively prolonged periods at 1 Police Plaza, and denied access to their lawyers.

Lead plaintiff and protestor Sarah Kunstler was held for twelve hours and charged with two counts of disorderly conduct. “It was frightening to learn how easy it is to be arrested without warning and hauled away for peacefully exercising your free speech rights,” she said. “I hadn’t realized how regressive New York City policing had become.”

Some of the protesters were questioned using the controversial “Demonstration Debriefing Form,” which includes questions about political affiliations and prior attendance at demonstrations. The form was first used on scores of activists arrested following the mass protest on February 15, 2003 against the U.S. invasion of Iraq. The NYPD claims to have withdrawn it after criticism from civil rights groups.

Discovery was completed in 2006, and CCR succeeded in fighting off the City’s attempt to force Plaintiffs to produce all of their past psychological files.

On August 19, 2008, CCR secured a $2 million settlement from the City.

“The New York Police Department violated core constitutional rights when it arrested a group of peaceful demonstrators who were lawfully protesting against the commencement of the Iraq war and those who stood to profit from it,” noted Sarah Netburn, attorney with Emery Celli Brinkerhoff Abady LLP, which handled the case along with the Center for Constitutional Rights. “We are gratified by the City’s decision to compensate these individuals whose targeted arrests were without probable cause and intended to quell future protest in New York City. This lawsuit, and this settlement, vindicates our clients’ rights to assemble and speak their mind free from the fear that they will be punished for their views.”

“My question is, why did the NYPD send over 100 police in riot gear, along with vehicles to block the street and disrupt the flow of morning rush hour traffic, all to stop a legal, peaceful protest, when there are far more important matters they could be pursuing? And, why did they fight us in court so doggedly when they knew the evidence proved that we were arrested without any police orders to leave?” asked Ahmad Shirazi, a film editor and grandfather and one of the plaintiffs in the case.

“We hope our victory helps convince the City to stop violating people's rights as a matter of policy and stop wasting taxpayers' money doing so,” said Sarah Kunstler, an attorney and filmmaker who is the daughter of the late William Kunstler, noted attorney and civil rights champion. Ms. Kunstler was acquitted after a trial of all criminal charges brought against her. “It should also serve as a reminder that Washington's illegal war in Afghanistan and Iraq is also being fought at home – against its own citizens and in the name of war profiteers like Carlyle and Halliburton. We intend to continue our resistance until this stops.”

Timeline
On February 12, 2004, the lawsuit was filed in U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York., after all of the criminal charges had been dismissed against all the plaintiffs. Aside from unspecified monetary compensation, lawyers also seek a declaration from the court that the NYPD’s actions on April 7, 2003 were retaliatory and unconstitutional.

The case has been in discovery since 2004. CCR deposed dozens of the defendant police officers and the City of New York deposed all fifty two plaintiffs.

In 2006, the City of New York took the aggressive move of attempting to force the plaintiffs to disclose their personal psychological records. This was rejected by Magistrate Judge Dollinger on August 29, 2006. The city appealed that ruling, but U.S. District Judge Sweet upheld the decision on May 14, 2007.

On August 19, 2008, CCR secured a $2 million settlement from the City.

Attached Files
Kunstler v. City of New York - Complaint
Settlement Press Release
Signed Stipulation of Dismissal

August 21, 2008
NYC Agrees to Pay 52 Antiwar Protesters $2 Million
LINK

The City of New York has agreed to pay $2 million to a group of fifty-two protesters who were swept up in a mass arrest during a peaceful antiwar protest outside the headquarters of the Carlyle Group in 2003. We speak with the lead plaintiff in the case, Sarah Kunstler.

Guest:

Sarah Kunstler, a lawyer and filmmaker. She is the lead plaintiff in the lawsuit against New York City.

JUAN GONZALEZ: Around 8:00 a.m. on the morning of April 7, 2003, Sarah Kunstler, the daughter of the legendary civil rights lawyer Bill Kunstler, joined a small protest in Manhattan against the fledgling Iraq war.

“I was in law school at Columbia at the time,” Sarah Kunstler recalled Tuesday. “I had my knapsack and books with me, and I thought the demonstration was early enough so I’d be able to get to class on time.”

She thought wrong.

Kunstler hadn’t counted on the ironfisted crowd-control tactics the NYPD had begun to adopt, tactics the department would later employ in even more shocking mass arrests at the Republican convention in 2004.

That day in 2003, Kunstler started walking in a picket line outside the offices of the Carlyle Group, a major war contractor.

Police immediately cordoned off the street and allowed no one to enter or leave. Then, without any announcement, they started arresting all the protesters on trumped-up charges.

This according to dozens of witnesses and the NYPD’s videotape of events that day, all of which came to light as part of a 2004 federal civil rights suit that the Bloomberg administration finally agreed to settle Tuesday for $2 million.

AMY GOODMAN: The case is called Kunstler, et al. v. New York City. Sarah Kunstler joins us now in our firehouse studio.

$2 million, you have won.

SARAH KUNSTLER: Yeah. I mean, it’s a tremendous statement, and it’s a tremendous victory, I think, for free speech rights in the city, and a long time coming.

