Wesley Lowery served with court summons for Ferguson arrest

Washington Post reporter Wesley Lowery, who was arrested during the Ferguson protests last year, has been formally charged with trespassing and interfering with a police officer by the St. Louis County municipal court, reported Newsweek.

This week’s charges against Washington Post and Huffington Post journalists arrested last year while covering protests in Ferguson are the latest sign that even high-profile reporters are not immune from the ongoing police crackdown on press freedoms and civil rights in this St. Louis suburb.

“You’d have thought law enforcement authorities would have come to their senses about this incident”, Baron said in a statement to his own newspaper. He tweeted Monday that there should never have been an arrest in the first place. “That was an abuse of police authority”.

The summons charges Lowery with trespassing on private property – the McDonald’s – and interfering with a police officer.

“I maintained from the first day that our detention was illegal and unnecessary”, he told the Post. The two reporters will appear in St. Louis County Court later this month.

The Post quoted a spokesman for the St. Louis county executive as saying the summons was legitimate and a “pending legal matter”.

Last year, Lowery and Reilly were in a McDonald’s being used as a staging area by journalists when about a half-dozen police officers, some in riot gear and carrying assault weapons, entered and ordered patrons to leave.

The court summons arrived as the city of Ferguson was roiled by fresh protests and a large number of arrests. I would imagine that both Lowery and Reilly will have pretty strong defenses, and that St. Louis County may end up handing over more taxpayer funds to both of them before this is over.

In an account Lowery gave after he was released, officers came inside the McDonald’s and asked him and Reilly for identification.

And Ryan Reilly, a reporter for The Huffington Post, is being charged with the same offenses, according to his employer. The reporters say they were merely trying to pack up their computers and leave when they were arrested.

Lowery explained at the time they were in a McDonald’s in town they were using as a media center that the police decided to shut down, and he was arrested as he was heading out and recording what was happening around him.

In a joint statement on the Huffington Post website, Ryan Grim, the Washington bureau chief, and Sam Stein, the senior politics editor, condemned the charges and said Reilly had the organization’s full support.