AMY GOODMAN: Explain how it happened and how the court case went on. You were arrested—you were planning to go to school, but you got arrested.

SARAH KUNSTLER: I was planning to go to school. I went to the protest around 8:00 a.m. Within half an hour, we were ringed by cops in riot gear. It was very frightening. I had never—I mean, I’ve been going to protests in the city since I was a child on my father’s shoulders, and I had never seen a police response like this one. I had my backpack. It was filled with books. It was heavy. I walked up to an officer, and I said, “What do I have to do not to get arrested?” And it was at that point that I was arrested.

JUAN GONZALEZ: And you, as you had told me earlier this week, you heard one of the white shirts say, “Nobody leaves.”

SARAH KUNSTLER: Yeah, no, I heard, “Nobody gets in, nobody gets out.” You know, when the officer arrested me, one of the white shirts said, “Get that one.” It was really frightening, because nobody understood why it was happening.

AMY GOODMAN: Your mother represented you?

SARAH KUNSTLER: My mother represented me.

AMY GOODMAN: Margie Ratner?

SARAH KUNSTLER: Yeah. I was charged with two counts of disorderly conduct. And there was a—we—I actually didn’t know anyone that I was arrested with at the time I was arrested. I wasn’t part of the organizing of the protest, but we became very organized very quickly, because we all shared this outrage and frustration over what had happened to us. We were—nobody was taking ACDs. We took a—

JUAN GONZALEZ: ACD is adjournment contemplating dismissal, for those people who—in other cities that don’t understand the term.

SARAH KUNSTLER: Yeah, no, they offered us an adjournment in contemplation of dismissal, which means if you don’t—if you keep your nose clean for a number of months afterwards, then it will get wiped from your record. But on principle, we hadn’t done anything. And so, I went to trial. It was a one-day judge trial, and I was acquitted.

AMY GOODMAN: Now, according to the New York Times, the City had five lawyers handling the case over four years, along with a special appellate team. A conservative estimate is that New York City spent a million dollars on the defense of this case, including the salaries and benefits of police officers and lawyers before agreeing to the settlement.

SARAH KUNSTLER: Yeah. It was a tremendous waste of money, from beginning to end, from the number of officers they brought out to police the protest and arrest us, for putting a hundred of us through the system, through winding our cases through the criminal courts for months, and then for defending a meritless position in this lawsuit for almost five years. I don’t know how the City justifies spending that kind of money.

JUAN GONZALEZ: I think one of your lawyers told me that they, the City, deposed 150 people—relatives, spouses of the complainants—trying to prove that they didn’t really suffer much distress as a result of these actions.

SARAH KUNSTLER: Yeah. I think that our lawyers spent a number of years and were doing depositions two days a week solid for at least two years.

AMY GOODMAN: Why were you protesting the Carlyle Group?

SARAH KUNSTLER: The protest was right after the bombing started in March 2003, and it was right after there were a series of protests in New York, starting in February, where there was outrage building in the city.

And that protest, the Carlyle Group was a target because of war profiteering, military profiteering. They’re an investment group that has ties to a number of ex-presidents and the Bush family. And they have—a large number of their holdings are in military investments, and they’ve done very well over the past five years.

JUAN GONZALEZ: I mentioned in my column in the Daily News this week that you had just finished not too long before that the making of a documentary on Tulia, Texas, the scenes from the drug war, where you talked about all the false arrests that were conducted in the small town in Tulia. And here you were, fresh from making that film, and all of a sudden you’re dragged in, into a false arrest situation right here in New York. You’re—now you’re a lawyer.

SARAH KUNSTLER: Now I’m a lawyer.

JUAN GONZALEZ: Now you’re a criminal defense lawyer. The education you got on the streets there versus what you got at Columbia Law School?

SARAH KUNSTLER: You can’t compare the two. I mean, you know, real-life experience wins every time. I think that as a lawyer and as a political person, I actually—I value this experience. I value this experience, because I was naive before it. I thought that as, you know, as a white middle-class person, that I was immune from this kind of treatment. I had seen it happen to people of color and poor people my entire life, and I thought that I was invisible to the police, and that if I wanted to get arrested, I could choose to commit civil disobedience and participate politically that way, and if I wanted to go exercise my free speech rights in a protest lawfully, I could do so, and I could control the parameters of that. And I learned that I don’t have that freedom.

AMY GOODMAN: The city lawyer Susan Halatyn said, “This settlement was reached without any admission of liability on behalf of the city and the individual defendants.”

SARAH KUNSTLER: Yeah. Well, you know, I mean, that’s why they settle these cases. They should have settled it a lot earlier. The police in this case, during these depositions, contradicted themselves constantly. At my trial, the officer who arrested me admitted he never heard a lawful order to disperse when he—actually, he lied and said he heard one, but that he didn’t know where I was, he didn’t see me, when he heard the order. So I couldn’t be convicted for that, because he didn’t see me hear it.

AMY GOODMAN: Any words of wisdom, Sarah Kunstler, for people who are going to Denver and to St. Paul who are planning to protest at the conventions?

SARAH KUNSTLER: Well, we have the NYPD advising the police departments in Denver and Minneapolis, so my word is, you know, is to be wary of the tactics that are going to be employed and to prepare for preventive arrest, because that’s what happened in our case, that’s what happened here in New York with the Republican National Convention in 2004, and that certainly will happen in Denver and Minneapolis.

AMY GOODMAN: Last week, it was revealed Denver had these warehouses ready with dozens of metal cages set up with razor wire above, with warnings of stun gun use around the warehouse.

SARAH KUNSTLER: That’s very frightening.

AMY GOODMAN: Well, Sarah Kunstler, I want to thank you very much for being with us. She is now a lawyer. She is a filmmaker. And she is the lead plaintiff in the lawsuit against New York City. The settlement, $2 million. I think each of the protesters get something like $18,000. The lawyers get over $1 million. Thanks for joining us.

SARAH KUNSTLER: Thank you.

* "$2M settlement is a cop wakeup call" by Juan Gonzalez

Indymedia on the arrest

Anti-war protestors win $2 million settlement from the city
BY TAMER EL-GHOBASHY
DAILY NEWS POLICE BUREAU, Tuesday, August 19th 2008, 4:21 PM

Anti-war activists who claim they were wrongly locked up by the NYPD during a 2003 protest won a $2 million settlement from the city Tuesday.

Led by plaintiff Sarah Kunstler - the daughter of famed civil rights lawyer Bill Kunstler - the 52 protestors claimed victory.

"We hope our victory helps convince the city to stop violating people's rights as a matter of policy and stop wasting taxpayers' money doing so," Kunstler said.

City lawyers said the deal was not an admission of any wrong doing, but simply the most cost effective solution to what would have been a lengthy and expensive legal battle.

The settlement comes after criminal charges were dropped against all 94 people who protested outside the Carlyle Group in April 2003.

Kunstler, a filmmaker and attorney, was acquitted of additional criminal charges stemming from protest against Carlyle's contracts in Iraq.

The lawsuit against the city claimed the protestors were not blocking the sidewalk and were not asked to disperse before cops penned them in and arrested them.

That tactic, panned by legal observers and civil rights activists and praised by law enforcement, became the model for arrests during the Republican National Convention in 2004.

"The NYPD violated core constitutional rights when it arrested a group of peaceful demonstrators who were lawfully protesting against the commencement of the Iraq war and those who stood to profit from it," said Sarah Netburn, an attorney on the case.

Lawyers for the city claimed a jury trial would have likely resulted in victory for the NYPD, but would have come with a hefty price tag.

"This settlement was reached without any admission of liability on behalf of the city and the individual defendants," said Susan Halatyn, senior counsel with the city Law Department. "Although defendants believe that they would ultimately have prevailed at a trial, the costs of going forward weighed in favor of a settlement at this time."

Related event:
Media Advisory: Details of Release of 10 Years of NYPD Data to CCR to be Revealed in Court Conference
NYPD Ordered to Make Stop and Frisk Data Public for the First Time

CONTACT: press@ccrjustice.org

New York, NY – On Thursday, September 25, 2008, Center for Constitutional Rights (CCR) and the New York City Police Department (NYPD) will appear before United States District Judge Shira Scheindlin for a conference regarding her ruling on September 10, 2008 requiring the NYPD to turn over all UF-250 (stop and frisk) data from1998 through the present to CCR. At the conference, the parties and Judge Scheindlin will discuss the terms of the protective order concerning which portions of the UF-250 database will be made public, and the NYPD is expected to give an update on when it will turn over the data and other important information related to CCR’s racial profiling case.

“It’s time for the NYPD to end its policy of secrecy,” said CCR attorney Darius Charney. “New Yorkers deserve an accountable and transparent police department, and the public should have access to data from the stop-and-frisks that happen on our streets. Once the NYPD hands over the data, we plan to make it public along with a detailed analysis to make sure our police department doesn’t operate under unconstitutional racial profiling policies.”

On January 31, 2008, CCR filed a class action lawsuit charging the NYPD with engaging in racial profiling and suspicion-less stop-and-frisks of New Yorkers. In April, CCR served discovery requests on the City seeking production of the NYPD’s stop and frisk data for the last ten years. According to CCR attorneys, the named plaintiffs in the case – David Floyd, Lalit Clarkson, and Deon Dennis – represent the hundreds of thousands of New Yorkers who over the last several years have been stopped on the way to work, in front of their house, or just walking down the street without any cause, primarily because they were men of color.

WHO: CCR Senior Attorney Darius Charney

WHAT: Conference with Judge Scheinlin and the NYPD

WHEN: Thursday, September 25, 2008, 4:00 p.m.

WHERE: Daniel Patrick Moynihan - United States Courthouse, 00 Pearl Street, Courtroom: 15C, New York, NY

For more information on Floyd v. City of New York, or for a copy of Judge Scheindlin’s Order, click here.

The Center for Constitutional Rights is dedicated to advancing and protecting the rights guaranteed by the United States Constitution and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Founded in 1966 by attorneys who represented civil rights movements in the South, CCR is a non-profit legal and educational organization committed to the creative use of law as a positive force for social change.